Joining the chorus of those pointing out that the research on this looks pretty solid. As Sattua mentioned, it is very related related to the million word gap issue.
One of my takeaways from the body of research that supports the idea of reading to young children is that it makes the most difference with kids who need reading help. So not your kids. I mean sure, it’s great for everyone who enjoys doing it, but kids like yours - who are coming into it with parents who are involved with them, who seem to take to reading eventually without much issue, who live in a house with parents who value education, and sure, let’s throw in kids who are likely to have inherited genes that are an advantage for learning and reading - they are not the ones who stand to gain the most from early childhood reading. So sure, feel confident about having opted out this particular strategy in your parenting.
Maybe try to think of it more as a parent who has fewer tools to begin with, and only has the time, interest, and ability to add one key new element to their early childhood learning in the home. This is the one they should get on board with.
Agreed. I even see this with the adults around me sometimes. Words that you’d normally take for commonplace, completely throws them for a loop. Either they’ve never heard them before at all or have had no curiosity to look them up and find out what they mean. So, you can have an entire conversation take place where they seem to not know 40% of what others are talking about. It’s sad and it certainly seems that way because they didn’t have the right skills modeled for them.
I have to say that I think reading to very small kids (2 and under) is overrated. Yes, anecdote, but my kid didn’t seem to benefit from it at all. And yes, maybe it was benefiting her in ways I didn’t see, but… now that she’s 4, I can totally see how it benefits her. I feel like we have a pretty good vocabulary in our house, but there are still words that we happen to only rarely use that come up in books and that then we have to talk about. Or just life things, like when Curious George got bubbles all over the floor and then we talked about how once Mommy put dishwashing detergent in the dishwasher instead of dishwasher soap and got bubbles all over the floor! I don’t think we would have ever talked about that had it not been for the Curious George book.
I think some of this could be learned via TV, but we don’t watch much TV in our house, so books it is.
Last night we read about Baby Clifford the Very Small Red Dog and how he rode on a record player. “What’s that?” the Little One asked. “…You may never see one of these in real life,” I started out, and then started telling her about records…
I have read to my twins nightly since they were infants.
Now, at age 7, they have informed me that they have no interest in working on their own reading skills, because they can always have a parent read to them.
Both anecdotally and according to research, I think it’s huge.
Anecdotally, as a teacher I see lots of kids come through my classroom. The kids with a solid reading life at home have got that indefinable “background knowledge” thing going on: when they encounter a new book or idea, they know enough basic stuff that learning the new stuff is easy. Today for example I talked with my third graders about why it’d be advantageous for a country to border an ocean or a sea. One kid suggested the added tourism from beach vacations; another kid suggested the advantage of shipping. I hadn’t taught either of these kids about beach vacations or about shipping, but they knew enough from their background knowledge that they could incorporate these concepts into our new unit on bodies of water and their societal impacts. Kids without much reading background aren’t really contributing so much to such discussions.
Of course some of their background knowledge comes from direct experience–but reading is a cheap and easy way to expand background knowledge. Due to all the reading we do to our own kids, my five-year-old knows all about sharks (ALL ABOUT sharks–Jesus, kid, expand your interests) and about Greek mythology and about dogs and about pirate searats and lots of other stuff. She’ll use words like “fascinating” in conversation.
That gives me flashbacks. Because of the size of my family, I could go from person to person to person to mooch reading time, long past the time when I was able to read things myself. Even then, I was a lazy bum.
(Strangely, while I still like being read to, my comprehension for audio books and the like is really small.)
Agreed, but I very often see social science studies–or maybe not even really true studies in the published, peer-reviewed sense, but massaging of data–presented by advocacy groups, and reported in the media, with an assumption about an arrow of causation which has not been demonstrated.
Just one that comes to mind was the claim that suspending students from school causes them to later get into a life of crime as adults. The evidence? Students who were suspended more often in high school were the same people who were more likely to show up on the police blotter later. No one involved at the nonprofit fighting against school suspension policies, or those interviewing him on NPR (or for that matter producers and editors behind the scenes), seemed to consider the possibility that it was a simple correlation due to the fact that a violent person is not likely to wait until after graduation to start being violent. So then when they are violent in school, they get suspended for it–simple as that.
You see the same kinds of assumptions presented regarding poverty, affluence, and educational achievement. As though we could take the income ladder and flip it, Trading Places style, and this would flip the gradebook as well. I even more seriously doubt that: I think there would be some flattening of the curve at the margins, but the overall ranking order would survive largely intact, just with the rich kids doing the worst and the poor kids doing the best. (If I am wrong about this, it would likely be because I’m underestimating the significance of lead exposure in urban tenements, not because of any other environmental factor related to poverty or wealth.)
