Poverty is linked to poorer brain development but reading can help counteract it
theconversation.com
theconversation.com
I won't go as far as to say reading is the only medium for self-development but I will challenge you, dear reader, to take a photo of a page of a book, then a photo of any modern website and compare the design elements. Books are less distracting, and are not designed to steal your personal agency with the strength super computers.
Books allow for greater introspective focus on complex ideas. In fact, some concepts worth learning require several hundred words to describe. Practicing the ability to singularly focus on long form thought is a great skill to have. It is a form of deep work/thinking.
Poor outcomes from disadvantaged families are due to more than educational opportunity. Children make fun of each other for superficial things, including how expensive their clothes are. The social element, and the feeling of being left out of activities because you cannot afford them, I would say contributes more to poor outcomes than just the lack of money.
It's everything else that gets triggered or worsened from a lack of money that creates the outcome. And typically, nobody cares unless that person is female or they grow up to create trouble for others. Then they start having conversations about how we can "improve outcomes". As usual, any effort to care comes after problems become too large to handle.
People who discuss this need to either live it or go get exposed to its realities before they can start making definitive statements on it. There are plenty of intelligent people who were simply handed the short end of the stick economically, and it's a failing of our societies that these people fall through cracks to begin with.
There is also something about forming your own identity that is important too - like understanding history tells you something about who you are and who you can become. Stealing from David McCullough [1]:
"History is philosophy taught with examples... First of all we have to get across the idea that we have to know who we were if we’re to know who we are and where we’re headed."
"The Greeks said that character is destiny, and the more I read and understand of history, the more convinced I am that they were right... It is not in the still calm of life or the repose of a pacific station that great characters are formed."
And so reading is much more than just developing skills around reading and focus, it is about learning and growing as an individual.
[1] https://www.butwhatfor.com/p/takeaway-tuesday-knowing-histor...
You could say the same today about video games, movies, television, or even youtubers. Exposure to culture enriches the mind.
People seem to like writing off the entire medium, which makes about as much sense to me as neglecting all of fiction. That happens, too.
Have you tried playing Minecraft with mods? You know, something like GT New Horizons or Omnifactory. Those will melt your brain. They are the equivalent of climbing a mountain vs taking a leisurely stroll (reading). The idea that reading would be as mentally stimulating as that sounds ridiculous to me.
"Some RPGs". You have seen nothing. Nothing at all.
I spent so much time reading as a child that I'd get grounded from it, forbidden from reading at the dinner table, that sort of thing. But that love came partially from a lack of alternatives; we only had local TV channels and no video games or other comparable distractions.
I worry how, to a child, a book can be as effective a lure as a screen when I, as an adult, often find myself taken by the latter.
The other advice I'd have is to take your kid to the library once a week. Let them pick out a couple books (maybe also pick up one your choosing so that you can expose them to more things - kids can be obsessive) Once they can manage a chapter book tell them they are allowed to pick whatever books they like from anywhere in the entire library. Kids love having choice and flexing agency. Don't worry if they pick up something too mature/scary/boring/whatever. Anything they want to pick really is fine, but if they don't like it they'll have to wait until next week to swap it out.
Get them their own library card as soon as you can too. Make a big deal of it. Having an official document for access to the books highlights the importance of them too.
edit: ages 3-9
Do the same with music, and sports/physical activity, and other things.
I think what the trick for me:
- My parents read regularly, so it just was a normal part of life in my eyes.
- My parents' siblings would gift me volumes of children's book series for birthdays and holidays. I'd look forward to getting the next book in a series for months, and it was a big exciting event for me.
- Adults were willing to discuss the books I read with me (and sometimes humor me by reading one), so I got recognition from them for what I was doing, and learned to connect over books. If a book was important to me, other people were willing to take my feelings seriously. Being rooted in a book made them legitimate.
- My dad was not a spend-y sort of person, but once a year for Christmas, he'd rifle through a book club catalog with me and let me order more or less any book I wanted. This was exciting, and we got tons of random books at home filling the shelves.
- Access to books, i.e. those full shelves. Bored to tears on a rainy day? My father would tell me to pick a book.
I have a daughter, and it is just crazy once you start reading books how much is needlessly male focussed.
From the first farmyard books where the boy is driving the tractor and the girl is in the cart on the back. To fantastic Mr fox and his four small foxes (all male) etc etc. It's just extremely unbalanced.
In our community, there's every reason not to use a male default everywhere. It would not have changed the original commenters meaning at all to have said "they" instead of "him" and would have been more inclusive. Surely that's a good default?
I wish it were as simple as making reading time quality bonding time. However, that doesn't seem sufficient. My two favorite activities these days are reading to him and giving him a bath, and yet he has a love/hate relationship with his bath. He acts like he hates the bath, until I announce to him that I'm going to take a bath without him. I think he really does hate his bath (and that it cuts into his train time), but puts up with it in order to spend time with me.
I do think it really helps that I give him time to examine the page and imagine before I turn the page. Also, sometimes he really wants to flip the page before I'm done reading, and I'm less happy with that, but let it happen.
Don’t try to force specific stories on them- just provide a buffet of great choices.
I know this was a little part of my life, but It really stuck with me and still to this day don't enjoy reading fiction for fun due to the negative implications growing up. Occasionally I start to read some fiction but end up getting it on audible to listen too.
About half of the group of adolescents starting reading early in childhood, whereas the other, approximately half, had never read in early childhood, or had begun reading late on.
