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?

Hot housing babies is not big or clever. You will just burn your kid out with mental health issues by the time you actually need them to excel.

By all means read, teach them words, conversation but actively 'teaching' babies is beyond ridiculous and a waste of time.

Some parents are just bonkers. There's a mother at one of our gymnastics classes that brandishes her 3 year old and Floppy's Phonics books whenever the elder sibling is in class. Very tedious.

I don’t think this is equivalent to fun weekly swimming lessons aimed at building water confidence. It’s more like drilling a child in the breaststroke. Reading to a two year is much better for there overall development than teaching them to read. By the same token a gentle singing and swimming type class is better to get a confident child who can swim when they are older kids Han forcing them too do length after length at two young an age.

I have 20 month old twins and one of them can only say “ga”. What language is that?

Their not there. Perhaps I should have been taught to read at two...

It’s a fact that bi/multi lingual children acquire language later than those learning one language."

not true.
It can be true for some, but certainly not all.

One of my dc was tri-lingual at 4, but one struggled to pick up the other two languages even up to age 6.

It's a generalisation (obviously not all children develop at the same rate) but is expected of children growing up with 2+ languages.

I'm not arguing with her, just following the discussion but she is now claiming that there is a developmental window (before 3) during which you should get your child ahead to give them a lifetime advantage, otherwise the synapses die and your poor child will be average forever. And she has also been teaching him all manner of other things (including swimming, actual swimming!) from babyhood and is posting a million pictures/videos of her little genius on this semi-public group with thousands of members. So at this stage I'm quite happy writing her off as nuts.

But I do see that in some cases, following up on a very young child's natural interests makes sense even if things seem a bit early developmentally speaking.

If any of you have a baby you don't want to fail in life, btw, here is the 'recommended' website. domanmom.com

I read at 2 but not hot housed, just obsessed with reading and books. My mum lost friends over it, people accused me and her of lying, teachers never believed me about reading and I still don't read books in public because of my reading speed. It's not the most fun thing!

Some children can and do read early. If they’re enjoying it, I don’t see it as a problem. One of my children loved reading and read very early. The other wasn’t as interested. They’re all different. We don’t stop children from running/climbing/kicking balls around if that’s what they enjoy. Why stop them from learning to read and write if that’s what they like?

Sorry lots of mistakes. Basically I mean helping develop confidence in the water and a love of books is what I think is age appropriate for a 2 year old. I think it will be more fun than being pushed and will likely mean they will genuinely enjoy reading or swimming when they get older.

AsAProfessional - ahahaha, I love this! Our DC often add an Italian adjective into an English sentence - my daughter says those words “are more juicy” 😂

It's just not good enough. They should be reading and swimming in the womb. Oh hang one..... One is natural and one is a load of league table driven middle class garbage.

I'm laughing at her window of opportunity thing.

When dd1 started school, there were a couple of kids who could already read well, and there was some not so subtle competition in the playground about who was bright.

dd1 wasn't reading, because I hadn't taught her. She learnt quickly enough once in school.

By the end of year 2 the non readers had caught up with most of the readers, and the difference was negligible.

By the SATs in year 6, those early readers weren't top, they were in the top group, but not outshining anyone.

It is expected by whom AsAProfessionalFekko ?

It sounds like an urban myth to me.

I only know of one multilingual child who did the legendary not speaking til he was 4, then suddenly starting to speak in sentences in all 3 of his languages at one thing.

My kids are bilingual. They're not geniuses but one spoke in full grammatically correct sentences in English before she was 2 and in both languages by 2.5. The other two (boys) were also slightly ahead in English and had more extensive local language vocabulary than a lot of peers, though still made the odd mistake, by 3.

Bi and multilingual children need a strong mother tongue, then the other languages are usually strong too. The mother tongue develops at least as early as in monolingual children in my experience, with the less dominant language/ s lagging behind at first.

