My Baby Can Read - Conclusion

Well, I think it's about time to wrap up this segment.  I started this series about 6 months ago and started off with some strong opinions making me want to blog through my experience even more.  This past month or so I have had several people ask me if I had heard that the company was being sued.  As I have understood it, the law suit is for falsely advertising that it will teach your child to read.  I will go more into my thoughts on that in a moment.  But for now, here are my final thoughts, confessions and conclusions on the My Baby Can Read Set.

I would like to begin with my confession.  I started off strong.  I started off trying to do as much as I possibly could, showing the video daily, trying to do the books and flash cards as much as possible and recording when I did them and how many times.  Then I got a job.  On top of my full time job and my already completely booked summer of cakes job.  So needless to say I kind of fell off the wagon.  Since then (End of May) we haven't really done the books or flashcards at all but try to still watch the DVD most days but there were several days over the past few months we weren't able to do any of it.  For this reason, I don't think that I can honestly say that this program doesn't help your kid read.  Can Maddie Read?  No.  But I also was not as disciplined as the instruction video tells you to be.

You might find yourself reading this and thinking "there, she just said that her kid can't read.  It's a waste of money, I knew it."  However, that is not the message I want to send.  After completing the DVD's I would absolutely buy this product again even knowing that they are under fire now.  I went into this thinking it would be nice if it taught Maddie to read but really I was just looking for something educational that was at Maddie's level.  I was blown away by how much she learned from these.  Maddie is a very active child (she doesn't like to sit still) but for the most part she really enjoyed these DVD's.  It helped me as a mother to have specific things to focus on and to reinforce.  For example, I was able to work on body parts a few at a time (each video would add a few new ones) and also were able to do this with animals.  I think that this was very helpful.  For the last few videos I tried to intentionally NOT ask a few of the new words apart from the video to test to see if she would learn it when I didn't reinforce it.  She did pick up these words without me even reinforcing them which was very encouraging to me. 

CONCLUSION:
If you have the resources or find these on the cheap (yard sale, on sale due to lawsuit, etc.) buy them!  I think these are fabulous resources for children 3 and under.  I don't know that they would be very useful after that and may even be boring for older kids but for younger kids it is a very well done video that would be beneficial.  Will it teach your kid to read?  I don't know.  Every kid is different and learns differently.  I believe that there are babies that learned to read this way and in fact I think that the lawsuit isn't that it doesn't teach any "babies" to read but rather that the commercial implies that if you buy this your baby WILL be able to read with is a guarantee that can't be delivered.  If you choose to use this resource use it as a tool.  We should never as parents rely on resources to teach our children but realize that they are there to aid us as we educate.