Got it. So you simply don’t like to read ‘The Very Hungry Caterpillar’ over and over, or ever.
Well, it’s your business how you choose to interact with your kids at various ages of development. I don’t think there’s much doubt that reading to them at very young age is developmentally beneficial. Others have said as much. But if you’re the strong silent type until they can hold a tennis racket, then so be it. Doesn’t make you a bad father or anything like that, IMO. It’s just silly to try to make excuses for why you don’t want to read to them beyond the fact that it’s just not your thing and you choose not to.
I’m so confused. Here you seem to be saying that teachers shouldn’t be blamed for the failures of their students.
But the OP seems to be arguing that parents aren’t on the hook either, at least when it comes to reading. So in that way, it does seem you are implying that poor people are hopeless and that intervention is futile.
I’m a data maven professionally and by nature. However, I don’t need reams and reams of scientific studies to judge a behavior as wholesome. For instance, I shower daily not because science has deemed this a good practice, but because I feel better about myself when I’m clean. And I would encourage this practice to anyone who is looking to improve their self-esteem. It certainly isnt going to hurt. That’s how I view reading to kids. I gotta imagine that such quality time has benefits beyond academics.
I think it *can *cause problems though, if you’re too pushy with Reading Matters and ignore what the child/family is actually telling you. Forcing my son to sit still while I read at him set up a huge power/control struggle in our early days. I’m fairly certain it delayed independent reading by at least a couple of years. He HATED being read to. Just hated it, even as an infant. (Far more than my daughter, who is/was mostly indifferent or bored by it.) There were tears whenever he saw a book. There were a couple of full blown melt downs. But I plugged on, certain that this Quality Time was what I had to do to be a Good Parent and this was the Sacrifices That Parents Make. He didn’t become fluently literate until the sixth grade, and didn’t read a book for pleasure until high school. Now, he’s a reader, but it took a long long time for his very real displeasure with reading to wear off.
Because I had my daughter 12 years later, I got a do-over in my parenting choices. I read to her some, but only until she started getting restless. If she asked to do something else, we did something else. If she said she didn’t want a book tonight, we sang a song or I told her a story, instead. I told her a lot of the same stories I read to her brother. (To this day, I’m pretty sure she thinks I wrote “I’ll Love You Forever.”) And this is the kid that won’t put a book down to eat dinner.
Both kids saw me reading a lot, though. I think that did more for encouraging them to read than reading to them did. They want to do what the grown-ups do, and when the grown-ups read, they want to read - unless you’ve given them an anxiety trigger in the sight of a book.
Again, I’m NOT saying you shouldn’t read to your kids. I don’t think it’s necessarily wise to force it, however.
(The reason I don’t like reading to kids isn’t so much the content, it’s the physical pain. For some reason, I can *talk *for hours, but reading aloud gives me a tight dry throat and a cough within a few paragraphs. I dunno why. Also, sappy books make me cry, and that scares the kids.)
WhyNot, your report may be dismissed as anecdotal uy some but I found it quite compelling. And I know what you mean about the dry throat. Why is that? There must be something different going on when we read aloud compared to just talking. That is an interesting subject for its own investigation.
I thought I was doing the opposite: arguing that I and others like me shouldn’t have to make excuses, because one only needs to make excuses for something if they are doing something wrong.
See, this just shows how entrenched the “failing schools” premise is, that you take it as axiomatic. Here is why I do not believe my points are contradictory: I do not believe schools, by and large, are failing their students. Some students are achieving far more academically than others, it is true. But I believe the students who are achieving less are still achieving much more than they would without the heroic efforts of a highly professional class of teachers and administrators.
So the group you are describing as “poor people” (which I would call an oversimplification since one can be financially poor but still possess a lot of social and intellectual capital–my own kids are on Medicaid and the free school lunch program, and until 18 months ago we were on food stamps as well) are not “hopeless” and intervention is not futile. Rather, they are already getting a very efficacious level of intervention in schools.
There are always improvements possible around the edges, but starting with the goal of getting them all to the same college-prep academic level is what is futile and counterproductive. We should be more appreciative of how well schools already do with them, and more vigourously pursue alternate avenues like vocational education. To insist on trying to get them all into universities, as though that will be the magic bullet (as opposed to, at most, watering down further the quality of lower tier universities and leading many students who are not really “college material” to needlessly rack up debt and get them off-track from learning a productive and useful trade) is what drives me crazy.
Of course my experiences are anecdotal, that’s all I have to go on when it comes to my own kids.
