It's been long established that reading aloud to your children is one of the best ways to advance their early learning.
(https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2267171)
I don't know which studies are accurate. I just remember that story because the findings were counter-intuitive.
[1] "Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, which tracks the progress of more than 20,000 American schoolchildren from kindergarten through the fifth grade." -- https://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/opinion/editorials/2005...
Maybe I'm reading it wrong, but it is very strange.
"What are the implications of our findings? Our main finding is that it is important that young children are being read to. This is an early-life intervention that seems to be beneficial for the rest of their lives. We show that there is an important role for parents in the educational performance of their children. The evidence strongly suggests that parental reading to children gives them a head-start in life."
I haven't studied either enough to say for sure, but it appears the the 2014 paper is trying to measure the marginal benefit of reading, while the Levitt study was looking at larger correlations. The Levitt study suggests that smart parents end up with smart kids, reading or not. What is more interesting to me at least, is what can I do to help my kids succeed? The 2014 paper comes closer to answering this question, and suggests reading to them helps.
To clarify, it wasn't a "Levitt study" per se. It was government study. The government had questionnaires asking parents "how often do you read to your children?" and it had the children's reading test scores. Levitt found no correlation in those 2 datapoints.
Worse yet is such an editorial reporting conclusions from public data, without details of the analytical methodology.
In this case, the medium is not the message here. That page wasn't an "editorial" in the sense that a dilettante newspaper editor put his own spin on research he didn't know.
Instead, Levitt himself was writing an article that was short enough for the editorial space alloted. His longer text is chapter 5 in his Freakonomics book. (In other words, the so-called "editorial" was advertising hype for his book.)
I just linked the USA Today page because I thought it was more convenient than trying to deep-link a copyrighted book.[1][2]
It was a government study so presumably, Levitt got the raw data and reports from here: https://nces.ed.gov/pubsearch/getpubcats.asp?sid=024
[1] best link I could do but it's not the whole book so it's incomplete: https://books.google.com/books?id=pGJ-BwAAQBAJ&pg=PT25&dq=fr...
[2] Google Books doesn't let you deep-link to Chapter 5 of Freakonomics: https://books.google.com/books?id=wNPnl5zYA-cC&printsec=fron...
Revisiting my child hood classics such as Hardy Boys, mixing in Harry Potter (books are so much better than the first and only movie that I saw) and so on: Feels like quality time, and a great way to connect. I can easily get into those books too, even in my mid 40s. ;)
I have noticed that enjoyment increases with my reading engagement level - creating different voices for the different characters and such. He has attention issues, and it's a pleasure to have him focusing on something other than a screen. I will stop every few minutes and ask questions to check if he is really listening to the story and not just the sound of my voice. Previously, it might have been more of the latter.
My sons are grown-ups now, how I miss these times.