Jul 02 2009
Your Baby Can Read – Not!
I have received numerous questions recently regarding the latest infomercial craze called Your Baby Can Read. This is a program that promises to teach infants and toddlers how to read, giving them a jump start on their education. Their website claims:
A baby’s brain thrives on stimulation and develops at a phenomenal pace…nearly 90% during the first five years of life! The best and easiest time to learn a language is during the infant and toddler years, when the brain is creating thousands of synapses every second – allowing a child to learn both the written word and spoken word simultaneously, and with much more ease.
This is mostly true – in fact the first four years of life is not only the best time to learn a language, it is the only time that language itself can be acquired. If a child is completely deprived of exposure to language during this time the neuro-developmental window will close. People can still, of course, learn second languages after the age of four, but it is more difficult and their brains will never be as hard-wired for those second languages as they are for a primary language learned before age four.
But the company goes off the rails of evidence when it conflates language with reading. There is no window of opportunity for reading like there is with language – adults who have never read can learn how to read. And while our brains are pre-programmed to absorb language, reading is more of a cultural adaptation.
The site also abuses evidence when it claims that:
Studies prove that the earlier a child learns to read, the better they perform in school and later in life.
Yes – but this might have something to do with smarter kids being able to learn to read earlier. Also, smarter parents, or just parents in a more stable and nurturing environment, may be more likely to read to their children early. What we have is correlational data with lots of variables. None of this necessarily means that forcing kids to learn to read early has any advantage.
In general studies of neurological development and education show that forcing kids to learn some task before their brains are naturally ready does not have any advantage. You cannot force the brain to develop quicker or better. In fact, it seems that children need only a minimally stimulating environment for their brain development program to unfold as it is destined to.
This further means that the whole “baby genius” industry for anxious parents is misguided. This is just the latest incarnation of this fiction.
There is another layer to this debate, however – that between phonics and whole word or whole language reading. One school of thought believes that children learn to read by first mastering the sounds that letters make then putting them together (ala hooked on phonics). The second school of thought believes the children read whole works, and therefore can be taught to memorize whole words and the phonemic understanding will come later in its own time.
In recent years the phonics side of this debate has been dominant in the education community. But the whole word group is a vocal minority.
However it also seems that there is an emerging third group who combine the two methods in a practical way. People read by both constructing words from their phonetic parts, an also by memorizing and reading whole words. Have you ever received this e-mail:
Arocdnicg to rsceearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer are in the rghit pcale. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit pobelrm. Tihs is buseace the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.
This would seem to support the whole word school of thought. However, we also learn new words by sounding them out, and still have to do this for uncommon words. So a blended approach seems practical and is gaining acceptance.
The Your Baby Can Read program is an extreme whole word appraoch. Infants and toddlers are taught to memorize words, which they can then recognize and name from memory, even before they can understand what they are reading. Critics of this approach claim that this is not really reading, just memorization and association. Some even caution that by taking an extreme whole word approach, phonic understanding can be delayed and the net result can be negative.
Others are critical of this entire approach of forced learning at a very young age. It is more productive, they argue, to give the child a loving supportive environement and let their brain develop as it will. You are far better off spending your time playing with and bonding with your child than engaged in drills or having them sit in front of a video.
There also does not appear to be any evidence that programs like Your Baby Can Read have any long term advantage. Their website does not provide links to any pulished studies to support their claims. Regarding the founder it declares:
Dr. Titzer’s research has been published in scientific journals, including the prestigious Psychological Review.
True – but misleading as a Pubmed search on Titzer R came up with only two publications, neither of which have anything to do with learning to read. His Wikipedia page claims that he has published no scholarly work on infant reading.
Conclusion
While the background concepts are quite interesting, the bottom line is that we have another product being marketed to the public with amazing claims and no rigorous scientific evidence to back them up. This product also falls into the broader category of gimicky products claiming to make children smarter or more successful academically.
Anxious parents wanting to give their kids every advantage is a great marketing demographic, in that they are easily exploited. But like all gimicky schemes promising easy answers to complex or difficult problems (weight loss, relationships, or academic success) in the end it is likely to be nothing but a costly distraction from more common sense approaches – like just spending quality time with your kids and giving them a rich and save environment. What such products often really provide is a false sense of control.
