Rush Little Baby

[purplefungi]

This is an interesting article that I found a while back. It goes back and forth about the pros and cons about early education. I find it interesting especially the part about "late bloomers."

http://www.commercialexploitation.org/news/rushlittlebaby.htm

[nhockaday]

Interesting article; it gives you a lot to think about.

[zoe22]

interesting indeeed!

[torusm]

Mine are definitely late bloomers then.(hopefully so according to the article ; )))
My 7 yr old has just started reading a few months ago, my 3 and a half year old is not reading at all despite YBCR a few times a week and my 20 month old shows no interest in flashcards nor YBCR videos except for the songs.

Is 20 months too late then to start doing LR and LM?

[Nikita]

Just persist. Not too late. Better late than never, though technically I'm sure there is an age that flashcards must lose their usefulness by...I wouldnt bother using them with my older kids, who are 13, 12 and 9! That includes encyclopaedic knowledge cards, as they can already read.  Even if it would still work, they wouldnt be into it!! So the earlier you can condition them to this sort of method as Normal, the easier it will be for you. I find it difficult to do flashcards with my 17 month old, but I persist, mainly via dvds.  Using LR etc is currently  difficult, she doesnt want to sit still on my very pregnant lap and that is not comfortable for me. When I can be able to burn the lessons onto DVD that will be easier. I dont have much luck with actual flashcards as she wants to grab them and wreck them. Just sitting her on my lap for a book reading session is difficult. Too active. So currently I just have flashcard dvds on the TV screen while she's in the room, and hope that while she's playing she's absorbing something, as they flash for a second, meaning if she glances at the TV for a second, she's got one bit of info into her. She wont just sit down and watch even for a few minute segment. But she is interested in sign language dvds and some baby learning educational dvds. So my advice is to keep at it, so the kids learn that flashcards and learning information is normal. Then it should become less of a battle. The later you start, the more difficult it would be to introduce.

[Nikita]

My son, now 9, was later learning to read than the older 2 girls. Partly due to being ADHD... he'd be hanging from the rafters, sticking his toes up his nose and just fidgeting alot when I was trying to read with him. I wish I'd had YBCR and all the available products we have now... I'm sure he'd have absorbed much more learning that way even if I'd started him at 3.5 yo or later. And i think it would catch on quickly with a 7 yo.  I'd try to immerse them in learn-to-read style dvds and cut out entertainment TV viewing. Some of the reading dvds are entertaining too. And you could sugar coat them as the older kids might think they're a bit babyish.  Tell them you need their help teaching the baby how to read, and that you plan to teach baby using certain DVDs, LR etc, so you need their cooperation sitting with baby while bub watches these programs, and not watching list-useless-shows-they-like-to-watch because they will not be helping baby learn.

[torusm]

Nikita, your little girl sounds exactly like my little one (20month old)...she enjoys the flashcards only when i let her handle them and all she want to do is flip through them real quick and spread them about on the floor. She does sit still for about 5 minutes to watch a part of YBCR if i'm with her and fully engaged but i doubt she's been learning much reading but enjoys doing the head shoulders knees and toes alot. My 3 yr old however knows that african elephants have larger ears than asian elephants but i doubt she can read. She does show some interest in words and  points to words and pretends to 'read'. And she does sometimes asks 'what's this word?' when she sees words around her.
I'm trying to be consistent but it isn't easy and not very motivating when i don't see any results.

[DadDude]

I read this article just as I started making Powerpoint presentations for my boy.  It's interesting, but it's also a little annoying and misleading.  The stereotype of the pushy parent is admitted to be a stereotype (that's good), but only by admitting a single exception (that's not so good).  David Elkind is presented as a neutral expert who is a "voice in the wilderness"--the implication being that his views are correct.  Kathy Hirsh-Pasek and other experts critical of early learning are, again, merely quoted approvingly.  In short, the article begins from an assumption that early academic education of the Doman stripe is semi-sophisticated bourgeois nonsense, then hunts for evidence to support it.

I've actually written some leading experts on all these issues, looking for hard research and asking them to elaborate arguments against, for example, teaching reading at a very early age.  I came away very disappointed -- they really weren't able to articulate their objections in any way that I could not easily dismiss as a failure to understand the educational programs or the kinds of people who follow them.

I also find the lumping of Baby Einstein with the sort of stuff we talk about in these forums to be a little annoying, too.  There is a lot of shoddy analysis like that in the article--especially where studies that really prove little are presented as if they presented profound findings.

