------ Forwarded Message

From: "Dr. Bob Titzer" <drtitzer@infantlearning.com>

Date: Mon, 13 Nov 2006 14:10:32 -0800

To: Hugh Penton <hp@pentonoverseas.com>

Subject: Sorry for the delay -- I had to answer some phone calls.

Dear Mr. White,

Thank you for your interest in our products. I am a very big fan of your books and our family has read hundreds of them.

 I have been speaking out against the idea of babies watching TV for more than 15 years and I would be happy to discuss or debate any of these topics with anyone. The reason that I made the DVDs was because I did not want my children to watch any of the so-called educational TV shows or videos. Even though I am opposed to babies watching videos or TV in general, our

DVDs are multi-sensory and interactive as well as truly educational.

I have presented scientific evidence of the value of the Your Baby Can Read DVDs -- as early as 1998 at the International Conference on Infant Studies. I have read the American Academy of Pediatrics study saying that babies should not watch TV until age two. In their study, they did not differentiate the content of the programs watched by babies. Babies were watching the news, soap operas, sporting events, cartoons, children's programs, and a variety of baby videos. Instead of determining which, if any, of the programs were helpful, the AAP lumped all of the programs together and said that watching TV is harmful. This is a general statement that is generally true, but it does not mean that all TV is not worth watching. In fact, many pediatricians have used the Your Baby Can Read! DVDs with their own babies. Some pediatricians have told me that their babies learned more watching our DVD one time than all of the Baby Einstein videos over many months. Some doctors show our DVDs in their offices and a few of them even sell our DVDs because they are familiar with the program and they have seen the benefits. (These pediatricians use or even sell the DVDs even though their national organization is opposed to any TV. It may be because the AAP has a history of making simplistic statements about complex issues. The AAP is the same organization that said in the 1970s that women should not breastfeed. In the 1990s, they said that babies should not use walkers in spite of the numerous studies showing how the walkers benefit the infant's spatial thinking ability and attention span. The pediatricians were probably not even aware of the studies showing all of the benefits of the occasional use of a walker early in life. They did this because a very small percentage of parents did not baby proof their homes.)

There have been many studies that support the use of the Your Baby Can Read! videos and teaching early literacy. As far back as 1998, I presented evidence at the International

Conference on Infant Studies that babies and toddlers can learn to read from watching the videos. (As far as I know, no pediatricians attend this conference because pediatricians are trained in medicine, not infant learning. Generally, pediatricians have had zero classes related to infant learning.) I presented data from two studies that were also published in abstract form in the society's annual proceedings. The first study showed that 2- and 3-year-old children can learn to recognize written words statistically above chance within five minutes. The children were shown four words from the "Your Baby Can Read!" videos, then tested using a doubleblind procedure. The second study was a longitudinal case study detailing a baby's progress from 3 months, 8 days through age 6. At age four years and 15 days, the child was tested by an independent psychologist reading phonetically as well as the average 18-year-old and having the comprehension skills of an average 10-year-old. Independent studies have shown that the earlier the child is taught to read, the better the child reads even if you control for IQ and socioeconomic status (from Durkin's Early Readers: Two Longitudinal Studies book). Another study (“Young Early Readers: A four year follow-up study” from the Journal on Research in Reading, Vol. 27, Issue 4, pps. 357-372) shows that young early readers tend to keep their advantage over the comparison group called Non Early Readers group. According to the authors of the study, “These children not only could read, but they did read. They were avid readers and had a greater exposure to print.” The young early readers had a greater phonological awareness and were more accurate spellers than the Non Early Readers. My children exemplify all of these abilities. They often read more novels in one day than the average American adult reads in a year. Aleka was the first baby to use my approach. She is now 15 years old. She is a happy, well-adjusted senior in high school who could go to any university of her choice next year. She reads Harry Potter books in an average of about two hours. I have seen her take four Harry Potter books at once and sit down to read them consecutively in one day. She had read more than 10,000 children's books by the time she turned four. We have thousands of babies and toddlers around the world who are on similar paths of reading quickly with great comprehension.

Nearly all of the research points to the same conclusion: babies and toddlers have a greater capacity for learning language skills than older children do -- whether they are learning receptive language, expressive language, second languages, sign language, or written language. For example, children deprived of the spoken language during early childhood have trouble learning grammar and they remain far behind other people in receptive and expressive language abilities throughout their lives (Curtiss, 1977). Children who learn a second language before the age of four had larger areas of their brains devoted to the second language than children who learned a second language between the ages of 5 and 10 (Hirsch, 1997).

