Review: Teach Baby to Talk and Make Reading Fun, by Sandra Jean Smith Reviewed by Steve Biddulph

If there’s a single deep down guiding assumption about everything we do in society, its the idea of progress.  That things get better. That we make continual improvement, and each generation advances on the efforts of the last.In parenting  and  educating children, we often feel we are more modern and advanced than those old fashioned people and methods of the past.  So pervasive is this idea of “going forwards” that when those quite frequent instances occur where change is not for the better, it takes a brave soul to speak up.In the simplest language, and based in direct life experience as a teacher of the very young, Sandra Jean Smith sounds an alarm bell about a deterioration that is so central to our lives that it needs to be written on the sky.  We are raising kids who are verbally dumb.  Who seem to lack the most rudimentary knowledge of how to use language – how to speak in whole sentences, how to even open a book and proceed through it.  Its shocking to realize that in the kindergartens of the western world, the least able and least verbal generation for centuries are struggling to communicate, and as a result are having diminished life chances.  Its not every child, but its a significant group, present in every classroom.

Have you ever listened to the language of Shakespeare?  Or read a few pages of a Dickens novel?  They demonstrate, to us,  highly advanced use of language – yet both were pop media of their day.  Shakespeare’s audiences were the apprentice boys of London, the street people, who today would be clubbing and hanging out in bars.  Dickens books were published in weekly instalments and read aloud by fathers at the dinner table to their children, who anxiously and eagerly followed the adventures of Oliver Twist or Nicholas Nickleby.  Their verbal ability, their articulateness, and therefore their capacity to reflect on and construct their own lives was vasty greater than those of children today.   We’ve gone backwards, or to use a phrase so much part of today’s jargon – we’ve dumbed ourselves down.  And we’ve dumbed our children down.

In a brief simple book Smith addresses how to fix this.  Her title says it all

Teach Baby to Talk… and Make Reading Fun.   Its subtitle is “The importance of speech and language in learning to read”.

This isn’t rocket science – every education student learns about this in colleges and universities across the planet.  But they don’t always register its importance, or the fact that its not happening as it should.

Smith sets out the problem, as she observes it in Australian kindergartens and schools.
She sets out the causes – rushed parenthood, less conversation, poor quality childcare where kids have little interaction with staff, being left alone with screens rather than people, over stimulation that makes input chaotic, and of course the simple absence of being read to.  She provides ample research evidence to support these claims. And she tells heart rending stories of the condition of these children when they arrive in school.

But her strongest suite is in providing remedies, from chapter five onwards the book is a parent’s guide to enlivening and enriching their baby or toddler, just as generations of parents once did, with their own language.  Music, movement, reading, talking, going places.  The ordinary ingredients of happy early years.  Not an Einstein DVD in sight.  Any parent could use this part of the book and know their littlie was coming alive to language – the most  important tool we have in living our lives.

Steve Biddulph is an Adjunct Professor of Psychology and the author

of  parenting books including Raising Boys, and the new Raising Girls.