Why Early Baby Reading Programs Can Be Bad for Your Child's Brain

All babies grow at their own pace, with general time windows of when they reach developmental milestones. Some can be a little more advanced than others in developmental areas like walking and sitting up on their own. The same applies to cognitive actions like comprehensive reading, which begins around age 4. There are education programs for sale that claim your baby can read as early as nine months when most children only read a handful of words by age three. Some parents might consider that a good thing. After all, getting ahead in education can get you ahead in our society. However, subjecting your baby to an early reading program can actually be detrimental to his brain's overall development.

A baby's brain might be doing the same thing if you try to teach him reading too early. Babies don't come out the womb fully formed with all their cognitive functions ready to go. At different times they learn how to recognize faces, grab items they see and turn their heads towards sounds. These all occur in different parts of the brain, which is growing by the millisecond. But putting your baby through an early reading program can do more harm than good. In fact, Dr. Laura Berk's Development through the Lifespan book states that subjecting children's brains to early learning can actually reduce their brain's experiences with every day "normal" functional development because it overloads their neural circuits.

Some question if the early reading programs even teach children to read versus teaching them memorization. Children learn language best when they experience it through social interaction. Dr. Patricia Kuhl, the University of Washington's Science of Learning Center director, lead a study on children's language learning styles that involved introducing a foreign language. 9 month-old children raised in English-speaking homes were taught a few Chinese words by a group of native Mandarin speakers. They used their "mommy" tones combined with audio and visual cues for no more than 25 minutes at a time in an interactive, playful environment. The experiment also included a control group that was taught English only.

A second experiment used the same Mandarin instructors, but children learned either from audio recordings or an audio-visual combination. After a dozen sessions spread over a month's time, children were able to recognize Mandarin words at a better rate when they were taught by the instructors as compared to learning them through the audio speakers. The social interaction is what appears to be the advantage. This also suggests that it doesn't take rigorous study for children to learn these things.

There are some children who learn to truly read early and their brains can handle it, just like children who can dribble basketballs or play piano concertos before they reach age 3. But more often than not the desire to learn these skills comes naturally to children who seem to be born with those advantages, and success comes when parents groom their children's advanced skills at their own pace.

Parents might want to consider what the overall value is of using a paid program to teach your baby to read early on. Just because your child learns how to read prior to pre-school doesn't automatically translate into academic success in later years. It would be hard-pressed to find a conclusive study supporting that a pre-toddler reading program directly contributed to an older child's academic success without controlling for multiple variables like the education system and the child's natural ability to learn. This isn't to say that stimulating your child's brain is wrong. Just do it at a normal pace through natural means like reading to your child. The early reading program may just be another fun toy or television show in their eyes until the next stimulating program comes along.

SOURCE:
Kuhl, P. K., Tsao. F.-M., & Liu, H.-M. (2003). Foreign-language experience in infancy: Effects of short-term exposure and social interaction on phonetic learning.