Additionally, the babies' and toddlers' brains developed more efficiently compared to children who learned later. People who learned at age 11 or later used much smaller areas of their brain for the second language. Children who learn a second language early in childhood also have superior syntax ability (Coppleters, 1987), grammatical ability (Johnson & Newport, 1991), and speech production (Oyama, 1976) than children who learn later in childhood. Children who learn ASL early in childhood have better sentence processing skills than children who learn during adolescence (Mayberry, 1993). We are currently waiting until children are 5- or 6-years old before we begin to teach them to read, which is after the natural window of opportunity for learning language has begun to close, and it is not working for millions of Americans. Just like it is easier for babies to learn all other aspects of language (receptive, expressive, foreign, or sign), it is easier to learn the written language at a high level early in life. Forty percent of 8- year-old Americans cannot read independently according to US government statistics. If a child is not reading at grade level by the end of first grade, fewer than one-in-eight children EVER catch up to read at grade level again (Seppa, APA Monitor) – which shows how important it is to learn written language early and how difficult it is to learn language skills later in life.

Some early education people -- who often do not read psychological studies -- suggest that cuddling with or reading to your child is enough to teach the child to read. While those activities are important for other reasons, they will not teach your child to read. A November, 2005 study in Psychological Science found that the average preschooler only focuses on the printed text for about five seconds per book when the parent is reading to the child. The child is usually looking at the pictures or simply listening to the story. The authors state that reading to a child does not teach the child to read. The authors recommend that the parents show their young children text in order to help them learn to read.

While it is true that most of the baby videos have no evidence showing any type of benefit from their use, it is clear that the Your Baby Can Read! videos are in a different category than the other videos. Most of the other baby videos (for example, Baby Einstein and Brainy Baby) are primarily passive shows designed by nonscientists to entertain the babies. The Your Baby Can

Read! videos were created by an infant researcher using a multi-sensory and interactive approach and they were designed to teach babies and toddlers language skills. The videos have had such success that other researchers have used them with children who have learning disabilities. A study completed by a student at a California State University at Pomona showed the videos were as successful as a therapist for teaching the child physical actions and words.

We also have thousands of e-mails, phone calls, and testimonials from parents who have successfully taught their children to read using the videos.

We would never teach any other aspect of language the same way we currently teach reading.

I believe this is because most people view reading as a difficult skill to learn instead of viewing it as a natural part of language. We currently teach the names of the letters to children who don't know how to read nor do they know why they need to know the names of the letters. The children generally take weeks or months to learn the names of the letters because it is very abstract and complex. Once they know the names of the letters, they still cannot read. We then teach the sounds that the letters make and put the letters together and find that they often don't make the sounds that were taught. Comprehension suffers because the children are reading slowly and they often don't remember the first part of the sentence by the time they get to the end of the sentence. To add stress to the situation, we learn in school in front of many other children who are often brutally honest when children are not reading well. Our current strategy of teaching read in school with one teacher and 20 to 30 students, or more, has not produced defensible results. Can you image how poorly people would talk if we "taught" people to talk in the same way?

Instead, we should look at understanding the written language as a natural part of language. It should be a fun, bonding experience for the baby and parent rather than the description made up by your sales associate. Babies and toddlers naturally learn language. It is not stressful for a baby to learn to understand the language, learn sign language, or learn a second language. The same should be true of the written language. Babies learn the patterns of the spoken language by listening to language. Children learn to add an 's' onto words to make a word plural. They learn to add an 'ed' onto words to make them past tense. We know they learn to patterns because they sometimes apply the patterns when the words don't follow the patterns (e.g., they may say "I goed over there." or "I runned yesterday." even if they have never heard anyone say this.) The babies and toddlers naturally discover the patterns of the written language if they are allowed to see the language. Babies figure out that a "b" makes a "b" sound after learning to read many words with that letter. Over time, the babies learn all of the patterns of the language so that they can read any word they see. We have had many babies at

18-months of age who could read books from the library that they had not seen. By the way, many of the babies love your books.

If the critics would look at learning the written language the same way as all other areas of language are viewed, then their perspectives would likely change. We currently teach reading in a complex and abstract method after the child's natural window of learning language has passed and after the child's brain is about 90% developed.

While at scientific conferences or talks around the world, I have been able to persuade most of my vocal critics that the most natural time to learn the written language is during infancy.

Babies and toddlers learn any aspect of language very naturally and easily when they are allowed to hear or see it.

The DVDs do not take the place of the child playing or the parent interacting with the baby and to suggest that they do is absurd. Again, I am an extremely anti-television person for babies and toddlers. The DVDs should be used when the parent or caregiver is busy. Every parent -- no matter how dedicated -- occasionally needs to do other activates or take a short break to use the rest room, cook, etc. Parents who use this program are often trying to prevent the problems that they have or that older siblings have. According to a national panel of reading specialists, most of our nation's reading problems could be prevented if we would do two activities: 1) teach reading earlier, and 2) not focus on either a phonics or a whole word approach. We do both of these in our program!

Thank you for taking the time to read this note. I have been promoting the idea of parents stimulating their babies in fun, multi-sensory activities for most of my career because babies and toddlers have tens of thousands of new synapses forming in their brains every second that will form a foundation for the child's future development. I can assure you that most parents' responses are extremely positive. If you would like to talk with anyone who has actually used the program, please let me know. The parents who have used this often cannot image why anyone wouldn't allow their babies to see the language any more than they would not talk to their babies.

Dr. Bob Titzer

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