Just for example, one study says it's great how kids who rated as superior in intelligence had cortexes that matured as late as 11-12--so, the suggestion goes, it's good to be a late bloomer.  But that, of course, doesn't follow at all.  All that follows is that it might not be bad to be a late bloomer.  And what, pray tell, does this have to do with the advisability of starting early?  Nothing, as far as I can see.  Does it make the brain less "plastic" to have a lot of information in it at an early age?  That seems to be the article's implication.  Maybe -- but where's the data or argument on that?

Oh, and here's another piece of "brilliant" analysis: "There's probably a reason, Giedd says, that researchers have found that very few Nobel laureates were child prodigies. They were more typically solid students, and many were late bloomers academically."  Big deal.  This is a scientist trained in probability?  Well, then why doesn't he reason that, of course, there are a lot more mediocre and solid students, period, than really brilliant ones, and brilliance in school isn't directly correlated with being Nobel material?  So there's bound to be more Nobel laureates who weren't stellar students simply because there are so many more non-stellar students (like me, for instance!).  Yes, that's a lot more reasonable, and does not require that one accept the absolutely absurd notion that being a good student somehow puts one at a disadvantage when it comes to later success in intellectual life!

In my own reading and discussion, I've come to the conclusion--well, the suspicion--that a lot of the resistance to early academic learning, from the professoriate and educationists, really comes down to a knee-jerk emotional reaction of educated egalitarians against what they perceive as overreaching, competitive, bourgeois types.  Well, maybe there are some people like that among us, but I don't know.  I get the sense that most of us simply want what's best for our children.  I don't see much evidence of competitiveness here.  People generally brag about their kids only after I specifically ask them to.    Anyway, this article is not exactly what I would call a brilliant analysis.

One last comment: how Einstein got to be Einstein proves absolutely nothing for anybody's case.  OK?

[Frukc]

I scanned Medline for studies on early reading.
I combined keywords like early reading, early reader, early literacy, child reading and "age 3", reading child adolescence, and more, and more. and did not find any direct study on really early readers.

(I did not search for papers on myelinisation because I don't know the background.)

Somehow I am surprised about it. Is it a kind of tabu? Early education has been debated over 50 years or more. But these debates are based only on speculations or on single cases. There is no statistics available. Story about Titzers children is not a scientifically proven study; it is just a single case.
Some papers exist, like these were used in article mentioned above. But several similar studies need to be done to have real results. We can not make global conclusions just on one study and one or two opinions.

Millions of early readers have finished schools. It would be so easy to take large group of 40-year olds, ask them (or their mothers) at which age they started to read, and study various aspects of their lifes.

Even IAHP people does not have (or does not give) such statistics. They say only that "all our children are highly successive" and than show some examples.

What is hidden here?

[Frukc]

And I agree to Dad dude that the argument "very few Nobel prize laureates were child prodigies, .... and many were late bloomers academically" is not serious. It is similar as all other speculations.

It would be correctly to say "it was estimated that there were x% of child prodigies among Nobel prize laureates compared to x% of general population; x% of Nobel prize laureates can be considered as late bloomers" (reference).
Othervise, there is no difference between "very few" and "many"; every number higher than 1 can be called so.

 

[PY]

thanks for sharing!

[purplefungi]

I was waiting for you to comment, DadDude, because you always have such nice, detailed discussions!

I agree completely especially on the part about competitiveness. Personally, I could totally be a hard-core doman mom (if money, time, and patience allowed), however few people in real life know what we do. Furthermore, I don't brag to my friends that my boy said something in Japanese or Chinese or calls the sun a star (which it is), and so forth. These are things that any kid here could do without any proboblem. I am also totally not the competitive type. I will let someone else win a lot of times. This can also be seen as a personality flaw, but I can't help it too much.

I much rather listen to other moms talk about their awesome children and what they are doing.

[genochye]

i think we're cut from the same cloth purplefungi!  i completely agree w/ you -- i'm the same way, not keen on bragging about the knowledge & skills my 3 yo has acquired thus far...our motivation for exposing our child to the world of early learning is not to put him in the "spotlight", but hopefully to equip him w/ the skills and knowledge to allow him to reach his full potential as he gets older.  i too prefer to sit back and let other parents do all the talking & bragging about their kids, i find i learn more from listening

[purplefungi]

i'm the same way, not keen on bragging about the knowledge & skills my 3 yo has acquired thus far...our motivation for exposing our child to the world of early learning is not to put him in the "spotlight", but hopefully to equip him w/ the skills and knowledge to allow him to reach his full potential as he gets older.  i too prefer to sit back and let other parents do all the talking & bragging about their kids, i find i learn more from listening

That couldn't be better said!

[Littleroo]

This article was actually written about my daughter. She is now 8!  The reporter had an obvious bias against early learning, but even he had to admit that my child seemed very happy and well adjusted.  I just had my second child and plan to do it all again.    

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