What science has achieved since Doman?!

[Kristiina]

Hi!

I'm a huge fan of Doman's method AND at the same time huge fan of scientific facts. I would love to follow scientific recommendations on how to stimulate and help my baby to grow. But science seems to be following SO FAR behind and seems to be giving recommendations identified by Doman 40 years ago ("Reading is good for babies", "Sitting in a sitter is not good for baby's motor development", "Babies understand a lot more than we expect").

Also scientific arguments for or against Doman's methods seem to focus on only one of his recommendations "patterning". We are following Doman's methods but have not been doing any patterning!

I have so many questions about Doman's methods without answers. What about healthy children? What about our own children we see developing so much faster that their peers and being happier than their peers? 

Does anyone else feel  there is a cap between what the parents of early learning children know and what has been proven scientifically? 

Kristiina

[Frukc]

I learned about Doman 5 years ago so I am used to the lack of scientific articles  

Currently I am thinking that Doman says that it is enough to work with his methods only - but he does not say anything about the development of speech and logical thinking. Early talking and logical thinking are considered as the signs of giftedness. Methods of Doman seems tabu in scientific research - but here are another interesting materials on brain development

[Kristiina]

I feel absolutely terrible about starting this thread because just reading Glenn Doman has passed away. Maybe thread should be removed?

[Paddy Jim Baggot MD]

some brain development materials were mentioned?
what do you suggest?
some books?

[kmum]

 re: Frukc's comnent on speech:

I don't think Glenn Doman had a specific method for improving speech however I am certain that teaching my daughter to read as an infant has been by far  the most effective tool to teach her to speak. She has Down syndrome & like many people with DS she is a visual learner. Reading is a visual way to teach her to speak. Now at age 5 she speaks quite well.

[Frukc]

Of course, I am fan of methods of Doman.

I will explain my point. If you teach in Doman-style, with flashcard sessions, and do not do anything else, your child hears some 15 - 200 words per day.

Children definitely need more words 
http://forum.brillkids.com/general-discussion-b5/30-000-words-a-day/

In his books, Doman says that children of loving and interacting parents develop faster. But he does not go deep in it. It is possible that parent follows directly to described method, does flashcards sessions only, and nothing else, and than this child can be language-delayed.

[Mandabplus3]

Kristina I am sure Doman would have loved to have the scientific proof as much as you do. The thread is still valid and hopefully one that will be added to for years to come! At the moment the scientific evidence is very lacking.  you will struggle to find much that has been tested scientifically at all.

[nee1]

Of course, I am fan of methods of Doman. I will explain my point. If you teach in Doman-style, with flashcard sessions, and do not do anything else, your child hears some 15 - 200 words per day.  Children definitely need more words 
http://forum.brillkids.com/general-discussion-b5/30-000-words-a-day/
In his books, Doman says that children of loving and interacting parents develop faster. But he does not go deep in it. It is possible that parent follows directly to described method, does flashcards sessions only, and nothing else, and than this child can be language-delayed.

Frukc, thanks for posting that ``30000 words per day'' thread. I guess that for language development, we have to continue to input, input, and input via reading aloud. Thanks to Seastar's thread on reading aloud and the 2,013 book challenge thread  by Tamsyn, I've upped the amount of reading aloud considerably.

But when I reread that old ``30000 words per day'' thread you posted, I found that well, I've still got some distance to go. 30000 words a day is equated to 18 and a half readings of Cat in the Hat. I got the Cat in the Hat book out, read it and found that well, I'm lacking. For read-alouds, I average about 10 chapters in a chapter book each day. (Each chapter is quite long though. Some chapters, however, are not as long as one reading of Cat in the Hat). On the whole, it takes about 2 hours to complete all 10 chapters. I read aloud mostly from the Yesterday Classics collection. But on reading the thread Frukc pasted above, I found I will have to up it to at least 15-20 chapters if I'm to get close to the 30000 word mark.

And what that paediatrician (Dr  Steven Perry) said about focussing on input rather than output echoes what Mandabplus3 says all the time. That was very encouraging to me. I'll continue to focus on input. Thanks again, Frukc.

Thoughts, anyone?

[Frukc]

nee1

Your approach is like this http://homeparents.about.com/od/backtoschool/a/language_2.htm   

For me, there are three whales of EL.
1. Doman and other authorities (Shichida, Heguru - they are many and strong).
2. Talking (see 30000 words thread)
3. Psychological aspects (see http://forum.brillkids.com/coffee-corner/brilliant-kids-lack-confidence-the-perils-of-praise/)

I do not think that children need exactly 30 000 words. Maybe that is in case if no direct teaching is applied. And I know two kids whose mothers are extremely chatty, and these kids are late talkers, below the average, and one is diagnosed as slightly mentally delayed. These kids are so used to useless talking (including countless restrictions) that they just switch off their ears. Such talking is like singing of birds; I am used to bird talking but still do not understand.
If you include some educative content in your language and have some empathy you can talk less, I am sure

I also do not think that reading aloud is the very best. At least for my kids. The language in books often is dead and unnatural. I retell book stories using my language and adjusting to level of particular kid. For some time, we also used to watch simple cartoons and I explained everything what happened on the screen. Reading aloud is successful after 3.5 years, at least for my kids.

