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Home › Articles › Guiding Baby's Development › Books, Babies and Brains

Books, Babies and Brains

A Few More Good Reasons
to Read to Your Baby

By Johnathon Allen

Pages:  1  2  3  

Important Bonding Time
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.

Dr. Titzer believes that one of the main reasons American children are having such difficulty is because they begin learning to read too late. "There's a window of opportunity for language adaptation that starts closing around age 4," he says. "Yet we don't start teaching children how to read until age 5 or 6, after the brain is mostly developed."

Too Much Too Soon?
But some people fear that trying to teach babies to read and comprehend language that early places too much pressure on them, and merely serves to confuse their already inundated minds.

"The first three years of a baby's life are crucial to their development and too much emphasis on trying to ensure they develop reading abilities can be confusing and somewhat misguided," says Matthew Melmed, Director of Zero to Three, a center for infants and toddlers in Washington D.C. "Giving small children all of that information may have certain drawbacks, because much of it is not relevant to them yet. By overdoing it, we run the risk of toddlers disengaging from the world around them, or not wanting to learn."


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