One of the more absurd claims in consumer product history — the notion that a baby as young as three months old can be taught to read — appears, thankfully, to be history itself. Last week, the company behind “Your Baby Can Read” announced that it was ceasing operations, because it had become too costly to fight the litany of formal complaints against it. The company, led by a man named Robert Titzer with a PhD in “human performance,” widely advertised a $200 set of flash cards, books, and DVDs, promising that babies and toddlers could take advantage of a “small window of opportunity” to read fluently and gain confidence.
Hundreds of thousands of people bought in. Then came the backlash, including a “Today Show” investigation that debunked the pledge with the help of leading child development experts. The Boston-based Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood also filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission, charging that the company’s marketing claims were false.
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It's obvious neither the kids nor their parents bothered to read the fine print. And SCAM was not one of the words on the flash cards.
There's a sucker born every minute
This is just a symptom of the rush to push reading skills onto young kids. Remember when kindergarten was a time for learning social skills and for play with the only "academics" consisting of the teaching of the alphabet and counting skills? Somehow everyone managed to learn how to read back then. Now kids are expected to know how to read by the end of kindergarten, or they are put into special classes. Studies are showing that pushing reading and math onto kids who are not yet ready to sit and learn these skills just turns those tasks into unwelcome chores. Generations of children grew up learning how to read after the age of six; there is no advantage to pushing younger children to read before they are ready. (Just a note: my daughter was a "late" reader--she didn't start to really read until around October/November of 2nd grade. Fortunately her teachers let her be and told us she was still within the normal curve. Now she is 25, in graduate school, and loves to read.)
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