My Baby Can Read Program: From a speech-language pathologist’s point of view, is this program useful?

Yes, if your goal is to teach your baby to read early, then I think that you can accomplish your goal with the My Baby Can Read program. It appears to be effective and interesting to babies. It can keep their interest and attention.

See this link for a review: http://www.theopinionatedparent.com/2007/04/13/my-baby-can-read/

However, I have some concerns: If you do this program, you are using up valuable time and energy to teach what is basically a splinter skill – almost a “human trick”. From an SLP perspective, the most important life skill is communication, not impressing others with early learned skills.

Instead, an SLP would concentrate on teaching social skills at this age, like taking turns passing a ball back and forth, making funny sounds and faces, labeling things the child is interested in, and looking at a caregiver’s face for shared enjoyment. Most learning happens just by watching the caregiver while he/ she goes about her business and talks to the baby, involving the baby where possible. If your baby has already mastered these social skills, then there would be no concern with adding reading. If your child doesn’t have social skills, or isn’t strong in her ability to connect to important adults in her life, then it would be better to concentrate on teaching these skills. If social skills are missed in babyhood, it’s possible that the child will not learn how to trust and connect to people, and that is a harder one to catch up on later.

What would be the benefit of learning to read as a baby?

A whole world opens up when a child learns to read. Literacy is like a key to open an amazing number of doors to worlds and experiences that would not be possible without it. If the child learns to love books at any early age, and experiences the success of learning to read as a baby could be life changing.

photo: chad_k