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17 Responses to “Your Baby Can Read – Not!”
Don’t you just love when you try to expose something, and Google displays their ads all over your site
Great article… as always!!!
I can’t stand the competition between parents (not children) hooked on those “magical” learing programs. We don’t let our kids play in the first place and we want them to know quantum physics.
We’ve been playing these DVDs for our baby at my wife’s insistence. Since we didn’t actually pay money for them, I haven’t sweated it too much, but I have been curious about their real effectiveness.
My mother-in-law’s baby could read at 2 and a half years old in the 1950s. Her first son learned the whole word approach and also learned to read from television. He read encyclopedia’s by 5 years old. His principal, an Ed.D, used to give him college level texts to check him periodically for comprehension. He would get 99s on the Iowa Basic Reading Skills tests. *
My favorite reading system was a phonetics system that I enjoyed in second grade. Thanks to my grammar school teachers, my parents bought me a pair of well-needed glasses by 10 years old. Those were very helpful indeed.
In my personal experience, the best way to teach children to read is to teach them to *want* to read. My earliest memories are of my older sister reading to me, books she like (some teenage detective stories). I cannot ever remember not loving books, not wanting to read. In the 6th grade, I was told by the school I was reading on a college junior level. And I was an honor role student all through high school, despite being an obnoxious ass.
Your parents hadn’t heard about glasses from another source up until that time?
artfulD-”Your parents hadn’t heard about glasses from another source up until that time?”
The same thing happened to me, only it was at age 12. I wasn’t even aware that I needed them. Teachers are often the ones to 1st spot a child having vision problems.
I was just curious whether HHC’s tendency to drop in the occasional thought apropos of nothing was in some sense hereditary.
I also became a good reader because I loved to read and that only encouraged me to read ever more challenging books. But it’s hard to say which came first, did i love reading becuase I was good at it, or was I good at it because I loved it?
If, as you first said, you became good because you loved it, you have answered the question and will soon need glasses.
Or you could just read to your child while showing them the words.
Actually, the bogus Cambridge University Reading Test invalidates the whole word method. The letters are not “all mixed up.” In fact, the consonants are in exact order–kind of like we text message. More on this on a blog I posted on this test at http://penningtonpublishing.com/blog/reading/dick-and-jane-revisit-the-reading-wars/
I am neither convinced nor unconvinced of the efficacy of these sorts of products. It doesn’t matter to me, I think they’re an extremely bad idea anyway–yes, whether they work or not.
There is plenty of evidence that early reading does not equal better reading in the long run, nor a greater love of reading. It’s just earlier, which seems like a poorly thought through goal, one that makes parents feel impressed with themselves.
Aside from that, there are broad developmental goals that are important in early childhood that are not necessarily served by drilling children in memorization.
Lastly, mpenning’s comment, while interesting, is simply innacurate. The consonants are NOT all in exact order, with only the vowels moved around. The first word, Arocdnicg, does not satisfy this claim, and neither do quite a number of other words in the passage.
Please note that the poster, otto_ 10 July 2009 12:05pm should have his post inserted here instead of Skeptics Affirmation. The post is relevant to Your Baby Can Read – Not.
As an MA reading specialist, I’ve seen some crazy fads come and go. My favorite has to be the developmental reading strategy that was quite en vogue back in the 1970s and 1980s. It’s assumption was that poor readers had missed a developmental stage along the way and that the best remediation was to revisit that stage to ensure that all of the synapses were properly hard-wired.
The supposed correlate was that poor readers tended to never crawl as older babies. The reading therapy? You guessed it; poor readers were put on all fours and made to crawl.
In your article, you mention the both/and, rather than the either/or option for integrating phonics and whole word learning. I tend to agree; however, the problem-solving approach is important in reading, i.e., readers should first attempt to decode (phonics) and then adjust to whole word (sight words) if the words are not phonetically regular.
