ABC Reciting Baby Sparks Fears

As published in The Richmond News, November 13^th 2009

Back in July I sat in the sun at a picnic and watched another mother quiz her eighteen month old on his ABC’s. “He knows all his letters and can read some simple words”, she proudly shared as she made her son recite letters off a printed napkin. I felt a twinge of parental fear as I listened. My four year old doesn’t know all his letters yet. Is he learning enough? Maybe he will be left behind? But this precocious toddler looked so sad, and he sat there stoically, not engaging with any of the other children. What is he missing out on with all this focus on letters? And what’s the rush?

When I lived in Japan I was amazed to see teenagers still learning how to read. In countries like China or Japan, where one needs to know thousands of memorized characters just to be able to read a newspaper, learning to read really is a daunting task...

But English only has 26 little letters. Unless a child has a learning disability, it is not decoding the letters that distinguishes the excellent readers from those who struggle.

As a former teacher with my Master’s degree in Education, I used to teach children who were struggling with reading. I remember one boy who could sound out a sentence like, “The baby bunny darted into the brambles, heading for the safety of its burrow.” But this child had no idea of what darted meant, what brambles were, or what a burrow was. His mind struggled to “make a movie” in his head and the sentence hung in his mind as just some vague rabbit doing something. His years of video games and TV had not build the vocabulary or the imagination needed to follow a story.

The best gift we can give our children when they are young is reading to them and conversation. In whatever language. If we can develop our child’s understanding of the world, then when she later reads of infinity, or war, or delicate tendrils, or burrows, her mind will have a conceptual seat for those words to sit in. Conversation and reading takes more effort than just turning on the TV or sticking in a DVD, but it is worth it. It reassures me to watch The Disney Company offering Americans a refund on the famous Baby Einstein DVDs, acknowledging that these DVD’s were not actually educational after all.  The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends no screen time at all for children under two. And they probably don’t recommend flashcards either.

In their book Enstien Never Used Flashcards, PhD moms Kathy Hirsch-Pasek and Roberta Michnick Golinkoff argue that what children also really need is free time to play. They refer to research that found kids who go to academically-based preschools have more anxiety than kids who went to play-based preschools. And even more interesting is that the children who attend academically-based programs do no better in school than play-based children.

As I type, my four year old is making a brew in the kitchen, doing an “experiment” with some flour and water and ketchup. My six year old is still in the tent they made out of sheets on my bed, and he is making his stuffed animals converse in high pitched voices. Learning to read is not high on their priority lists right now, and maybe that is just fine.

Sarah Dakin is a Richmond mother of two who loves reading to her boys and who has never used a flashcard. You can reach her at sarah@babystepscoaching.com