There is also research: reading aloud without interaction and understanding can be ineffective
http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/124/1/342.full.pdf+html

====

And now about me. Why I am in this thread. With my second kid I did Doman since birth and I did not talk enough. Mostly I continued to talk with my first kid, and I thought that my second one will learn from this. I also am not a chatty person. And this second child was unplanned; something was not waken up in myself. When he was almost two years old I understood my mistake. My second one was a bit delayed. Now he is approximately one year after my first kid. He is 3.4 years old. Concerning language and logic, he is exactly in the same level where my girl was when she was 2.4 years old.

My second kid is reading since 2.10, he has some basic knowledge in math, he knows much about animals and nature. His ability to read does not influence his language and logic development.

During the last year, sometimes I wake up in the middle in the night with thought "my son will be mentally delayed because of me". I learned from the experience of Karen Quinn.

Now things go better. His talking and logic are improving. He is very right-brained, consistent, strong-willed and creative. He likes to play alone; that is another reason for language delay because he do not seek interaction all the time as my first kid did. 

I continue to concern about his development but am not in panic anymore. He develops one year after my first kid. But my first kid is two years above the average (she is smarter than any other kid I personally know) so being one year after her is OK

This is the first time I talk about it in this forum. How guilty I feel that I did Doman without anything else.

[Kristiina]

Hi Frukc!

Thank you for sharing your thoughts on raising siblings. Karma! I bet you are not the only parent having similar thoughts of what they should have done differently. 

I believe that things will even out in long run, so if you just keep giving same focus for both of your kids, your younger kid could soon show more knowledge than you expect.     I wish you all the best!

Kristiina

[nee1]

Kristiina, please I hope you don't mind my posting on this thread. Frukc made some observations that I think are worth discussing. Thank you.

Frukc,

Many thanks for your comments. I've pondered all you said and here are my thoughts (feel to chime with your thoughts too):

1) I've heard that boys are less talkative in general than girls. I don't know if this is true since I don't have daughters yet. But if you look at broad generalisations, you'll find that men in general don't talk as much as women. Most men are people of few words, and if not for the women in their lives, most would not talk at all. Most men talk mainly to give information, if you get what I mean. I don't know,  honestly. I don't know if you should compare your son with your daughter. Men in general are completely different from women - their temperament, their level of talk, etc. Let me know what you think.

2) I also think you should remember that kids are very different. Kids from the same parents, same upbringing, will still have different strengths. I remember reading ``Native Reading’’ by Timothy Kailing. I've posted a link where you can read preview the pages I wanted to highlight -  http://www.nativereading.com/introduction.html. You see, Timothy Kailing had 2 kids. The first son, Otto knew his alphabet soon after his first birthday, he started reading at 18 months, and by 2 and a half months, he could read aloud Charlotte's Web (read the link above for the whole story). Not so with their second child, a daughter named Freya. She started showing an interest in words at 2 and a half.  Remember, 2 and a half was the age at which her older brother Otto could read aloud Charlotte's Web. Soon after, she started reading individual words, and by 3, she was reading fluently too.

Permit me to quote an excerpt about this from Chapter Six of the book. It says:

As in every other ability, there is a great deal of individual variation in how easily children are able to master reading, and when they are most ready to do this. A child who has abundant curiosity about abstract things, and who has an attention span to match, may well pick up reading at the age of three in an environment only moderately rich in correlations between the written and spoken language; simply being in a literate educated home with dedicated parents may be sufficient for such a child. But most children, with different strengths, will not make the connections necessary to become an early reader in even this supportive environment

In contrast the native reading techniques are intentionally based on the natural abilities that essentially all children share.  The different strengths and personalities of each child will certainly lead to different individual pathways to reading, but the end result should generally be the same: a deep and fluent understanding of the written word at what most people consider a strikingly young age.

My experience with my own two children shows the truth of this. My son, Otto always had a particular interest in signs and symbols from an early age. For example, as soon as he could grasp objects, he loved to play with his multicolored bathtub letters. Otto knew all the letters of the alphabet soon after his first birthday, and he delighted in this knowledge. He started reading at eighteen months, and for most of his childhood, he read with just about the same level of fluency with which he could speak. Otto quickly progressed until by the age of two, he was fluent enough to read chapter books. By the age of three, he was already a considerably better speller than I am (and I'm not that bad), completely unflustered by silent letters, hard versus soft c's, ie's and ei's and other such difficulties.

