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?

The issue with any developmental milestone reached - be it early, normal, late etc - is not whether it should be celebrated or not (of course they all should) it’s really who you tell and how you tell them. Gloating/stealth boasts etc are all off putting and sharing news about your child with anyone other than family/close friends always runs the risk of looking just like that. The shame is that what most parents are often saying when they do share news of their kid’s development is really just: “hey this parenting thing actually works!. They are developing because of me/us and what we are doing with them!”. We shouldn’t knock someone for doing this or even hothousing a child because if someone shows pride in their children’s growth and their part in it it’s really an expression of affection and joy in their little one which, as any mum on here will tell you, can be some of the best highlights in an often otherwise long whirl of moods, washing and tantrums. So Let’s all just say “that’s brilliant! Keep doing what you are doing” even if it sounds far fetched (reading Dickens at 3 days old) or just simply better than yours are doing on that particular front. Any success with kids is usually hard won so all power to any and everyone who is getting their little ones to develop.

My dd, my dgs and I all learned to read very early, certainly before 3. I read a book by an American named Glenn Doman. ‘Teach Your Baby to Read’ which is quite interesting. We did use flash cards with dgs and it became his favourite game.

Lol colditz. Really

I don’t really care either way. I suppose the thing I never got about baby swimming lessons was why you had to pay a fortune to do it. Essentially you are just splashing about in a pool with a few other babies singing a song. Why not just go with a mate, have a chat and splash your child at the same time? It’s the organised nature and expenditure for something of these things that I really struggle to understand.

petrol you could Google it - it was identified in the 60s and overlaps with autism apparently. That would actually fit with personal experience...

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperlexia

Really, petrolpump. I'm sorry your education lat you down.

I have a video of dc3 opening her birthday cards and reading them, on her second birthday. If you’d suggested this would be possible, when I’d only had dc1 and dc2 (both of whom couldn’t read much before three-and-a-half) I would assume you were on glue.

I think teaching babies to read and to swim are pretty good analogies. You can try and teach your baby the butterfly in the same way as you’d teach a ten year old but you won’t achieve much and the baby will cry. Or you can splash around and have fun whilst gradually increasing the baby’s self confidence and ability to support themselves in the water. Likewise you can include some alphabet books and gentle phonics introductions into the stories you read cuddled up together. Hundreds of tiny teaching moments dropped into everyday reading can add up to a lot over the course of the years between one and three. I’m generally in favour of early reading where a child is able because it gives young children independence and access to additional sources of entertainment. (Obviously I still carried on reading bedtime stories to children after they could read themselves - I’m not a monster).

It really is what suits an individual family isn’t it? I find all the number, alphabet books etc just so dull in comparison to all the funny, lovely stories around. Children can still get loads of pleasure and independent entertainment from books before they can actually read them. DC3 who is 2yrs can’t read a word but will sit for ages with books looking at the illustrations. But I saw a lady with an under 2yr old in the bookshop today looking at number and alphabet books and the toddler could recognise all her letters and numbers and was enjoying doing it. Not for us but it clearly works for them.

I was a very early reader and even I could only read at 3 years! You don't have the speaking language ability before that surely?

why does everybody have to have either a syndrome or a weirdly advanced ability to bark at print?
is nobody ordinary anymore?

Well I’m in my 40s and my mum taught both me and my brother to read using the Doman method before we started school. I was definitely reading Famous Five books by myself at age 3. Did it give us an advantage/head start? I’ve no idea. Both myself and my brother did well at school, grammar school, good exam results, degrees.

Dd is 17yo and I half heartedly had a go at Doman with her. It’s no more than ten minutes a day so it’s hardly hot housing. It’s just holding up flash cards and saying words. She seem to enjoy it. She could certainly recognise the different words from a very young age but I wouldn’t go as far as saying she could read. I probably only did it every other day though, maybe less.

My brother did it with his son and I think was more committed to it and my nephew is exceptionally bright and could read before starting school.

My daughter could recognise words and the alphabet at 2 and was reading by 3. Happily reading Roald Dahl etc at 4. Turns out her hyperlexia was actually one of the early signs of her autism.

This is a thread specifically about children who can read at a weirdly young age petrol. I’m not sure why you’re surprised that a recognised condition resulting in this ability has been brought up?

I think flash cards will only work for some children - those with a good natural ability to intuit the underlying phonic rules. Others will need more explicit phonic instruction. Humans are very good at intuiting underlying rules though. I’ve just failed totally on a quiz question about the order of adjectives in English. I couldn’t give you the list for the life of me, but I have never ever got them wrong in speech.

