I would recommends the Youtube rabbit hole of Neil Postman lectures from the early 1990's that outlines this very observation. ( I don't expect you to subscribe to all his opinions, but he does attempt to analyze the impact of different media)
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.
It occured to me that a broken mirror is a good metaphor of what the modern web does to our attention. Instead of a whole smooth surface clearly reflecting the reality, our attention becomes shattered into many pieces, each reflecting something different. Books, due to a long continuous context, let us polish this mirror. For a similar reason, I guess, a typical exercise in the eastern tradition is to keep all your attention on one thing for a few minutes at least, and all the time, ideally. HN is, unfortunately, not very different: a stream of tiny disconnected comments shatter our attention if we read it too much.
There are too many variables at work here to deduce something as droll, and frankly, offensive as "poor people are stupid".
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.
The other thing that is important about reading beyond brain development is the learning of lessons / history / culture. I can't remember who the quote is from, but something like "He who does not read lives but one life. He who reads can live thousands."
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.
> The other thing that is important about reading beyond brain development is the learning of lessons / history / culture. I can't remember who the quote is from, but something like "He who does not read lives but one life. He who reads can live thousands."
You could say the same today about video games, movies, television, or even youtubers. Exposure to culture enriches the mind.
Not to imply playing video games is as intellectually stimulating as reading, but I feel like some games really challenge you in a positive manner. The ability to manage your inventory, interact with characters, make choices and deal with the consequences are all great for expanding your mind. Essentially, playing some RPGs (I feel) can make you a slightly better person whereas I have a hard time seeing the intellectual value in something like Fortnite.
That's absolutely true. The game matters. Games with a strong story can put you in the role of someone with unfamiliar backgrounds and challenges where other games are more about reflexes. I think they likely all have some sort of value. Fine motor skills, teamwork, dealing with success/failure, spatial reasoning, etc. but a good story is great for lessons you can't get with space invaders or bejeweled.
>The ability to manage your inventory, interact with characters, make choices and deal with the consequences are all great for expanding your mind.
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 don't have children yet, but I expect to in the coming years. I wish to instill a love of reading in them, but I worry about how to go about doing so.
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.
First read to your kid. Fill your house with books and let them know by example that they are fun and important.
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.
Will it be controversial? I feel that to most of us in tech it makes intuitive sense that too much screen time isn't a good thing. We know the vice it can be.
That's true but most people will argue for at least some limited screen time. For us only a complete ban got them interested in reading, outdoors, sports, card games etc again.
Ive spent hundreds of hours reading aloud to my kids. It's a big investment but I believe it's almost certain you'll stumble upon something that will catch their attention. It's also about family culture - if you establish the habit of reading at a certain time of day (we do it after dinner / before bed) then it's easy to stick with that over turning to other things to fill the time.
Read to your child, and provide books and opportunity once he starts learning to read. He'll either be drawn to it or not. I've had three kids and their interests and things that motivate them are all wildly different. So a lot of it just boils down to "if he likes reading, he'll read."
Do the same with music, and sports/physical activity, and other things.
I was not read to as a child, but I was pretty good at reading from an early age and grew to love it. Adult life is busy and many other activities compete for my attention now, but I still manage to finish around 10-20 books a year. This lower bound is not impressive to any serious, habitual reader, but I'm happy I manage to keep it up.
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?
Here I've seen female and male defaults used as well as "they". I haven't noticed any prevalence for one other the others, probably because it makes no difference to me. I understand from the context that the text is applicable to any gender.
I'm curious, if it makes no difference to you then why not extend your sympathy to those who feel they are affected by it and simply use a gender neutral pronoun?
I'm not sure how much of it is just not allowing my 2-year-old screen time (and not owning a television), but his 3 favorite activities are being read to, playing in the park, and playing with his wooden trains.
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.
Expose them to good books. Visit the library, fill the bookshelves at home, read to them. All kids love stories, so your job is simply to make it a nigh-certainty they will encounter stories they love.