In contrast, my second-born child, Freya, was comparatively uninterested in letters and words through her first two-and-a-half years. She was, perhaps more typically, focussed on the pictures in books and generally ignored the text. However, I continued to use my correlational methods with her because the logic behind them was so compelling, So, for example, even though she generally seemed to be ignoring my consistent text pointing when I read books to here, I continued to do it. I was in the habit by this time, after the experience with my son. But I never tried to make Freya look at the words. I simply persisted in my techniques, reasoning that she would take notice when she was ready. Freya, by the way, was always such a ``stubborn'' or as I like to think, ``opinionated'' child, that somehow pushing her to read, or pushing her to do just about anything else she wasn't enthusiastic about, was seldom a viable option. The moment she felt she was being pushed into anything was the moment she usually determined she was going to have nothing of it! Then, at around two-and-a-half year, Freya, too suddenly started asking me (or more accurately, commanding me) to point to the words - ``Point, Papa, Point!'' - on those occasions where I was being momentarily forgetful or lazy  and was not already text pointing. The way this happened, quite out of the blue, makes me quite sure that she had actually been taking notice of the words for a long time, at least subconsciously. Within a month or two she was reading individual words on her own, and very quickly, before her third birthday, she too was reading fluently. I suspect that Freya's very nonlinear trajectory will prove more typical for native reading acquisition; only the experience of many more families will tell for sure.

Please let me know what you think.

[nee1]

I'll continue here.

3)  Frukc, also remember that we EL parents are well in the minority. Most parents are not even doing most of what we are doing. So I'm sure that whatever mistakes we make in this EL business, there is plenty of time to catch up. So be encouraged, Frukc. You mentioned Karen Quinn. Her son did catch up, if you remember. He went from a 37th percentile IQ score at age 3 to the 94th percentile at age 4. So when people say IQ scores are unchangeable, I say hogwash. In my opinion, if you intervene early, as Karen did, you can influence the scores significantly. I shared Karen's story of her son's IQ saga here - http://forum.brillkids.com/general-discussion-b5/'mindset'-is-a-fabulous-book!-but-it's-hard-to-live/msg83762/#msg83762

Now, with Karen's first child and daughter, Schuyler, I think that maybe in Schuyler's case, Karen did not know then that one could affect IQ by talk ( I posted an excerpt here - http://forum.brillkids.com/general-discussion-b5/article-moms-talk-their-infantstoddlers-into-being-gifted-%28my-recap%29/msg90005/#msg90005). But you know early, Frukc, and you are talking to your son in his early days. Remember, Karen's son did ace IQ tests, a test which the doctor told her that scores were unchangeable. He went from the 37th percentile to the 94th percentile. So I'm sure your son will catch up. Please, be encouraged, Frukc.

[nee1]

One last post.

Frukc, you mentioned a mom who was chatty but the kids ended up speech delayed. I'm a bit curious.

a)  When she chatted, was she directing the words to her kids? I ask because I read in the Hart and Risley paper (on the 30000 word thread) that the speech that counted towards language development was speech directed to the child. So TV does not count. Could you explain what you saw that you think caused the speech delay? I'm curious why talking to a child could cause speech delay. The mom of Aaron (on the Karen Quinn thead above) was chatty in a very productive way, and her son turned out bright.  Do you think your friend’s chatting was more of rambling than productive conversations? Can you explain?

b)  Your comment about her placing countless restrictions on the children made me wonder. I read in the Hart and Risley paper here (http://forum.brillkids.com/general-discussion-b5/30-000-words-a-day/msg79356/#msg79356)  that:

``But the children’s language experience did not differ just in terms of the number and quality of words heard. We can extrapolate similarly the relative differences the data showed in children’s hourly experience with parent affirmatives (encouraging words) and prohibitions. The average child in a professional family was accumulating 32 affirmatives and five prohibitions per hour, a ratio of 6 encouragements to 1 discouragement. The average child in a working-class family was accumulating 12 affirmatives and seven prohibitions per hour, a ratio of 2 encouragements to 1 discouragement. The average child in a welfare family, though, was accumulating five affirmatives and 11 prohibitions per hour, a ratio of 1 encouragement to 2 discouragements. In a 5,200-hour year, that would be 166,000 encouragements to 26,000 discouragements in a professional family, 62,000 encouragements to 36,000 discouragements in a working-class family, and 26,000 encouragements to 57,000 discouragements in a welfare family.

