Is It Really Important to Teach Your Baby to Read ?

Still fresh in our memory about Glenn Doman research. He has demonstrated that very young children are capable of learning than we ever imagined. He has taken his remarkable work that explores why children from birth to age six learn better and faster than older children. With his book "How to Teach Your Baby to Read" he shows how easy to teach young child to read using flashcard. Since this book published in 1964, five million parents have bought it and report how much they enjoyed teaching their babies to read and how much their babies have enjoyed learning to read.

But, recently research proved that there are no significant differences in academic capability between children who able to read before five years old with children who able to read at seven years old. The seven years old children finally will catch up somehow. Expert argue that children need necessary groundwork of those early rich language development and the ability to understand the complexity of words before they are ready to begin any formal instruction in reading. Linda Phillips, director of the Canadian Centre for Research on Literacy says children awareness of the rules of spoken language is what allow them to read, as a necessary step that to be passed before children learn to read.

As a parent, what are we going to do with all of those controversy ? Maybe, we should listen again to our grandparent advising us to enjoy our children because, they have warned, all to soon the children will be grown up and gone. Presenting our babies with flashcard surely can be useful to make them easier to be able to read, but we shouldn't have to forget that our important responsibilities is to encourage our children to love reading. Because, if we succeed to build interest of books with them, they will learn and search knowledge by themselves in the future, with strong enthusiasm. So, we shouldn't not forget the activities such as read a story everyday, make reading fun, talk about the books, point to the print as you are reading and ask question, that presented to them with so much love and affection. Beside that, some neuroscience research suggest there is a-use-it-or-lose-it element to some aspect of baby brain development, those synapse will get firing from the combination of close human contact , visual stimulation and oral learning that comes from parent playing, talking and reading for their children. As conclusion, we can choose not too stuck with the effort to put children through meaningless flashcard activities, but we can combine it by spending our time to enjoying good book with them.