Don’t try to force specific stories on them- just provide a buffet of great choices.
A point often left out of this discussion is that a love of reading is usually engendered by a single book. Not by reading 10 books over the summer, though, of course, that's something all kids should do. You can't really predict when it will happen, or what book will be the catalyst.
Growing up I never really got into reading for fun, mostly due because the school I went too didn't understand reading comprehension issues and "incentivized" reading. They set a limit of reading 5 books within some time frame in order to go to recess this one special day and/or attend this party they were having. I wanted to go, but really couldn't catch up. I felt left behind. The reward should be the reading, not some external source or something a child should be getting by default.
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.
“The dataset contained measures of young adolescents ages nine to 13 and how many years they had spent reading for pleasure during their early childhood. It also included data on their cognitive, mental health and brain health.
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.”
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".
I'm going to risk quite a lot of fake internet points to add to your point. Bring up violent tendencies or anything to do with culture, and you'll be demonized. Yet study after study of children who were not raised by their natural parents suggest a very strong link between parents' and childrens' behaviour - even after accounting for externalities such as the area where they live or intake of e.g. lead. I would be very, very surprised if the children of intelligent people - who typically enjoy reading from what I observe - didn't themselves enjoy reading.
Anyone who works with or spends time with children will tell you that all kinds of behaviors, including violence, are learned from adults and peers.
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.
> Anyone who works with or spends time with children will tell you that all kinds of behaviors, including violence, are learned from adults and peers.
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.
I thought this was clear in context but obviously not. Obviously not all discussions of race/culture are racist. However…
> 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.
I would like to understand what you're talking about. Do you think that some people use culture as a proxy for race? Do you agree or disagree that different cultures have different values? Do you agree or disagree that culture is very closely associated by race?
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.
The usual direction this goes is, some cultures place higher or lower relative value on parenting your kids, and some cultures are in practice rife with absent parents as a byproduct of what they value.
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 think they meant that studying children "not raised by their natural [i.e. genetically related] parents" is a way to tell that any differences are a result of parenting or culture rather than some other factor, like genetics or location.
> But bring up intelligence along with genetic factors and everyone recoils and tenses up.
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).
Nobody believes 100% blank state. The debate is about the percentage.
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.
> 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.
I think the problem is that people tend to see the genetic factor as the predominant factor, and conclude that some kids aren’t worth the effort.
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)
The article does try to control for this via the education levels of the parents:
> 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).
It seems that the article/study does not disagree with your point:
> 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 difference in attention being paid seems rather sensible to me. It's more useful information, because it's actionable. You can't alter the genetic make-up of your children post-facto, but you can nurture them.
It’s dangerous ground, so people are leery of it. For example, if different races have at a population higher or lower average IQ, and IQ is heritable, that starts to look uncomfortably like the old arguments from a few hundred years ago justifying racism.
The point is not to compare people to each other, comparing people is purely secondary to the task, the point is to enable people as best they can be enabled. Even if you are low iq, you should still learn to read if you can.
People are worried about the outcomes of such thinking, not so much the accuracy of it. Especially since it's only one step removed from talking about cultural/racial association.
At Sudbury schools, reading naturally occurs for students, but the age ranges from 4-12, with typical being 7-9. There seems to be little correlation to early reading and a love of reading, anecdotally from these schools. In fact, often the ones who learn to read later seem to love reading more than the ones who read earlier.
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.
Anecdata based on a sample of two: If you find things he's interested in and read to him, he'll eventually take off on his own. At least, that's how it worked for me. After my mom had read to me who knows how many times, I can still remember the thrill of realizing I was reading the book (about a rocket trip to the moon, late 60's) myself. The habit has sustained me in many ways since then, but it didn't feel forced at the start, which helped, IMO.
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.
I just read age appropriate books to my kids and figure they'll eventually read on their own. The strongest predictor of whether or not a child will go on to read for pleasure is just having books around. If they don't want to, well, whatever.
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.