by Ted Sherman

Created on: April 18, 2010

It is never too early to teach a child to read. The critical word in this premise is teach, not force. Parents should never force a child to do anything until readiness is clearly evident. This also applies to walking, speaking and other developmental stages every child must attain physically, mentally and emotionally only when the child is prepared and willing to make the next step.

Our family may serve as an example, because both parents were educators and well along in our thirties when our children were born. Our son is four years older than his sister, so we had the task of teaching each individually to read, rather than have them experience the readiness level at the same time.

There's a TV infomercial airing now that portrays children of less than two years old looking at big pictures of animals and objects. For example, in a typical demonstration (if not faked), the child looks at a picture of a chair and says the word printed at the top of the picture. This seems to be more of an act than actual learning. TV didn't have such unnecessary products when our kids were growing up, but we did use a similar method of teaching them to read.

Every night before bedtime, we read illustrated story books to our kids.  At first, between the ages of one and three, they mostly listened. Sometimes they'd point to a picture of a dog or horse and say the word. As with the TV product being peddled today, they were just imitating our words, but it wasn't yet reading. Reading is understanding how the word fits into a phrase or sentence, and the beginning of that stage happens when the child understands the concept of nouns, verbs, pronouns, adverbs and other forms of speech.

Children of two and three are great imitators, and can recite a string of words as identified from pictures of the objects the words identify. However, they're just not yet developed enough to be able to put words together in reading and speech. In the case of our kids, we realized they could understand reading when they voluntarily and independently put words together in the beginnings of correct speech.

When our daughter was three, we were present when she looked out a window on a snowy scene, and said with wonder, "It makes all white." She didn't yet understand the concept of winter and snow, but from words she learned when we read to her, she put together a correct sentence. We had a similar breakthrough experience with our son several years earlier when he was introduced to the neighbor's German Shepherd, Lobo. He said, "Lobo is big dog."

We knew our kids were each at the beginnings of reading readiness at about age three-and-a-half. We don't believe it was too early, because we never forced it on them. We were there to encourage, demonstrate, guide and teach. We must have done it right, because our son is now a producer of contemporary music videos. We don't always understand the lyrics, but we're sure our son does.

Our daughter is a writer-producer of TV programs, now associated with one of the most popular daytime talk shows. We proudly believe we got her started reading early enough, so that she could take what she learned from us to school, college and go on to her now brilliant career.

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