This is a plausible hypothesis, but do you have a cite? What about reports that initial gains made by preschoolers in Head Start have faded to nothing when they check back a few years later?
This too seems plausible. I will confess that while I was a stellar reader and always aced standardised tests, I was not such a good student per se. I graduated in the bottom half of my high school class and never finished college. (My 14 year old son shows signs of similar issues, which we have chalked up to undiagnosed inattentive ADHD in both him and me). So there’s another anecdote, as a singular data point for the other side…perhaps.
Awesome. I certainly did not mean “underrated” to be in any way synonymous with “contraindicated”. If you enjoy it, that’s great. But the pervasive recommendations have the effect of shaming parents like me who do not take to the activity so well.
Can I ask what about it makes it hard for you to do?
Parents are always urged to spend “quality time” with their kids, as if “quality time” is self-explanatory. But not all activities are “quality”. Seems to me that telling parents to read to their children is a more helpful recommendation because it’s concrete and easy for most people to do.
All recommendations can have the effect of shaming SOMEONE. Parents who are too poor to buy fresh fruits and vegetables probably feel ashamed every time they hear about the food pyramid. But at least they know what they should be shooting for. If you can’t afford fresh, get frozen. If you can’t get frozen, go with canned. Do something. If a parent can’t acquire a library book and 30 minutes every night to devote to reading with their kids, they need to do something else. Like tell them stories while they’ve giving them a bath. Or put on an educational video at supper time. Shame can be useful, in moderation.
How do you determine which kids are coming from homes where they are read to? I’m absolutely certain my daughter’s teacher thinks we must have read to her a lot. We didn’t. We’re readers, and she’s a reader. She wasn’t a prodigy, learned to read in first grade with the rest; once she began to grok it her skills quickly outpaced her peers and now I’m not sure what her face looks like because it’s always deep in a book. But we didn’t much care for reading aloud, and she never enjoyed being read to. So we didn’t do a whole lot of reading to her. We spent (and spend) lots of time talking to her like she’s an intelligent person so she has that background knowledge you speak of, but it’s not from us reading to her.
But I dutifully signed the paper that they sent home every week in kindergarten and first grade asking if we read to her for 100 minutes per week, because they demanded it.
I’m not really fighting the notion that reading to your kid is a good thing to do if you all enjoy it. But I think the research in this area is deeply flawed in design. Self-reporting is a terrible way to gather data, but it’s the most common way they do it. People lie.
WhyNot, great points (and good to hear from someone likeminded). Not only do people lie, but the ones that know to lie (even on more neutrally worded, and open-ended, questions like “how many minutes per week do you read to your child?”) are the ones with more cultural and intellectual capital. It’s like that psych test, the MMPI. I took that once as a teenager and it was, for me at least, ridiculously easy to spot which answers were “right”. I could have had some seriously twisted impulses deep down, and as long as my grasp on reality was decent and my intellect still there, could easily have portrayed myself as plain-vanilla Normal no matter what a sicko I actually was.
So your suspicion is that I made this up? To what end–just to puff up my own image? Why then did I not make myself HS valedictorian and Ivy League graduate, instead of admitting to being in the bottom half of my class in high school and dropping out of college?
I agree, if the science is solid (as it is with the fruits and vegetables, not to mention breastmilk). But here, and in the dovetailing recommendation to severely limit or altogether eschew “screen time” for the under two set, I just don’t see a convincing case.
Why don’t I enjoy reading to my kids? The books are just juvenile (obv.) and uninteresting to me, a trial to get through. My kids sit in my lap frequently–we are a close-knit family–but we might watch a nature documentary, or I might silently read something to myself while playing music.
Did either of you actually *read *the damn link I posted in the second reply? Yes, there *have been *peer reviewed studies published, and no, they weren’t just self-reporting. Heath did a study of actual behaviours in several close communities. The follow-ups were similar. These are scientific studies - if you want your anecdotal naysaying to trump that, bring the peer reviewed studies that say different.
And the site I linked to’s whole mission is about making the science of early reading available to whoever needs it. That doesn’t make it an advocacy group, it makes it a dedicated academic source for this very topic.
Is it really that you don’t want to be shamed, or is it that you are making an argument that poor people are poor because they are inherently less capable, and there’s no point directing money or resources in a futile attempt to help the genetically inferior–that what we are seeing on the far side of the bell curve represents people already working at their full capacity, and nothing will improve that?
There’s room for an argument that “other forms of intellectual stimulation can have the same impact as that of reading to kids”. But I think you are actually arguing that “intellectual stimulation or not, the inherently smart like me and mine turn out smart, and the inherently stupid turn out stupid”. You’ve made similar arguments before.
