How to Teach Your Baby to Read

One of my family’s most prized possessions is the original, handwritten copy of the manuscript for How to Teach Your Baby to Read, written by my father. Dr. Edward LeWinn was a highly respected member of the staff of The Institutes for the Achievement of Human Potential. He had a beautiful property in the country in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. It was one of the oldest structures in the county, having been built in the 1600s. After the second World War, Bucks County became famous for very prominent authors, and play and movie producers from New York. Pearl Buck, James A. Michener, and their friends and colleagues all owned country homes there.

Dr. and Mrs. LeWinn were vacationing in France for two weeks in the summer of 1963. They offered their home to my family for a vacation. This was a very big deal for me because they had a beautiful in-ground pool that I could swim in every day. My father took their picnic bench and placed it facing the pool. Every morning he sat for several hours handwriting the book in pencil on legal pads. He completed the book in its entirety by the end of our two-week vacation.

The book was inspired by a child with brain injury, Tommy Lunski. The Lunskis were a typical American blue-collar family. Tommy’s brain injury left him with mobility problems which meant his first objective was to learn to walk. Often, these children have little or no injury at the higher level of the brain, the cortex. Nonetheless, they’re often misunderstood by physicians and the public. Because they can’t walk, people think they are stupid. Tommy was not stupid. He was brilliant. Mr. Lunksi showed my father how Tommy, at three, could read commercial literature written for the public easily and well. From that point on, my father, with my mother’s help, began to teach all the children with brain injuries how to read. By 1963, my parents had created a very effective system where even children with severe brain injuries who couldn’t talk, could learn to read.

How To Teach Your Baby To Read

When my father sat down to write his first book at the LeWinn’s pool, he wrote fluidly and easily and virtually non-stop. That book was published with very few changes. That is why the handwritten copy was bound beautifully in leather by German-American book makers who also made books for the White House. The book was published by Bennett Cerf. He was one of the cofounders of Random House, an author, and a TV personality. He loved How to Teach Your baby to Read and it quickly rose to the New York Times best-seller list. My father received a $5,000 advance which was huge in those days. We hadn’t taken a vacation for years. My father’s editor at Random House advised we go to the Virgin Islands. There, we had one of the best and most memorable vacations in our family’s history.

My father created the first How to Teach Your Baby to Read kit. My sister and I had the job of assembling the boxes and the kits in our basement. We also had the idea to help promote Dad’s book. For example, whenever we visited Manhattan, we would go to the biggest bookstore in the city, Doubleday on Fifth Avenue. In those days, there were only two books of prominence in bookstores having to do with child raising and development. One was the best-selling book by Dr. Spock. It gave instructions to parents for when their babies were not well. It taught things like proper diapering procedures and treating skin rash. The other book was How to Teach Your Baby to Read. In every book shop we visited, we would take the book standing vertically on the bookshelf and we would turn it around so the front cover faced out. This way the book caught the attention of people walking by and it was our hope it would increase book sales.

There were articles in major magazines about the book and these helped boost sales. Within a matter of weeks after publication, letters began to arrive for my father. They were almost exclusively from mothers and once in awhile from a father. The letters profusely thanked and acknowledged my father. The mothers were thrilled that their babies were learning to read so easily and adored reading. This was the beginning of thousands of letters my father received from mothers around the world. They were his most beloved possession. To this day, hundreds of these letters are carefully preserved at The Institutes for the Achievement of Human Potential.

It wasn’t long until my father was contacted by Jonathan Cape, one of the most famous publishing companies in the United Kingdom. Graham C. Greene, my father’s publisher, was among the most famous publishing executives in the UK. He was the nephew of the famous author, Graham Greene. The Read book was even more of a bestseller in the UK than it had been in the United States.

More than sixty years later, How to Teach Your Baby to Read has been translated into more than twenty languages. It continues in its third edition and continues to be published in English, Italian, Spanish, Russian, and Hebrew. It is about to be published in the languages of the Balkans. I was ten when the book was published and I have always regretted that when I was a baby, my parents had not yet developed the method and hadn’t taught me to read at a younger age. This became a highly motivating factor for me. When my wife Rosalind and I had our children, we enthusiastically taught all four of them to read as babies. They continue to be avid readers to this day as adults and parents themselves. They are also teaching the fourth generation of my family how to read as babies.

My second son, Spencer, while in graduate school and at The Institutes for the Achievement of Human Potential, was bringing his grandfather’s work up to date for the 21st century. Reading Before School is Spencer’s newest book. As part of my father’s legacy, Marlowe, Spencer, Morgan, Noah, and I have created Domanlearning.com. This educational platform provides modern courses to teach all babies to read words, do math, have encyclopedic knowledge, and read books. Currently, nine languages are available for the first six months of the reading program. In time, this platform will grow to include more cognitive programs, physical, social, nutrition, and sleep programs. In time, everything will be offered in all the principal languages and cultures of humanity.

Written by: Douglas Doman