Books, Babies and Brains

A Few More Good Reasons
to Read to Your Baby

By Johnathon Allen

Reading stories to children is easily one of life's greatest joys, but not all parents realize that reading to their little ones, and helping them learn to read themselves, is one of the most significant things they can do to ensure their child's success in life. In fact, recent studies suggest that the earlier children start reading, the better. Though academic institutions don't officially begin teaching children to read until they are older than 5, new breakthroughs in the study of brain development indicate that the best time to begin reading to little ones is when they are between the ages of 3 months and 3 years.

"All of a child's fundamental language skills are acquired during infancy," says Dr. Robert Titzer, a San Diego, Calif.-based infant learning researcher and creator of "Your Baby Can Read!" – an interactive video series designed to teach babies and toddlers how to read. "It's not that babies can't learn to read; it's just that adults don't expose them to written words very often. Really, babies and toddlers are better at learning language than their older peers."

Dr. Titzer explains that an infant's brain grows rapidly between the time she is born and age 4. It produces billions of cells, and trillions of interconnected synapses. Active reading, especially when accompanied by sounds, pictures, character voices and physical actions, significantly increases the number and type of neural pathways the brain develops.

"If babies are exposed to language frequently before the age of 3, they will not only learn to read, [but] will become skilled at learning itself," Dr. Titzer says. "They will have ingrained in their neural pathways various combinations of visual, audio and tactile learning styles."

Reading is also an ideal way for parents and children to simply take time out to be together. This interaction, in addition to helping children learn about the world of words, creates important bonding time. A study by the Philadelphia-based Commission on Literacy reported that little ones whose caregivers read to them consistently were more emotionally stable and far more likely to achieve academic and work success later in life.

Despite this fact, only 39 percent of parents with children younger than age 3 read to them daily, and 40 percent of 8-year-olds in the United States cannot read by themselves, according to federal government statistics.

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