I have written articles on both sides of the coin: Phonics: http://penningtonpublishing.com/blog/reading/top-ten-reasons-to-teach-phonics/ and Whole Words: http://penningtonpublishing.com/blog/reading/how-to-teach-sight-words/
Dear Dr. Novella,
As a fan of the SGU podcast from the beginning (well, for years – I’ve “caught up” from the beginning), I believe the skeptical movement can provide valuable instruction to people who do not ordinarily apply sound reasoning principles to the the news and marketing information to which they are continuously exposed. I actually don’t care much for the notion of a skeptical “movement;” I think that tends to marginalize an intellectual process that should be characterized as common, right-headed, rational, sensible reasoning (still working on the winning catch-phrase). In any case, applying a skeptical eye to sales pitches is certainly a necessity in our society where, for the sake of turning a buck, things are often not what they are presented to be.
However, I believe your blog post fails the common consumer who would look to an authoritative voice in the skeptical movement for sound guidance in their consideration of Dr. Titzer’s “Your Baby Can Read” product. You flirt with the real issue to the consumer, but ultimately remain primarily focused on the call-to-arms issue of the skeptical crusader. Worse than that, though, is that you seem to be willing indict the product with no more, or perhaps less, evidence than Dr. Titzer has available in making his claims. And worst of all – if you are advocating the adoption of rational thought processes in everyday decision-making, should you be including common rhetoric in the making of your case? I have a great deal of respect for your knowledge and your discipline of reason; I don’t think your commentary in this case lives up to the standard that I find you to generally uphold.
Parents considering this product seek the answer, that suits their circumstances, to a singular question: “Is this product a worthwhile investment?” One of the issues to be considered in making this determination is “is there any published scholarship or valid scientific study to support the claims of product benefit?” But to confuse the latter question with the former as being the real issue to the consumer would be erroneous, and is by my observation an error too often committed in the name of the skeptical movement.
I am the father of a nine month old. My wife and I saw the infomercial for the “Your Baby Can Read” program. I consider myself to be a very skeptical person and a hard sell for the incredible claims of the typical infomercial. Having scrutinized the fine print of the trial evaluation offer, we decided that for the risk we would be taking, the product was worth a look. We are a week into the program, and our observations so far would be interesting from an anecdotal standpoint, but not what would constitute scientific evidence. The jury is still out on whether we will continue past the trial period, but early indications are promising.
During this trial interval, I am searching for valid evidence of the product’s effectiveness outside of my own observation, and other useful perspectives that would contribute to my own decision-making. Your blog addresses an important question – the lack of published studies or other scientific evidence demonstrating the program’s benefit makes the program’s value more difficult to discern, if it exists at all. But, that there is an absence of studies that provide any finding of product efficacy means that scientific research has nothing to say on the matter one way or another. Therefore, I don’t find a reasonable route to the absolute conclusion that the program does not have benefit.
I do not see where the company has made claims of benefit based on a “window of opportunity” for reading. Having examined the parents’ guides for the program, I find that the company claims that an early start at learning to read is advantageous for maximizing ultimate reading potential, not that an opportunity for any level of reading ability will be missed. It appears that the “window of opportunity” interpretation was your own leap (I recall the discussion of the concept as it relates to language from a past SGU podcast).
I entirely agree that the marketing of the product incorporates some breakdowns of rational conclusion. The company fails to validate their reference to “studies” that would demonstrate long-term school or life performance advantage so as to allow a critique of the studies’ design. And I would prefer to not see vague references to Dr. Titzer’s scientific publishing if it is not relevant to the subject at hand. However, I think it is important to recognize the distinction between shortcomings in the marketing of a product and the fundamental merits of the product itself. The former poses a challenge to the determination of the latter, but we should not be led to an unsupported conclusion about any product by objections we may have to marketing technique. And in this case, I certainly don’t see the egregious marketing crimes being committed that would lead to question of the basic integrity or ethics of the company or its principals.
“No scientific evidence of long term benefit” would be a reasonable skeptics finding to be made from the facts available. Disturbingly, though, you have peppered your commentary with numerous remarks ill-suited to a reasonable critique of the product claims or other available data:
- “… forcing kids to learn some task before their brains are naturally ready … .” Forcing? This is not consistent with the instructional guidance for the product, and inflammatory on your part. Has there been a determination that the brain of a toddler is not “naturally ready” to begin learning to read? If so, please elaborate.
