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Comment by paganel | Hacker News Reader

> That the single biggest predictor of high academic achievement and high ACT scores is reading to children. Not flash cards, not workbooks, not fancy preschools, not blinking toys or computers, but mom or dad taking the time every day or night (or both!) to sit and read them wonderful books.

One of my earliest (and fondest) memories is about my mother reading "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer" to 4-year old me, even though she had had a hard day of work behind her. It got me so hooked to stories and books that I learned to read almost all by myself when I was five.

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Proud moment: catching the kid up at midnight reading. I can verify it's actually impossible to tell a child off for something you both did and totally approve of.

Even worse: getting caught doing midnight reading by your 2 year old. Who absolutely isn't going to tell you off, but joins you. hashtagproudmomentsinparenting

My soon to be 12 year old has been 'sneaking' books/lights into his room for most of the last decade. It is a cool problem to have, except he tends to do it to excess, and end up not getting much sleep. For days at a time.

Serious passion for reading, though we did end up having to 'bring the hammer down' and shake him down for lights before bed, alas.

In a true miracle of sweet reason working on kids, we said "you should go to sleep so you won't be too tired in the morning for school" AND SHE LISTENED.

Well that's trading off actual education for education-looking activity :(.

I'm always caught in that dilemma. After all, you tend to learn more and with more efficiency under your own direction than you ever do in school. I guess it depends what type of books they're reading. Perhaps start grooming his library ;)

I missed a lot of sleep for my books at that age. It did have some of the negative qualities of an addiction, and still can drag me in -- I broke my toe last week, and tried reading a novel to keep my mind off the pain, and finished it around 5am. And realized I was exhausted, and my shattered toe was throbbing madly, and I hadn't even taken any pills for pain.

These days I mostly read serial online fiction, because it comes comes in metered doses; e.g. http://pactwebserial.wordpress.com/

My parents quickly realized that "go to your room" was totally a non-punishment for me, and they couldn't reasonably do anything to stop me from reading after they'd gone to bed.

I'd suggest working with your son on flexible solutions -- it could work to ask him to always read more advanced stuff (with more challenging vocabulary, plot, etc.) at bedtime so that it takes more brain-work... that makes it a bit more likely that he'll put it down when he's really tired.

The main thing (I think -- my oldest is only 5) is to see if he himself thinks there's a problem, and (if so) help him hack his own lifestyle, acknowledging that you don't know the answer, but you can help experiment & track the results.

Thank you for that.

It's pretty much a solved problem. We talked about it, over the course of several years.

Mostly, for him, it's about self moderation/regulation. He's mildly autistic, so it's super easy for him to get 'stuck' on many types of tasks/actions.

He is now able to grasp and internalize the consequences of staying up all night reading. :)

The single biggest predictor of high academic achievement is socioeconomic status of parents.

Which we could shorten to:

"The single biggest predictor of achievement is achievement"

For one generation; from the second onwards it becomes: "The single biggest predictor of achievement is lineage"

Not necessarily. Failure is always an option.

It doesn't in any way change the validity of GP's statement.

I think that we overstate the "economic" and discount the "socio" aspect of "socioeconomic".

That failure is an option doesn't in any way change that socioeconomic status of parents is the best predictor. I.e. kids from rich families fail less than kids from poor families.

Except in your shortened version, you've completely eliminated what you're using to measure "achievement".

Plenty of people don't define academic success as achievement. A lot of blue collar communities consider other things as being successful.

Define achievement as you wish and you'll probably find it holds true. Expert pickpocket as a measure of achievement? Kids probably go on score well on that environment. And to be fair, in the right situation it's probably a pretty good measure.

Do you have reliable cites for that?

Here's a nice start, which I found to be the top result by entering "academic achievement and socioeconomic status" in a search engine: http://www.apa.org/pi/ses/resources/publications/factsheet-e...

In particular, from the subsection "SES and Academic Achievement":

1. Children from low-SES environments acquire language skills more slowly, exhibit delayed letter recognition and phonological awareness, and are at risk for reading difficulties (Aikens & Barbarin, 2008).

2. Children with higher SES backgrounds were more likely to be proficient on tasks of addition, subtraction, ordinal sequencing, and math word problems than children with lower SES backgrounds (Coley, 2002).

3. Students from low-SES schools entered high school 3.3 grade levels behind students from higher SES schools. In addition, students from the low-SES groups learned less over 4 years than children from higher SES groups, graduating 4.3 grade levels behind those of higher SES groups (Palardy, 2008).

4. In 2007, the high school dropout rate among persons 16- 24 years old was highest in low-income families (16.7%) as compared to high-income families (3.2%) (National Center for Education Statistics, 2008).

https://www.google.com/search?q=socioeconomic%20effects%20on...

That it has predictive value doesn't mean it's the cause.

Enjoy your kids. This means if you enjoy reading books, you should read books with your kids.

I have a three-year-old, and I think this is on the whole a great list, but I also find it very hard to believe that reading to your young kids causes them to be high academic achievers.