We discovered that reading for pleasure in early childhood was linked with better scores on comprehensive cognition assessments and better educational attainment in young adolescence.”
Seems like classic correlation not causation
It's totally possible that intelligent people have well paying careers and give birth to intelligence advantaged children. Mother nature loves bestowing fortune to the fortunate.
There is the pervasive "blank slate" approach to cognition, when there is plenty of evidence that your brain is not in fact a blank slate at birth. I mean people just passively accept that some people are just born physically stronger, or with a more athletic build. Especially if their parents are athletes, or it runs in the family.
But bring up intelligence along with genetic factors and everyone recoils and tenses up. It seems so plainly true, there is plenty of evidence to back it, yet its article after article, discussion after discussion of "Kids who read books end up being more successful" and never "Naturally smart kids enjoy reading books".
Once someone starts talking about “culture” though they're usually veering toward some really vicious stereotypes and wink-nudge fig leafs that help people hold & promote racist attitudes without thinking of themselves as racist.
That's literally everyone in the child's vicinity. What constitutes "culture" to you, if not the values shared and imparted by the influences around you?
> Once someone starts talking about “culture” though they're usually veering toward some really vicious stereotypes and wink-nudge fig leafs that help people hold & promote racist attitudes without thinking of themselves as racist.
You're calling him out for stereotyping...while confidently suggesting discussion of race/culture is usually racist, and anybody daring to initiate it is just a racist in denial? I don't even agree with him but holy shit man, rethink your approach.
> Bring up violent tendencies or anything to do with culture, and you'll be demonized.
Is not all discussions of race/culture. Whose violent tendencies? What does OP mean by culture here? Unclear, it’s left to your imagination.
Should it read: > Bring up violent tendencies or anything to do with culture [of teaching children violence] and you'll be demonized.
Or should it read: > Bring up violent tendencies or anything to do with [violent people’s] culture, and you'll be demonized.
Or should it read: >Bring up violent tendencies or anything to do with [you know who I mean’s] culture, and you'll be demonized.
Why does OP expect to be demonized? Maybe because these are common racist shibboleths, in the same vein as someone trying to tell you about threats to “western civilization”.
Idk if OP actually meant it that way. Their meaning was vague, which is how these things work. A good tule of thumb with strangers on the internet though is that if it quacks like a duck it might be a duck.
> Once someone starts talking about “culture” though they're usually veering
> toward some really vicious stereotypes and wink-nudge fig leafs that help
> people hold & promote racist attitudes without thinking of themselves as racist.
To be clear, my original comment did not address any of this. I was seriously discussing culture, not race. But I think that I have something to learn from someone who takes such a stance as you have written, so I don't mind if the subject drifts a bit OT.
> Bring up violent tendencies or anything to do with culture, and you'll be demonized.
edit: on rereading, I think the original comment about “natural parents” was trying to make a point about nature vs nurture, not about parenting.
I don't think this is true; general intelligence is considered to be highly heritable (40-80% according to Wikipedia). If you start suggesting that g is correlated to race then you'll get a lot of push-back, but as far as heritability not really.
To the degree that intelligence is affected by the environment, we should encourage things that help. Not starving kids and preventing them from ingesting lead both probably have a higher effect than reading, but I would not be surprised if reading doesn't at least cause some development to occur earlier (whether or not there are measurable effects that last into adulthood).
Also intelligence (as measured by IQ) is not linearly correlated with success. After a certain point the higher IQ you have the less likely you are to be successful.
Being much smarter than the people around you must feel very isolating. The expectations placed on you since you are a child can't be easy to deal with either.
Thankfully I'm too stupid to have any of those problems.
The balance between nature and nurture is tbd, but what we’ve seen is that humans have a lot of plasticity and the major factor is your environment.
Your athletics analogy is apt I think. Here’s the part that’s missing - who’s likely to be better at basketball? A gifted child with no training or an average kid who has spent years drilling and studying basketball.
Through this we can see that even average people can do really well at something if we give them a proper upbringing, something that many kids are denied today.
(For completeness, of course there are kids who are gifted and receive training. Those are gonna be fine and we probably don’t have to worry about them, they already excel)
> Our results showed that reading for pleasure in early childhood can be beneficial regardless of socioeconomic status. It may also be helpful regardless of the children’s initial intelligence level. That’s because the effect didn’t depend on how many years of education the children’s parents had had – which is our best measure for very young children’s intelligence (IQ is partially heritable).
> Our results showed that reading for pleasure in early childhood can be beneficial regardless of socioeconomic status. It may also be helpful regardless of the children’s initial intelligence level.
The first books, of any kind, my daughter read were Harry Potter books. She went from not reading at age 8, to reading chats with her friends at age 9 (pandemic time), to having read the entire 7 book series by the end of age 10. No one taught her how to read. Writing, using devices, arithmetic, she largely acquired them all on her own as she matured.
While I am biased, she seems well-adjusted and quite bright. I have no doubt that she is capable of mastering whatever she would like to master.
Note that the article was looking at a cohort study. It was not based on randomly assigning "pleasure reading in early childhood" which means cause and effect cannot be ascertained. My guess is that if they were to measure lifelong Sudbury students they would find well-developed cortical areas regardless of early childhood reading or not. The development probably relates to constructing complex understanding of the world (or fictional worlds) which independent play as well as reading can do, but conventional teaching cannot.
My own son is having difficulty with reading, among other things. The thing that gets him going is recognizing he needs to be able to read to serve some of his other goals. So, again, interest.