Preschool: Teaching Baby to Read

If preschool training is great for rich kids in nursery school and for poor kids in the Government’s Head Start program, why shouldn’t every parent get busy and give his child a head start at home? That reasoning, stimulated by parental pride and fear, has led to a barrage of books and packages that offer to help Mommy teach Baby how to read, add numbers and raise his IQ, even while he is sitting on the potty.

Among the do-it-yourself books, two are getting the most play.

How to Teach Your Baby to Read is an almost evangelical ode to early learning by Physical Therapist Glenn Doman, who has been teaching preschool children with brain damage to read at Philadelphia’s Institutes for the Achievement of Human Potential. He contends that almost every young child has a “built-in rage for learning” and that parents have “a sacred duty to open the floodgate of all basic knowledge to him.” Doman claims that a baby will take to the written word as easily as to the spoken language and can even learn to read before he learns to speak—if the written word is presented repeatedly and in large letters. His book details step-by-step teaching sessions, beginning at two years with several daily periods of less than five minutes each. Example: the parent touches the baby’s toes, pronounces the word “toes,” holds up a large sign with the word on it. Each session must be a “game” that both participants find “joyous,” and it must always end before baby becomes bored. Since its publication in 1964, the book has sold 75,000 copies.

Doman and Carl Delacato, a remedial-reading specialist at the Philadelphia Institutes, have also produced a reading kit, which includes word cards, parents’ manual and child’s book. Parents have spent $400,000 on the kits—at $19.95 each—but a mother could do as well with just the $3.95 Doman book, plus a lettering pen and cardboard to fashion her own cards.

Give Your Child a Superior Mind is sold with the promise that if carefully followed, it will help a child “read 150 words a minute, add, subtract, multiply and divide, understand fractions and simple algebra, even handle abstract concepts and interpret them creatively”—all before he is five. It was written by Siegfried Engelmann, a research associate at the University of Illinois’ Institute for Research on Exceptional Children, and his wife Therese, a psychologist. They argue unconvincingly that such intellectual giants as Goethe, Leibnitz, Mill and Macaulay benefited less from genes than from early teaching, conclude that parents can train their children to become gifted.

Unlike Doman, the Engelmanns say that a child has an “initial resistance” to learning, that “you must push him” and “make lessons a rigid part of his daily schedule.” They urge parents to teach a baby names of parts of the body before he is 18 months old, start on the alphabet in five-minute lessons at 30 months, gradually work up to daily 90-minute lessons. The book details a sequence of teaching steps with specific instructions on how to get across such progressively more complex concepts as geometric shapes (by age three), counting backward (age four), fractions and inferences from statements (age five).

Now the “Learn-A-Tron.” Many “instructional kits” have also come out. Biggest one is First Adventures in Learning, a $69.95 package consisting primarily of 16 thin books—each dealing with such basic concepts as sizes and shapes, time, numbers and color—and a rather flimsy Learn-A-Tron plastic testing device. Parents insert rolls of simple pictures and questions into the Learn-A-Tron, then read the questions and check the child’s answers. Example: one picture shows three geometric shapes, with the underline: “Which is the triangle?” The set, now used in some Head Start programs, will be sold door-to-door this fall along with Compton’s Encyclopedia. Though overpriced, First Adventures can help parents explain to the child, in terms that he can understand, some ideas that he should have by the time he starts school.

Less helpful are such aids as the Milton Bradley Co.’s Modern Mathematics Kindergarten Kit, a motley of geometric shapes, animal cutouts and numbers in felt ($3). Kenworthy Educational Service, Inc. has put out Programmed Reading Aids, a series with ten flip cards of words ($2.50), perception cards showing figures, domino patterns and numbers ($1), and such 65¢ workbooks as I Learn to Read and Primary Count and Color. More informative for parents is a record-booklet package, Teaching Jonny’s Sister to Read ($4.95), in which Cambridge Housewife Henny Wenkart instructs her 4½-year-old daughter in reading.

Too Many Vitamins? Educators and child psychologists are generally skeptical about the home-teaching trend, particularly the teaching of reading. They have little doubt that some parents can teach some three-year-olds and four-year-olds to read—but why should they? “No one has really given any sound reason for doing so,” says Psychologist William Kessen of Yale’s Child Study Center. Myra Woodruff, recently retired chief of New York State’s Bureau of Child Development and Parent Education, believes that the real motivation for many parents to teach their tots is that “it represents status.”

Some critics fear that early instruction, like an overdose of vitamins, can be harmful. Dr. Paul J. Kinsella, director of the Developmental Reading Clinic at Lake Forest, IIl., figures that a young child’s hearing and seeing are so disorganized that parental pressure to read may only confuse him or cause emotional blocks that would permanently impair his reading. Dr. Evelyn Pitcher, chairman of child study at Tufts University, recalls a four-year-old girl who could read, but “all other aspects of her development were neglected. She did not want to play, was not popular, and withdrew into vicarious experience.” Burton White of Harvard’s School of Education calls the home-teaching trend “mass hysteria” and “part of the overemphasis on cerebral development.”

Good for the Ego. Early reading has its defenders. Dr. Abram Blau, head of child psychiatry at Manhattan’s Mt. Sinai Hospital, contends that “teaching young children anything that enlarges their ego is good for them,” and “any activity that demonstrates a mother’s emotional interest in her child is very important for a three-year-old.” Many experts also applaud the games, art, musical records and picture books that help prepare a child for school but do not pressure him to read.

The controversy will rage until educators produce reliable studies of the long-range effects of parental preschool teaching. No one knows whether a grasp of algebra at five makes a boy a sharper mathematician at 25. Meanwhile, all the experts urge caution—and even Doman and the Engelmanns concede that impatient parents, who tense up when Timmy says “saw” as he looks at the word was, ought to forget the whole thing.