Baby Can Read - Valley Village,CA

No, waste of money and your child will have to relearn how to read anyway.

If you will read to your child everyday, your child will learn to read.. those videos are all a waste of time and money..

From what I understand you have to force your baby to watch them ALL the time and who has time for that?? Plus my kids wouldn't sit still to watch anything....
My oldest is 2 1/2 and just now can watch some cartoons and enjoy them. We just read to them every day and make the library a weekly event. She LOVES her books (even sleeps with them) and although she won't be reading on her own any time soon, I know she will be a wonderful reader and enjoy it, just because it is such a part of her life.
I don't need her to be child wonder.... she is a kid and I will wait for all the steps in life to come, as they should.

Someone else just asked the same thing on here recently - I think it was dated 8/23 and the question was "Anyone use My Baby Can Read?" If you can find it, I would read those responses (including mine).

Personally, to me, it seems very forced and unnatural. My daughter is 3, and I don't just want her to learn to read. I want her to ENJOY reading. Everyone will tell you that all you need to do is read yourself to your child every day. I read my daughter stories at nap time and bed time. It's part of our routine and she loves it. I let her pick out what she wants to read, even if it is Green Eggs and Ham for a the zillionth time. My mom read to me every night as a child and I turned out just fine. My daughter also knows all her alphabet letters (big and small) and numbers and can sing the ABC song - since she was 2. She is starting to know what letter a word starts with by the sound it makes. She is starting to count to 10 in Spanish. All without a flash card or DVD ever being brought into our house (though I admit she does watch some Sesame Street and Dora when it's on TV - I gotta have a break sometimes!)

There are a lot of products out there that essentially prey on parents' anxiety about doing everything for their kids to ensure their success. They usually cost a lot of money and are totally unnecessary. We all want to do right by our children but sometimes that means keeping things simple. Read to them. Make it a pleasurable experience. Take them places. Talk to them. Play with them outside. Get them toys like blocks that gets them using their imaginations, that they can play with in multiple ways. Let them play with other kids. Don't just park them in front of a video all day long.

Don't waste your time, or your money. Besides, do you want your 3-year-old to be able to read things like "Candy" and "Liquor" and "Live Nude Girls"? ;)

i agree with everything peg said. first, too much time - obsessive amounts of time, really. S., NO reason for it other than bragging rights. third, you're NOT teaching your child to read, you're making them memorize words, which is not the same thing at all. reading includes understanding how letters work together to make certain sounds - phonics! phonetically comprehending what a word does because of how it's spelled and using that information to read the next word. memorizing words is not reading. period. it's a scam.

you'd do better to spend that money on books dealing with the alphabet, and reading to your child. we would talk about letters in the car, "what does the letter "A" say" etc. i would repeat a word, "D-D-D-DOG" and get him to guess what letter it starts with.

Bad bad bad. The program encourages you to sit your baby in front of a tv to watch DVDs. Take those minutes/hours and hold your baby and read to him instead. The program is a scam.

It doesn't teach them how to read, it teaches them objects. Please do not let your child watch DVDs or TV before the age of 2. They are unable to understand it and it destroys creativity and imaginative thinking. If you truly want to give your child a good head start, teach him/her how to play by himself/herself, and spend a lot of time talking/reading to him/her.

Dr. Amen, who specializes in the brain, does not recommend young children watching tv, dvds, movies , etc as they teach our children to have short attention spans. Let your baby be a baby and learn reading by enjoying you reading to him/her. They will pick it up when they are ready and easily.

Good luck!

Save your money and spare your baby. Programs like that do far more harm than good, and the only reason to drill "reading" into a baby that way is to be able to brag that your 2-year-old can "read." Reading to a child and encouraging play that incorporates lots of language is far more important to his future academic performance.

With enough repetition, "My Baby Can Read" teaches young children to recognize a word as a whole shape. That's no more reading that showing the color blue, or a picture of a dog, or the storefront of Borders Books, and the child having a word to associate to it. Similarly, I have learned to recognize some words in Chinese, too, from studying catalogs of Chinese tree peonies. But that's not "reading" Chinese, which would be an entirely different, and much more complex, function.

Your child will still have to learn to "really" read later on, by learning the sounds of letters and syllables and gradually putting them all together. For many children who think they can read because their mom said so, it's harder to teach real reading, writing and spelling to a child who thinks reading is memorizing word shapes.

I used it with my son and he was reading 50+ words at 18 months or so. You do have to be kind of dedicated to it. It is a 5 dvd set and the child will watch the first dvd once or twice a day for 2 months and move to the next. I found it easiest to play it during breakfast and lunch while he was eating in his high chair. We would miss some days here and there no biggie. When I first watched the dvd I thought this is so boring there's no way it will keep my sons attention but for some reason he really enjoyed them. After about 4-5 months of it I thought he isn't going to learn to read but I did notice that he was learning to repeat, memorize, and learning new songs so what was it hurting to keep watching them right?! One day I made some flash cards of the words from the video (I bought my set on ebay so I had to make my own flashcards) and started showing them to him and telling him what they said with in a month he could read all the words in any order I showed them to him so I started making more flash cards. I really loved these dvds and thought they worked wonders.