And that’s the crux of it, I think. Much like medical advice and drug trials, the professionals have to be concerned with what works for most people, most of the time. That’s what gets suggested first, because that’s the ethical way to do it. But as parents, we’ve got to balance that with what works for our anecdotal kids.
I’d disagree. Lord knows there are books for kids where the thrill of reading the book to your kid wears off anywhere from after the first few dozen readings, to midway down the first page. But there are also plenty of books that are fun for kids and grownups at the same time. I’ve got books I’ve read to the Firebug more times than I can count, that I’m still not tired of reading to him. Once he gets to the age where he’s bored with Dad reading to him, I’m gonna have to round up a group of his friends’ younger siblings, and read to them.
OH HEY, I’m so glad I don’t have the only kid who disliked being read to! (Well, okay, my kid mostly vaguely disliked it, more like your daughter, rather than hating it like your son.) All the other kids I know love being read to and think it’s great parental cuddle time. Not my kid.
Now that she is getting better at reading herself, she likes to sit next to me as we read together (sometimes separate books, sometimes we take turns reading pages of the same book), but at age 2 and 3 she pretty much never wanted me to read to her. (Before age 2 she couldn’t vocalize her thoughts as well, but she would seem fairly bored by the whole process.)
In her case I think there’s something a little bit delayed in the way she understands narratives – she still prefers very simple stories to complex narratives (maybe partially because it’s easier for her to read the words, though) and also doesn’t like most movies, I think because the narratives are too complex for her as yet, whereas all her 4-year-old friends seem to have no problem understanding, say, the complete plot of Frozen (and telling me about it in great detail if I even simulate interest).
Very little is true for everyone. And virtually nothing is the key essential ingredient to helping our kids develop to whatever is their ideal potential (however one wants to define it).
Seeing reading role models. Good.
Hearing lots of rich spoken language. Good. (Note, Slacker your op includes “or the number of words they hear, period” … you don’t think you and your kids were each exposed to rich language growing up?)
Having books around. Good.
Parents who listen to their kids cues and play with them rather than force what they have been told is what they “should” be doing. Good.
For most people reading with their kids accomplishes that whole list and giving tries at different ages with different sorts of books will give good results most of the time. Can you do the same without reading to your kids? Sure. One size need not fit all.
Our individual kids vary. My eldest loved being read to. (He is 28 now and I can still recite “One Fish Two Fish …” by heart exclusively because I read it to him so so many times.) We kept it up into middle school with me reading books to him that were at a level I did not feel he could/should handle at that age without the opportunity for discussion and context setting (Huck Finn, for example). The youngest two had little tolerance for being read to: the older of them preferred fairly early on to read it himself instead and the youngest just does not love reading or being read to. I am having to satisfy myself with her at 12 enjoying her teen bopper magazines and getting rave reports from her reading teacher but how I do not know.
Maybe because on the Dope, it seems EVERYONE taught themselves how to read when they were still in diapers. Or has a kid who did it. It’s just gotten to be such a cliche. Anymore when you see it, your eyes start to glaze over.
Oh, the reading itself is great fun. The books themselves aren’t too interesting after the first reading, especially if you actually know your colors, shapes, numbers and manners.
Right?! And for that alone, I’m glad we’ve had this talk. It can be awfully hard when your kid “rejects” you with a book when all the conversations and posters in the pediatrician’s and the library are about how wonderfully bonding and peaceful and loving reading to your child is. We’re not the only ones who haven’t found it to be so, and that’s okay - we’re still good parents, and we may even still raise good readers!
I doubt it’s the reading per sé that does the magic, but how would you get people to implement this advice:
Try to use lots of really difficult words all the time.
Try to use at least some words you don’t even know yourself.
Try to model some play with language, such as alliteration.
Try to expose your child to complex situations of social interaction that involve a problem solving element, but that aren’t real life so that it’ll upset them.
In your interactions with your child, try to have a mix of realistic scenarios and also imaginary ones, some of which relay cultural knowledge.
Make these situations that you present to them really varied, a different one every day.
Make sure that your child responds and contributes to all of these difficult words and scenarios.
Try to have many of these elements come from you rather than from television, since we know that that has a greater effect.
etc (I just made up some of the stuff you’d have to incorporate to recreate what books bring, there’s probably more.)
