Read to children before birth, say librarians

Press, 8 February 1985, Page 13

Read to children before birth, say librarians

NZPA-AP Washington Librarians have always urged parents to read to their children. Now some say the time to start is when they are still in the womb. “In the womb you can sense things and hear the sounds. Water transmits them,” said Virginia McKee, an expert on children’s books for Alabama, at an American Library Association meeting. “It is for the rhythms,” explained Darrel Hildebrant, a librarian. £

In an era of video cassette records and other gadgetry, where tape recorders are as übiquitous as television sets in most homes, the librarians say that nothing can take the place of a parent’s voice, reading the classic nursery rhymes and other children’s fare. Ms McKee, a board member of the Association for Library Service to Children, of Montgomery, Alabama, said that experts such as Dorothy Butler, author of "Babies Need Books,” contended that for the first six

months of a child’s life, it did not even matter what you read, It was hearing the language. “Too many parents stop reading aloud when children enter first grade and start to read on their own,” she said. “Fourth graders may love to hear an adult author read to them." Mr Hildebrant, the programme co-odinator for the Veterans Memorial Public Library in Bismarck, said his library offered prenatal classes for parents encouraging them to read to