AIBU RE teaching babies to read

[Graut]

Sparked by a discussion on a FB group I am in for parents of bilingual children.

Someone was talking about how her 20-month-old was reading in two languages and my first instinct was a mixture of a) scepticism and b) feeling sorry for the poor little boy to have been hot-housed in that way.

But some of her arguments reminded me that I've been criticised as a parent for taking our babies to baby swimming (should 'let them be babies' and not try to 'force their development' and what have you). I've always felt that baby swimming is just something that some babies enjoy and if it helps their physical development then all the better (note that the babies in our classes are not actually learning to swim, it's just kind of like baby gym in the water with lots of singing etc). I found it annoying and unjustified when people accused me of being competitive about my kid's development or of pushing them when as I saw it, we were all just having fun.

This mother said her baby enjoyed learning to read and why delay learning for no reason. I still strongly think that earlier is not 'better' when it comes to reading and have no intention of trying to teach my baby (or indeed my 3 yr old) to read, but WIBU to negatively judge the practice of teaching babies to read? Am I just underestimating babies to think that they shouldn't be reading?

And I get your point, that actively encouraging a talent/skill, be it reading, swimming or dancing, can be seen by some as pushy but to the parent seems a natural progression that they and their child enjoy doing together.

I think when it stops being fun for either side and it becomes a chore, or causes resentment (like you hear of child sport superstars pushed by the parents), then that strays into the unhealthy area.

Are all these kids who were reading at 2 or 3 world class novelists and rocket scientist types now

I'm a meagre teacher

She says we could all read really well (4 kids) before we went to school age 4. We didn't have a tv though

Likewise, no TV and I could read before I went to school.
My own dd also could read before starting school, so not necessarily completely TV related. We didn't have computers or smartphones or tablets though. No hothousing involved either - it just happened naturally through looking at books and reading stories together.

She sounds weird, but I don't think 'teaching' reading before school age does any harm at all if the child enjoys it. I don't think 'competitive development' is good, but nor do I think 'competitive chilled parenting' is good. Let people get on with doing things in their own way.

@OutsSelf Dbrother taught first year medics at oxford before qualifying himself. Now a renowned researcher (in his specialty no one else gives a fuck) He's always been very academic. He always wanted to learn me not so much...

What an interesting thread, I love this. My DC are trilingual - Italian and English and French. I only speak Italian to them and my husband as mixture of English and French. As well as Italian and French grandparents family etc.
DS2 knew all the letters of the alphabet by 17 months and how to spell out simple words - cat, pig, man ( in English) - our HV brought 2 senior HV’s to observe him at home because she couldnt believe it.
He used to shuffle round the house on his bottom shouting out - “ a is for apple” “ c is for cat” etc all day long. However, he never crawled or walked at all until he was 14 months - ahahaha. DD1 didn’t read until she was 3 and yet was running round the garden at 10 months. I think the whole development debate is such an interesting one.We never did find out why DS could read and spell so early - we didn’t push him into it at all - and I was quite relaxed about the whole reading thing. He’s still a voracious reader now and has a phenomenal vocabulary - much more so than his 3 siblings

I could read before I started school just after my 3rd birthday (long story).

It's not a sign of intelligence (although I was a smart arse) nor does it indicate that the child will become a nuclear physicist. I'm very wordy but that's because I read a hell of a lot growing up.

Nurture has a big influence on a child's development and future achievements.

Depends. I have read about actual geniuses who could properly read at 2. By that I mean the kind of books 8 and 9 year olds can read. I don't know if that is the issue here. But I always think it must be difficult to have an actual genius child and have others mocking you for it.

reading is decoding words and it can be taught very early - but understanding and comprehending are cognitive skills that cannot be forced developmentally.

But what benefit does she think this has for the child? I seriously question whether the child is enjoying anything other than pleasing its mother. It's great that children are encouraged to enjoy books but too much formal education too young will stifle their creativity.

A friend of mine taught one of her children to read before she was 2 using flashcards - whole word recognition not phonics. She also routine potty trained her (in an operant conditioning style rather than through any understanding that she needed to go) at about 18 months. She genuinely could read words, a lot of them, by pattern recognition, but couldn't work out how to read different words with the same phonics.

So it is definitely possible to teach very, very young children - babies really. However the methodology is closer to animal training than pedagogy.

