“Your Baby Can Read” Closed by the FTC

Can you teach your 9-month old baby to read? Do you really want to teach your 9-month old baby to read?

Evidently, many parents thought it a good idea to give their toddlers a push start in life by teaching them their ABC’s. One company, Your Baby Can, LLC, stepped right up to provide the “help” with its “Your Baby Can Read” series of products. Through its advertising and marketing, the company implied that a baby could indeed learn to read at ages as early as nine months!

In April of 2011, however, the Boston-based “Campaign for a Commercial Free Childhood” took exception to these claims and lodged a complaint against the company, alleging they were false and deceptive. The FTC (Federal Trade Commission) agreed and in August of 2012, filed a complaint against the marketers of the program, including the company’s owner and originator of the program, Robert Titzer. As of the end of August, two of the three defendants have settled. The settlement bans their use of the phrase “Your Baby Can Read” as well as a fine of $185 million, which equals the company’s gross sales since 2008. After the company paid $500,000, the rest of the fine was suspended since the company’s financial condition is more than dire and it is going out of business soon.

(For more on the settlement, see http://www.ftc.gov/opa/2012/08/babyread.shtm)

The program used videos, flash cards and pop-up books and cost approximately $200. It was advertised strongly on TV, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.

Whether infants can indeed learn to read at such early ages is still debated vigorously by researchers. Has a child’s brain developed the necessary neural connections to enable it to make sense of what it is seeing? Most scientists seem to be leaning towards the negative but others, such as “Your Baby Can Read” publisher Dr. Titzer, claim that it can.

Perhaps this begs the real question, however. Should a baby learn to read at such an early age? Sam Blumenfeld, the originator of Alpha-Phonics, states that the ideal age to learn to read is around five and six years old, with a give-or-take of a year or so on the bottom end. He and others believe that the child’s time is better spent (and the parents’ too) preparing them for the yet-to-come learning experience by reading to them and instilling in them an appreciation of the value of books. As most parents who have used Alpha-Phonics will testify, a few kids as young as four have indeed picked it up and developed an enthusiasm for reading right away. One of our customers told of us how her 3-year old was picking up simple words just by “auditing” her older sibling’s lessons. Although the parent was not actively or directly teaching the younger child, she could already see the excitement developing. When it comes time for that youngster’s reading lessons to begin, she will be more than ready.

Of course, there is no hard and fast rule about when to start your child on the path to literacy, and every parent will have to make that judgement.  Alpha-Phonics does not recommend that any child begin before the age of four.  The world is still such a vast and surprising place to be and there is just so much to learn as it is at that age; do they really need to be pushed to learn more?!

If you wish to begin teaching a child to read who is four or five and want an easy program that has been proven successful for forty-three years consider Alpha-Phonics.  It has been used by tens of thousands for all these years and, yet, has never been changed because it is timeless.  It can no be made any better than it was when first published way back in 1976.

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