Extrapolated to the first four years of life, the average child in a professional family would have accumulated 560,000 more instances of encouraging feedback than discouraging feedback, and an average child in a working-class family would have accumulated 100,000 more encouragements than discouragements. But an average child in a welfare family would have accumulated 125,000 more instances of prohibitions than encouragements. By the age of 4, the average child in a welfare family might have had 144,000 fewer  encouragements and 84 encouragements and 84,000 more  discouragements of his or her behavior than the average child in a working-class family.''

Hmmm. Do you think her children heard too many prohibitions and very few encouragements? Could you explain some more, Frukc?

[Korrale4kq]

I just want to raise my hand... Chatty mom here with a child that was speech delayed. So it can happen.
I was a nanny for 10 years before I had my son so I knew all the tricks of talking and conversing with infants- to young children. I was informative, paused for response, did eye contact, etc. I also did sign language.

Now the back story on James was that he was born not breathing and was predicated to be mentally retarded, he was then failure to thrive for the first few years of his life. He was then red flagged for autism and had several speech regressions. He was doing speech therapy, to no real avail. I was teaching his to read on the side. And frankly it was his ability to read that gave him the ability to speak.
We now read a lot. And I believe those words really count. I was constantly explaining what it was when we were reading.
Now at 3.5 he talks quite well. His vocabulary is expansive. And we have some amazing conversations. Many people say he is gifted of genius. But I know him just to be an EL kid.

So what I am trying to say.... I think talking does help. But it might take a while to see some results. Or the child might have an underlying issue.

And frankly boys talk later than girls. You can have the rare boy that has advanced speech or girl that is a late talker. I think that there should be different speech milestones for girls and boys. Something I discussed with my sons speech therapist.

[Frukc]

thank you both for your kind replays!

nee, you asked me about the two boys.

Well, there are two families. The first one I met 6 years ago for some days and I do not remember details. Than I did not have kids. Mother is talking all the time and her son is diagnosed as slightly mentally delayed. He was 12.

The second family I meet often. Mother in this family is very chatty, she is just talking all the time. But her talking can be sometimes unbearable because she often is including memories about discussions with people nobody else knows, and interrupts others with something what is not connected with the discussion others are having. (I am sorry, L.)

Her son J is now 5 years old. He did not have any diagnosed health problems. In his first year, his both parents stayed at home and both were involved in parenting. Mother had vacation, father studied but did not finish. From 1 year to 3.5 (until childcare), father was stay-at-home father. He is a nice person and nice to kids but his talking might be called un-empathic. He is often using long and foreign words, and logical thinking is not his strong side.

This is a very strange subject, restrictions in this family. I remember some events.
When J was four months old, his parents did not allow to him to chew a towel because "it is coloured so it is chemical" (100 times washed cotton towel).
When he was 8 months old, he was sitting on a chair and swinging his legs, and his mother said him not to do it because it is not politely.
When he was 1 year and 3 months old, we were in countryside, and kids had fun trying to water flowers in a flower bed. For J, this was the first time in such activity. J parents did not allow him just pour water on a footpath and everywhere else and demanded that he pours water only in a flowerbed. When we (I and my husband) said that J should explore first, mother said in an angry voice "we are teaching him". this "we are teaching him" she said every time in following years when someone tried to say that he should explore and learn by himself.

It was like some instinct - they banned all these activities I consider developing activities. So, also the motor skills of J seemed to be delayed.

I think - if this boy would listen and follow to all these restrictions which often were age-inappropriate, his mental health would be endangered. so it was better not to listen. And even if he would listen, he would not understand because his parents did not talk in his level. They always talked in long and complex sentences. At the same time, they used rather restricted vocabulary. "do not run along a pathway because you can fall down" type sentences; pointless to listen for 3 year old boy.

In article I linked above is a quote I like:

"Parents are most efficient at promot-
ing child language development when
they calibrate their own speech to be
just challenging enough for the child,
neither so simplistic that the child
learns nothing from the parent’s model,
nor so sophisticated that the child is
bewildered. This just-challenging zone
has been termed the “zone of proximal
development."

This is what was wrong here.

I remember some episodes when J was 2.5 - he definitely did not understand what I was saying. He started to talk when he was three, and the process was slow. Now (5) he still has rather little vocabulary. "I like jeeps better than tractors" is probably the most difficult sentence I have heard from him. When he was 4, he was able to count only to 3 but now he can up to 6.  His parents are very satisfied with childcare so they do not do any education at home.

You may feel that I am not positive. This boy used to be aggressive to my daughter. He is aggressive to everyone. When kids (mine and neighbors) want to play, he without learning the game cries "you can not, I will be the first". And than he looses because he is not able to understand the rules. Neighboring kids (very nice kids) do not come to our yard when they see J. 

I think, aggressiveness is a logical result of this type of parenting. His parents do not let him explore, to be himself. And he thinks that it is the only type of communication - restriction and correcting, and no empathy.

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