- “You cannot force the brain to develop quicker or better.” This is an apparent misread of the core claim of the program, that being that the time interval concurrent with explosive brain development is an advantageous time to begin teaching a child to read, not that you should teach your child to read at this time to stimulate explosive brain development. (An argument could be made that the latter is an implication of the program’s marketing, and such an implication would be certainly be a marketing overreach, but this is not the issue that is of concern to the parent considering the merit of the product.)
- “… the whole ‘baby genius’ industry for anxious parents is misguided.” Not sure how you would classify this logical fallacy or rhetorical maneuver, but it is untoward of you to imply that any parent who is attentive to the educational potential of their child is “anxious.” Nor do I think it is exemplary skepticism to uniformly indict all products that would serve early child development objectives with a blanket indictment of the entire industry, or to identify them with a condescending label.
- “The Your Baby Can Read program is an extreme whole word appraoch” [sic]. Extreme? Other than for rhetorical effect, I don’t see the validity of any characterization other than a “standard” or “regular” whole word approach. The program presents a singular approach, but in the materials, Dr. Titzer actually espouses a blended approach, which would “seem practical” by your reckoning.
- “Critics … claim,” “some even caution,” “others are critical … of forced learning … .” There is a great deal of generalized negative implication, but little or no reliable fact in these remarks. Don’t we as skeptics have an obligation to live up to the same standards for quality argument that we demand of the objects of our criticism?
As a fan of you and your advocacy of critical thinking, it is difficult for me to read the concluding statement of your blog post. You may not have had the opportunity to respond to your audience’s inquiry with the benefit of an adequate examination of the product, but you should resist the inclination to pass such judgments without due diligence. The product does not offer an easy solution to the objective – the program involves a detailed process that proceeds over many months. How do you get to “gimicky?” The claims are not so amazing – you put in the work to teach a child to read, and they learn to read (in the generation in which I learned to read, a kindergartner that can read would have been pretty surprising). The process, properly applied, actually provides rewarding interaction between parent and child (that much is clear in the first week, before any indication of reading success is seen). Your entire conclusion is a swing and a miss.
Bottom line is that we are presented with a product that offers compelling benefits in the context of a somewhat revolutionary educational concept, for which there is no scientific finding available that speaks one way or another on the product’s efficacy. So we are left to consider a product based on a plausible notion and that purports to serve a worthy objective – improving the learning potential of children. As an “attentive” parent and an alert skeptic, I would say this product bears further examination. Unless valid scientific study emerges that addresses the product or the underlying principles, sound skepticism has little more to say.
With best regards,
John Rullman
John,
Thanks for your thoughtful feedback. However, I disagree with your reading of my post. Essentially, you seem to agree with my core point – the company makes claims not backed by adequate evidence, but disagree with the form of my critique.
For example, you object to my use of the term “force” – but you misread my usage. This is not meant to be emotive – I use the term “force” to mean that you can make something happen ahead of schedule.
You also misread my use of the word “extreme” – again, this was used specifically to mean one end of a spectrum. I understand that the instructions include other techniques, but the core of the program and the way it is sold is at one end of the reading strategy spectrum.
Further, I disagree that all we can say is that this product lacks evidence. We do have a body of neurological research that indicates that as people mature they reach their intellectual potential, as long as they do no have a deprived environment. Doing extra or early work does not improve long term outcomes. So this is a reasonable default position unless there is evidence to suggest otherwise – which you agree, there isn’t.
And to clarify – I am not talking about fund of knowledge, but rather intellectual skills, like reading.
If the program encourages quality time between parent and child, fine. But then you could do this without spending any money on a program – which is what I recommended.
I also did not mean the term “anxious” to be derogatory. I am an anxious parent – all parents should be appropriately anxious. Anxiety is an adaptive trait. Appropriately concerned, anxious, motivated parents are easy to exploit by making them feel as if they are missing out if they don’t buy some product.
So I completely stand by my characterization that this product makes unsubstantiated claims, lacks plausibility, is conceptually problematic, and very deliberately exploits their target demographic.