The child remains unusually bright and literate, but I'm sure she would have been anyway. It took her a very long time to genuinely know when she needed the toilet without being prompted though, and she had accidents when peers who had ditched the nappies a year later had stopped...

There isn't always a benefit to pushing milestones early for its own sake...

One of my kids learnt to read at 3 and another at 7, they got identical grades in their last year of primary.

My DP could read and write before he went to school as his big sister who was 10 years old, taught him.

Luisa - one of DSS friends at school was similarly linguistic and ended up with his own version of Frenglitalian. Then he plumped for English.

The babies I knew who could 'read' could memorise flash cards and then really struggled at school with phonics

moredoll

Well, I don't know that there is any evidence for that. My DD is 18 months, and obviously she can't read but she loves books. She clearly enjoys them because she goes looking for them.

my mother insists she taught me to read at 2, but she is a fucking lunatic.

i started school at 3 and a half, though, and could definitely read by then, so she may have just extrapolated from that to make herself look amazing.

my DD started talking at 8 months, and could read ‘new’ books by 4. however, she didn’t have a tooth in her head til 11 months and waited until 14 months before taking a a step, so it’s all relative i suppose.

My brother could read before he went to school. My mum realised when he started reading advertising hoardings (neglected third child, so she hadn't noticed).

I could read at 3 but have always loved books and was at a montessori. Couldn't add up to save my life.

Neither of us is in Mensa.

As a parent of two monolingual young children, your friend is talking a pile of bullcrap. No way is her kid reading at 20 months.

I can't see how it's a bad thing, if the child enjoys it. Then again I can't see what's wrong with baby swimming either. Most babies and children love sploshing around in water.

DS is bilingual and could read English well before he was 4, Dutch came later at school, so 5 or 6, and he's now tackling German by choice. He's 8. He was probably the last in his class to ride a bike though. Dutch children seem to be able to do that at 3.

It all balances out in the end.

It's not so early as to be impossible developmentally. I wouldn't be surprised if my friend's baby were reading soon (she's 17 months). She has a great vocabulary for her age, understands some prepositions (she told my fiance her hands were 'dirty' then pointed to her sleeves and said 'inside' after he cleaned her hands for her - lo and behold, muck in her sleeves too). She can pronounce difficult words too. I was speaking in three part sentences at 18 months.

Of course her mum is unbearably smug about the whole thing, but I worked on the development team of a child development assessment, and I know what I'm saying when I say she is distinctly advanced. Some children are.

My son read a word at eighteen months ‘pizza’ totally untutored and actually on way out of in laws house. No idea how and he never read anything else until school.
Was very odd.

Pengggwn

I must have worded it badly.
My DD (just 2) also loves books and pretends to read them to her dolls and teddies. She also knows some words from bedtime stories that are read frequently and will finish sentences from them. However there's no way I would sit down with flashcards. I think DD benefits much more from making it up to her dolls. A writer not a reader iyswim.

There is a huge amount of natural variation. I learned to read very early (reading flash cards by 18 months which must have been basically "picture" recognition I think - I must just have learned the shape of the words, and reading simple books by 3). There is a thing called "hyperlexia" which is part of the autism spectrum, which may explain it for some children. Obviously within a few years everyone can read and it doesn't make so much difference.

I try not to be too judgmental about these things. Different people find different things fun and I think it would be almost impossible to teach this stuff to a child who wasn't interested unless you were really abusing them. Children just have very different interests and developmental pathways. I'm increasingly in favour of largely following your DC's interests even if they are a bit unusual/"out of order" developmentally.

moredoll

I have flash cards. She likes them. I don't particularly mind whether she likes them at the moment, but she does.

Two year olds cannot read in one language let alone two. How ridiculous. My two year old (26 months) can recognise her own name written down, Mummy, Daddy and Grandma. She's not reading though she recognises the word in the same way as she recognises a picture of a ball. It sounds like she is reading though because if you say 'what does that say?' and write Mummy, she says 'Mummy'.

The usual thing with these babies is that they recognise a few words by sight (i.e. not decoding, though it is true that some children can decode before starting school). So they know the "names" of a bunch of letters in the same way they know the "names" of pictures etc.

Bilingual children don't learn more slowly. They are just sensible and sometimes don't bother learning a word for something if they already have one in another language. Cue poor old monolingual nursery worker who doesn't know Arabic and wonders why the child can't tell them the word for "teddy" in French (or whatever).