I could read confidently at 3. As a consequence I was reading the upper level reading scheme when I joined receeption class at school and don’t actually remember being taught at all in that class, just left with a book because the teacher didn’t know what to do with me when teaching the others in the class.
By the end of reception I was reading the books in the lower juniors , I remember how scary it was going in their classroom to choose.

Whilst I am/ was bright I am / was a bit lazy and my qualifications are good , not excellent.

I am happy with my lot.

20 months sounds awfully young, but my DB had taught himself to read by about age 3 so maybe it's possible.

Ultimately though, who cares? Kids learn at their own pace and educational achievements at the age of 20 months are neither here nor there. Parents who boast about this stuff come across as a bit tragic.

Ollivander use an ereader in public, nobody will know what speed you are reading at.

That's not strictly true - a child who has been severely deprived of nurture, yes may well have learning, communication and social difficulties as they grow up if they are left in that environment or not helped (I'm thinking of children who have been 'raised by wolves' in the extreme cases or brought up in a particularly dysfunctional home) but even past 3, extreme cases can be perfectly happy, well adjusted and successful teenagers and adults.

I think that pushing a child like mad can end up frustrating the parent and child!

I've known children who the brought up to be musicians, crack martial artists or chess camps but somewhere where along the line 'someone' forgot that a child should be happy in order to learn and thrive, and that childhood is about experiencing a variety of influences. None of the adults still 'do' whatever they were conditioned to do by their parents and that causes them some degree of sadness and guilt.

cat - can't deal with them sadly! I've tried and tried but it's not a book

My 20 month old could recognise words in two languages, but couldn't 'read'.

My eldest really wanted to learn to read when she was about 2.5 or nearly 3. She had me haunted to teach her so eventually I got some Peter and Jane books and she learned to read them. She enjoyed it but it didn't make her more advanced than my other DC, in fact she is the only one that never picks up a book now.

Oh I agree Ollivander - it’s all about the book for me - the smell, feel, solidity

You can't just hothouse any old child into reading at 20 months. Child could be gifted, or have hyperlexia. I think as long as the child is happy and not being pushed into doing things they don't want to or spending too much time on it, they're just fine.

I think we all teach our kids, and you don't just stop teaching when they meet the tick boxes for their age. Lots of parents point out an A for Alice to toddler Alice from time to time. We did with DS, he didn't learn to read. We applied a similar amount of (non)-effort with DD and she was decoding simple words at 2.3. Okay it's not 20 months but there are much more gifted kids than DD around. Same input, occasional casual pointing out of things that are "next step" for that child, but very different children.

DD got so much pleasure from reading, she seemed to see it as her own little superpower. What preschooler doesn't love stories after all?

I can't see that reading to or with your baby is a bad thing.

You said her baby is enjoying it so I don't know why you'd still think it was a bad thing.

I read to DS from the day he was born, and I did get some looks at baby group when I read to him there when he was about twelve weeks old (the first time we went).

One person asked me why I was bothering because he couldn't understand the story (it wasn't exactly War and Peace, it was about a Hippo holding a house party - Hippos Go Berserk by Sandra Boynton if anybody is interested, it's very good).

I don't think that understanding the story was the point (neither was it "my baby will be reading by six months old" or whatever). The point was, we got to sit and cuddle, he got to listen to my voice saying lots of new words, he got to associate books with fun, he got to look at ** pictures of Hippos basically holding a rave on the rooftops being gatecrashed by a monster. It gave us something to do while he was having a feed and eventually whenever we were anywhere where we had to sit and wait he was happy to sit with me reading to him.

It was fun and we liked it. I didn't sit down and read to him with the intention of teaching him to read and we didn't have a programme for learning, but he was reading on his own by the time he was two and still loves reading now. He beat me by about a year, I was reading on my own before I started school at three just by being raised in a house that loved books, and that's what I wanted for him. It wasn't a race to get him reading, it was a desire for him to love books as much as I do.

I still read to him as well, and he reads to me. He's always been able to sit nicely and concentrate from being a very young toddler, and I think that's because he got used to sitting and listening to me read while he looked at the book at the same time.