I don’t doubt that genes help, but environment plays a role as well. Of all the ways to create an environment that fosters intellectual complexity, reading to your kids is known to be effective, affordable, and hard to fuck up.
Oh, this thread has an agenda behind it? And it’s a pattern? OK, that explains the ignoring of cites and the reliance on anecdote over real science. OK, I’m done here, I think.
Teaching my kids to swim, ride a bike, ski, cook, sail, do math, prepare for a vocabulary test…
I mean, I already know how to do all that stuff. What the hell do I need that aggravation for?
Realize it or not, you come across as being completely self-centered. It’s not all about you.
If only you put the effort of trying to justify and excuse why you don’t want to read to your kid into cracking open ‘One Fish, Two Fish’, you may find yourself rewarded down the road in ways you obviously don’t comprehend right now.
The argument I am making, and the one you linked to, are not as extreme as you are painting them. My wife is a special ed teacher, and a very good one. I do not think she is wasting her time or the community’s resources. Her salary makes up 80% of our household income and I do not think we are undeserving parasites.
What I do think is that the Waiting for Superman types, who are ascendant in the chattering class right now, have an unrealistic and unfair expectations of what teachers can do with the students they are given.
I suppose they do not expect students who are profoundly intellectually disabled (the new term for what has in the past been called mentally retarded) to move up to grade level. But there is an expectation of getting everyone else up there, even kids that come from deeply dysfunctional families or ones that just do not have any brightly glowing intellectual lights in the family tree. Otherwise, teachers and administrators are “failing their students” and I think that’s bullshit. I think most teachers and most schools are doing a very good job for too little remuneration, and I’m tired of seeing them get dumped on.
ETA: Quicksilver, I actually do like teaching my older kids various things–especially math and history and discussing current events and politics. And we play tennis together when it’s warm. The younger kids do admittedly mainly get my affection through sitting in my lap and just being together without a ton of interaction. But we are still close, I feel.
Well no shit Sherlock. They’re written for small children, not a grown man. Of course they’re boring and uninteresting to you.
You can do what I did and dig in deeper- my son likes trucks, trains and construction equipment (don’t all 2 year old boys?), and I’ve used the books as a starting point for me to learn more about them myself- I couldn’t have told you much about trains before having a kid- I knew that they come in diesel, electric and steam, and that was just about it. Now I can tell you a LOT more- nomenclatures, types, uses, etc… Same thing for bulldozers, cranes, front end loaders, etc…
The other thing is that reading to your kids is a great opportunity to share an activity with them- it may be boring to you, but they probably love it, and it’s an easy way to keep tabs on what your kid does and doesn’t know, and how they tick. I mean, my son’s not-quite-3 year old sense of humor is very different from mine, and it’s interesting to see what and why he thinks is funny.
Once they’re past a certain age, you can also start quizzing them while you’re reading to them to see what and how they’re comprehending what you’re reading to them.
Mr. Dibble, you made a fair point so I clicked your link and looked at those abstracts. I would argue that all of the studies cited except the very last one have the same flaw we have been talking about. They are observational studies that observe differences in households with less educational achievement, and assume those correlations are causative. (If there were robust attempts to compare with other households of similar income and educational attainment, it was not apparent in the abstracts.)
The last one does actually use a prospective rather than retrospective approach, by initiating an intervention with one group while leaving a control group alone to compare. Now we are getting somewhere! But this was done with first-graders, in school (and as I said, I am a big proponent of teachers and public schools) and was done with kids who can already read–not the age group I had in mind.
What would impress me would be a longitudinal study with a design along the following lines:
Start with observational research determining which households (out of a large, diverse, and geographically scattered population) already read to their children and which do not. Do not rely on self reporting and do not let the parents know that reading is what is being studied. Be sneaky and have the researcher just observe the entire day and surreptitiously note the number of minutes of reading out loud done with small children.
Randomise the population that does no or very little reading to their children into two cohorts. One is the control group; the other half will be the recipients of an intervention. Again, keep the groups on the large side to make the results statistically significant. Now, send social workers and/or early childhood educators to the experimental group’s homes and read directly to the children and/or make efforts to spur the parents to do so. Discontinue engagement once the children are in school.
Then just keep checking back to see if, and to what degree, the two groups diverge in educational attainment and in later life outcomes. Don’t just assume that higher performance in kindergarten is dispositive, as it could be like the Head Start effect which mostly evaporates by later grades. Follow them all the way to adulthood. That would be persuasive if it found a significant, persistent effect.
ETA: bump, that all sounds fine but how are we not accomplishing the same thing by watching Mighty Machines together?