Can You Teach Your Baby to Read?: Vital parenting information from Eyewitness News

From a very early age, your baby is ready to begin learning the building blocks of educaiton, words. I talked with one expert and infant researcher, who's vision is to develop reading skills in children, earlier than you would imagine. And Dr. Robert Titzer says your baby can read!

Dr. Robert Titzer, Ph.D.
We have babies who by nine months of age, who can read many words.

In more than 15 years of teaching, Dr. Titzer has worked extensively in researching and developing a method that takes advantage of your baby's natural learning skills. He believes that babies can learn to read as soon as they have visual tracking with their eyes. That's somewhere around 2-3 months old. Dr. Titzer says it's up to parents to work with their baby at home. He doesn't believe in waiting to let teachers at school do the work- because about 90-percent of brain development happens in the first five years of life.

Dr. Titzer
How to do it would be to talk to your baby as much as possible. And describe baby's senses. Talk about what the baby is looking at, smelling, tasting, and touching. Describe how the child is moving. Talk to your baby as much as possible and allow the baby to see the language at the same time.

He uses what he calls parent-ese to talk to babies, not baby talk. Here's an example.

Dr. Titzer
"This is my hand... I'm touching my hand". So when you talk like that you're talking in a higher pitch voice and you slightly enlongate the vowel sounds. And it attracts the baby's attention. There are studies that show babies prefer a higher ptiched voice.

Dr Titzer says his methods are tried and true and used by many families. He even used the techniques with his own children, and they too, learned to read at a very young age.

Long term studies show the earlier a baby learns to read, the better the child reads and the more likely the child will enjoy reading through life.