Dad Talk: No TV For Baby - Reading at 14 Months!

Is she really reading? Well, I doubt she’s making sense of the words, but I do believe she is triggering different elements of her imagination with each page turn.

Prior to the birth of our daughter 14 months ago, my wife and I committed to doing everything possible to limit / prevent her exposure to television. Babies are extremely impressionable. Even the highly touted Baby Einstein series of DVD’s were not a consideration. A research study from Time magazine includes the following:

…with every hour per day spent watching baby DVDs and videos, infants learned six to eight fewer new vocabulary words than babies who never watched the videos. These products had the strongest detrimental effect on babies 8 to 16 months old, the age at which language skills are starting to form.

Our reading suggested, and logically so, that the human interaction would be far more beneficial. In addition, at around 4 months of age, we introduced her to playtime. Playtime would be time that she would spend alone, with a few toys, allowing her to explore her environment, which studies have suggested is critical to her cognitive development.

If you read my article on high definition television you might be thinking I’m quite the hypocrite right now. After all, how can one prevent a baby from being distracted by a monster TV. Fair enough….but, who said TV and baby have to be mutually inclusive? My wife and I still enjoy some programming together, primarily after our daughter is down for the night. If she is awake and the TV is on, she is simply positioned away from the TV and provided other means with which to distract herself. The point referenced above from Time is specific to placing a baby in front of the television for the purpose of watching the TV, and this is what we avoid.

Something else we’ve done since the day we brought her home is read to her. Not only her books, but we read everything out loud to her. Newspapers, magazines, our books. If she is in the vicinity when we are reading, we read out loud….every day.

Our baby is now 14 months old and will entertain herself for hours with nothing more than just a few books. She will sit down, grab a blanket, and start turning pages. While her vocabulary is limited to a few words at this point, we expect her to begin rattling off several words in the very near future. Where relevant, I plan on posting updates as they occur.

As always, I would enjoy hearing from others on this topic, which I understand can be somewhat controversial.

chris@clawblog.com

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