Reading books is a pretty good way of offering all of that. It’s entirely plausible that all of that could be offered in other ways too, but that would also be very difficult to research (though the linked article about the 30 million word gap goes towards that, it would be difficult to reverse it to look at all the behaviours other than reading that have the same effect as reading to children). Of course many people offer at least part of that automatically, but to close the gap reading books would be a great tool for some parents.
But I think that’s really cool. That’s why I love this place: so many smart people.
It’s a very fair point. But even there, I question whether this correlation has been established as being causative in this way. Couldn’t it just be that the proclivity to learn and use rich language is passed on genetically?
And aren’t books made for small children too simplistic to help accomplish this goal? I mean, isn’t this–even if it is causation and not just correlation–about hearing a greater variety of vocabulary used contextually correctly? (Hard for me to imagine that parents with smaller vocabularies are just quieter and say less around their kids, as opposed to repeating the vocabulary they do know.) If the parents do not use such language themselves, is getting them to stumble over the words in books (the theoretical books for small children that use complex vocabulary) going to make a difference?
There is, for whatever reason, a single solitary book that I do like to read aloud to the kids, although only during one season of the year: The Snowy Day by Ezra Jack Keats. I get all animated with it and everything. So as others have said upthread, there are exceptions to every rule.
…Maybe it’s a cliche because it actually does happen a nonnegligible fraction of the time, especially with educated parents who are concerned about their kids’ education, of which you might expect to find a high percentage on the Dope? I read early, I know another Doper in RL who started reading early, my kid started reading early (although she preferred reading signs and labels to books, for a while). I also know another kid in her preschool who started reading even earlier than my kid did. …And I have friends who started reading when they were 6 and are more literate than I am. I don’t really see what the problem is?
Yeah! fistbump of nonbonding reading I have to say, I’m really relieved that the fact she doesn’t like me reading her doesn’t necessarily mean she hates / will hate books. If only because that would be really hard for me! (What would we even talk about when she got older??)
I don’t think children’s books are too simplistic, and I do think it can make a difference. Pretty much what gracer said, but in my anecdotal experience again: I have a fairly large vocabulary and life experience, but I simply don’t use a lot of it around my kid because the context isn’t necessarily there. I know what a record player is (to bring up my previous example), or what a pride of lions is, or that in some parts of the country which are not the one I live in that it is possible to go blueberry picking in the summer. But it’s not necessarily the case that I would think to talk to my kid about these things. And in none of those cases does the book need to be particularly complicated. (In fact, the Clifford book we read the other night with the record player is almost comically simplistic.)
As you can see from my other posts, it’s not that I am a huge proponent of reading to kids! But I do see why one might want to do it, even if my kid isn’t a huge fan.
Hard to control for everything, especially all at the same time, but there have been adoption studies done that attempt to control for the genetic proclivity factor.
Other studies seem to confirm the concept that both genetic proclvity and environmental influences are in play.
Reading to small kids partly just demonstrates the idea that symbols on the page hold meaning; rhyming, a mainstay of the early readers, is important as a pre- and early reading skill as well (anticipating what comes next). Talking to the little ones, the crazy oft-times monologue, is the rich language exposure in that age group. But from not very big on up books would contain words that I understood but would not typically use.
BTW, not sure early, even absurdly early, reading skill correlates with later intelligence, being smart, or even later reading skill. That oldest of mine, who I read to into Middle School years? Did not start to read on his own until sometime in 1st grade. Then it suddenly came together and he could and did read anything. Another one advanced more linearly beginning earlier. The were both equally fine readers by second grade and both have done well enough with themselves. I read slightly early only because I had a sister ten years older who made teaching me her project (a gold star each time I read Green Eggs and Ham with no mistakes!) and an older brother who then passed on to me a ton of comic books (the reading level in those old Marvel and DCs was actually quite high). I don’t think it refelcted anything about my smarts or lack thereof.
You know you are not limited to just reading the words on the page. I used to read a picture book of the Erie Canal song over and over, with slight modifications.
I read '50s and '60s Nancy Drew books to my daughter for long after she could read them herself, and it was only when I went on a trip and she decided to finish one without me that she found that Nancy’s housekeeper’s name was not Hannah Gruesome.
But when kids get older you can engage them in discussions of what you just read. Pointing out plot holes and logical inconsistencies is great training for life. Even before that asking what they think will happen next involves them in a story. You have to get past Goodnight Moon for this to work of course.
Its this backhanded way of bragging about something irrelevant to everybody but the person posting it. They’re acting like they are making a matter-of-fact statement but ultimately it comes off as intellectual dick waving.