(I think also the goal of "high academic achievement" seems dissonant with the rest of the list, but maybe that's just me.)

And yet, it's one of the few solid results science has given us on the topic of children off to a good intellectual start. The signal is fairly strong.

Does this science control for "being the kind of parent who thinks sitting down and reading with their kid is a pretty damn good idea"? I could see how reading to children is an effect of a set of values that are conductive to raising successful children, and as values often do, don't lend themselves well to being broken down into its constituent parts.

Or put in a different way - if you, as a parent, consider reading to your child a chore, will it still work?

Yes, language exposure in an of it's self is useful. Also, reading interesting books often leads to children continuing to read that same book to see how it ends. And thus reading for fun which provides a lot of useful practice.

There's got to be something more than language on it's own. Surely, you can't just leave your kid with an audiobook - or the TV on.

There is whole lot of what we do not know about kids and effects of reading at various ages. There are also a lot of unconfirmed myths about it. To make it even worst, most studies on very young kids (babies) dealt with language deprived kids and not normally developing kids.

You will not be academically successful if you can not read well and reading a lot of books makes you better reader. Parents who love reading and read a lot lead to kids that love reading.

Depending on what exactly you mean as good intellectual start, the effects might been much less proven then we like to believe.

You know, I'm actually first on board with the idea that rather a lot of science is more poorly sourced than we'd like, and a lot of people place too much trust in "Science!". There's a lot of people who use the religion part of their brain to deal with "Science!".

On the other hand, this pathological need to disprove every study that has ever come out, ever, on every topic ever, is equally wrong. Perhaps it is also sourced from the same part of the brain.

Simply demanding more proof than we have right now is too powerful an argument; it disproves everything, and is thus useless. This may not be the all-singing, all-dancing result that is so easy to call for when it's not your job to provide it, but it is one of the few strong signals we legitimately have about early intellectual development, and it's as wrong to just dismiss it as it is to blindly trust it.

To forever demand higher standards is not sophisticated; it is to embrace endless, profound, uncorrectable ignorance. It is not scientific.

I'm not disproving those studies, just their interpretations. Those famous baby reading studies were made on language deprived children, because it actually makes sense. Those babies are in need of help. Knowing whether twenty or whatever minutes of reading makes difference or not can change peoples lives. It turns out, that it does.

However, concluding from the above that normally developing baby in family that communicates with him a lot will get the same benefit is incorrect. May or may not be.

The other thing is, babies, toddlers, preschoolers and elementary school children are very different in a lot of ways. The effects of reading on those groups are going to be different. The effects of reading on interested and uninterested child are going to be different too. And it just so happens that many very small kids are not interested in being read to.

Note that I'm not saying that reading to preschooler stories that the preschooler likes will not help to build love for reading. I'm kinda sure it will. However, the whole "reading every day is necessary for children of all ages" drum beats are overstating what is actually known about it.

If you can't read, or read poorly, you cannot be a high academic achiever. Reading (prolific) to a child teaches how to read, and that reading is important & worthwhile - leading to voracious intake of academic material.

It may not cause high academic achievement, but high academic achievement is unlikely without it.

It's somewhat similar to the parenting book analogy used in (I think) Freakonomics, isn't it? It's not the fact that a parent buys parenting books that makes them a good mother or father. It's the fact that they're the type of parent who would buy those books, who cares about their children, etc, that makes them a good mother or father.

At 4-5 I could read two languages fluently (at the rate of a typical 7-8 year-old), having been taught phonetics for both languages. There were a lot of words I didn't know, but I could at least look them up in the dictionary.

> Reading (prolific) to a child teaches how to read ...

So even though I wasn't read at a lot as a child, I was taught how to do it myself. Inquisitiveness goes a long way with a child. I started doing crosswords at 6-7, and that taught me other skills etc.

TL;DR, I agree that you can't be a high academic achiever if you can't read well.

In this radio piece about the Harlem Children's Zone, they reference a study that connects the sheer volume of words a child is exposed to with success later in life [0].

It may just be that reading is one way to increase the number of words in early childhood and that it correlates generally with more (nonviolent) language usage.

[0] http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/364/g...

>> "I also find it very hard to believe that reading to your young kids causes them to be high academic achievers"

My guess is that reading to them at a young age teaches them that reading can be fun. It probably means that as they get older they will look at reading as a fun activity - something they want to do - and not something boring. And I'd guess that someone who reads performs better academically than someone who doesn't.

More importantly, reading is the foundation of every middle class job. Whether it is legal precedents, medical journals, technical manuals, textbooks, articles, memos, reports, or code, reading is constant.

It's not causative but it is definitely correlative.

Source: My girlfriend's startup is in this space and they have 15 year of studies backing it up.

Our older daughter hated to be read to - she just wanted to get to the next page and look at the pictures. After getting my fingers jammed in her board books one too many times I just let her enjoy it. In elementary school she really didn't want to do her 20 minute reading assighments.

Now she and her sister, who loved being read to, are both doing just fine and they both read piles and piles of books.

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