Came on here to say "hyperlexia, overlaps with autism" to find it'd already been said.

I had hyperlexia. Was reading Peter & Jane books at 2, anything put in front of me at 3, could comprehend content fine, if probably not nuance.

It didn't make me a world class novelist or indeed any good at writing essays on English literature - what it did correlate with was being able to learn grammar and vocab very quickly in English and every other language I've had reason to try. Other people I've known with hyperlexia have said the same thing - it doesn't mean you're a genius or will turn out to be the next Wordsworth, it means you find learning languages very easy.

Oh and OP I think AintNobodyHereButUsKittens has it right. Treat it just like swimming. If mother is trying to teach kid inappropriately or lying about kid's capabilities, that's unfortunate (and will come back to bite mother later). However if reading is being treated as a life-enhancing thing that is fun, and many tiny teachable moments are being grasped over the course of the day/week/year then what's the problem? It's not like reading means the kid then can't do anything else.

I was a very early reader and even I could only read at 3 years! You don't have the speaking language ability before that surely?
What an odd thing to say. 9 months is a very early walker, most babies don't have the strength or the balance at that age, mine certainly didn't. But I don't need to disbelieve in the baby I saw walking across the room at just turned 6 months. Speaking fluently at say 18 months is not even that precocious is it?

I agree catkind.

Lots of kids we know at around 18 months have hundreds of words that they know and maybe a hundred or so that they can say. They're starting to form short sentences, usually strings of nouns or noun + verb/adverb/adjective.

I do however remember being utterly freaked out by an 18-month old doing just that, when I'd never seen it before, maybe 15 years ago.

When I had dd I left a very demanding job and had s lot of energy to spare. Dd was a very early talker so when she was 12 months I made flash cards- holding them up and saying "this says DOG!" In a bright CBeebies voice. She tolerated it for a while, then picked up a card and said "Dis say silly"........
She learned to read at about 5. And she still has a good eye for bullshit.

Haha Bertrand - we may be going the same way with 19mo DS. His response to every enthusiastic "and what colour is this one?" type question is an eyeroll and "lellow". He's started picking my hand off the book when I follow under the words with my finger, and putting my finger in my mouth, and saying "no!"

I could read at 3. I never remember learning to read.

I never taught either or my children to read but both could pre-school-1 has dyslexia (so it was all sight) and one probably has ASD. Neither were academic later in life (now adults)

We just read a lot of books.

Interesting experiences. I personally was book mad as a baby/toddler and my mother has said she could easily have taught me to read before school, but didn't because she didn't want me to be bored (which was the experience she herself had). Clearly I was not sufficiently precocious to fully self teach, though I did pick it up very quickly once I received some instruction and have always been an avid reader with strong language skills.

My own daughter enjoys books but isn't obsessed in the same way. She's 3 and knows some letters, but not all, and is obviously nowhere near reading. She won't receive any formal instruction until she is 6 and I'm quite happy with that to be honest.

Hmm... interesting, DS is 20 months and it hadn’t occurred to me to start going through letters and numbers with him yet. We’ve taken Hygge’s approach and he adores books, will ask for them, bring them to you, point out the pictures. But I haven’t started tracing or spelling out the words or having specific letter or number books, I wonder if I should try and see what he thinks of them. I could read at 3 - my parents promised me a bedside lamp to read by if I could read a ladybird book I hadn’t seen before (I’d been desperate to read and mum had helped with flash cards but they weren’t convinced I wasn’t just remembering the stories in my books). I read the elves and the shoemaker and got my lamp sometime before I turned 4.
I have always loved reading and still do, it unlocked a whole world for me. I don’t want to push DS but I don’t want to fail to give him the tools to learn if he is interested.

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

Um, not quite.

I was a fluent reader at three, crap at school. I doubt I was hothoused to learn either as my mother just wasn't that way inclined and showed no interest in my education in school. I think I must have just liked letters so I was easy to teach.

I have three chidren myself and one picked it up in about a week, I swear. He was four but I realise now if I had made any effort he could have learned much earlier. The other two not interested and learned at the normal rate.

I was an early fluent reader but that was me. I didn't expect my own to be and wouldn't expect anyone else. What I do expect is that parents give children a love of reading and learning generally in whatever way makes the kids grow up wanting to keep this up themselves.