Email this story to a friend

All right you drug runners, you captains of industry, you middle-class parents. Yes, this message is for anyone and everyone:

If you are striving to produce offspring who are a rousing success, forget the wooden blocks and the fancy color schemes for the nursery.

"The number one thing you can do is read to your kid," says Carl Birkmeyer, manager of media support services for the Baltimore County Public Library system.

When do you begin?

Is there good light in the delivery room?

"As soon as they are born," says Birkmeyer, who notes that the sounds, stimulation and attention are just as important as the words, even if the child is too young to understand them.

"Study after study shows that reading from birth stimulates brain growth," he says. "The more interaction with a caregiver, the more brain growth takes place."

It's a matter of numbers. Birkmeyer says that during the first two years of human development, the brain creates synapses - 50 trillion connections that allow brain cells to communicate.

By the time the child is three, that number increases 20 fold to a thousand trillion synapses.

"The more the interaction, the greater the increase in synapses, the better your brain works and the smarter you are," says Birkmeyer. "Without an active caregiver, you will not have that growth."

It's all over by the time the child is 5, he says. If the synapses aren't in place by then, they never form.

And when puberty hits, they start dissolving. "I guess they must turn into hormones," he says. "Those that remain are those that are used repeatedly."

Read to a child from the beginning and by the time he enters school, he will know the connection between sounds, sights and words, says Birkmeyer. "He will learn quicker and more than likely continue to read the rest of his life."

Does he have children? "No," Birkmeyer says, "Oh, God, no."

Then who made him the local authority on children and reading?

For one thing, he oversaw the creation of the "Story Timers" video tape, which is used to train volunteers who read stories to children at county libraries - presumably getting the kids' synapses hopping and jumping.

And now he speaks with national authority. The library is exporting a Story Timers manual and video to other library systems so that synapses can sprout across the country.

"Intellectuals have to study what people have been doing naturally for years," says Birkmeyer. "That's why they need a tape."

The Story Timer export, which is priced at $130, is obviously a winner. BCPL will benefit from the revenue and people who are worried about their children's futures will learn what they can do.

It's not the first library system export of a successful program.

"Oddly enough, our sales are big in Asia," Birkmeyer says, noting Hong Kong is a lucrative customer. "We also sell in Texas, Kansas, Louisiana and Iowa.

"But we don't sell well in California - their libraries have funding problems."

E-mail Loni Ingraham at lingraham@patuxent.com.

All other trademarks and Registered trademarks are property

of their respective owners.

Back