It pays to read to children

My daughter and her 3-year-old stood by a backyard fountain watching the bubbling water. She began explaining to the child the pumps, pipes and water pressure involved.
The owner listened and gently laughed — obviously the child was too young to understand. Then she did a double take, “He really understands!”
“Of course,” my daughter said.
Later, my daughter told me, “Mom, he wants to know how everything works. If you find a book about toilets and sewers, get it.”
I found a 1960s children’s book on sewers. It cost a couple hundred dollars.
“I guess I could take out the repair manual to show him,” she said.
Kindergarten is years away, but I already know this child will be ready. He has “The Reading Mother” as Strickland Gillian described in his poem which ends:
“You may have tangible wealth untold;
Caskets of jewels and coffers of gold.
Richer than I you can never be –
I had a mother who read to me.”
With the huge variety books in retail stores, public libraries and the abundance of used books to be found at yard sales, any child can have books.
But not all do.
My daughter mentioned studies from the Handbook of Early Literacy Research. It references the knowledge gap which parallels the income gap in our society. The printed word is linked with increased knowledge and a larger vocabulary and abstract reasoning.
Poor families and communities typically lack the resources for books, newspapers and magazines. Examining four neighborhoods, two poor and two middle-income, we found stark and triangulated differences in access to materials between poor and middle-income neighborhoods,” the researchers wrote and went on to say, “Middle income children had multiple opportunities to observe, use and purchase books. There were 13 titles per individual child. Few such occasions were available to low-income kids who had an estimated … one book for every 300 children.”
My daughter read that statistic to her husband. He observed that they personally, probably owned at least 300 children’s books.
The lack of literary resources goes beyond the home. Children in poor communities had limited access to libraries compared to children in middle-income neighborhoods. In poor communities the researchers found that the school libraries were closed or even boarded up.
Consider that the next time we hear the statistics about the poor reading levels of children in Union County and weigh it against the number of hours our children have access to a public library on week nights or on Saturdays. If we really want to raise the reading and comprehension levels of our students, we need get it right and agree to a tax increase that will open the library so that even parents working two jobs can access the books during their off-work hours.
And, kudos to Fairview Head Start which last week launched the Joint Venture Literacy Project engaging parents as academic mentors to strengthen the foundations of local pre-schoolers.
As a parent make sure that those caring for your children read to them also. According to the study, a survey of 300 centers found that on average fewer than one or two books were available per child – and the majority of those books were of mediocre quality.
Why does it matter? After all, we have Sesame Street, the Internet and animated stories on DVDs.
It matters because children who have fewer experiences with new, different or more sophisticated words outside of their day-to-day encounters are less likely to learn about their world and less likely to learn how to transfer information from print to application.
The idea is not new. In 1943 Betty Smith wrote her fictionalized autobiography, “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn” set in the early 1900s. She records the dilemma of a poor new mother asking how to improve her child’s life. The grandmother advises, “The secret lies in the reading and the writing. … Every day you must read one page from some good book to your child … until the child learns to read. Then she must read every day.” She recommends reading Shakespeare and The Bible. An aunt buys a discarded copy of the complete works of Shakespeare from the library, steals a Gideon Bible from a hotel and the reading begins. Even though initially neither the adults nor the children understand much, by the time the children enter high school they do and they have read Shakespeare and the Bible innumerable times — plus they have discovered the library.
A more recent example is portrayed in “Gifted Hands: The Ben Carson Story” the son of a black, poor, single mother. After his mother turned off the television and demanded two weekly book reports, Ben Carson went from an academic failure to our nation’s foremost pediatric neurosurgeon practicing at Johns Hopkins.
If we really want to enrich our children, it begins with opening books, early and often. Enriching children with books, enriches the community in a multitude of ways and we can’t afford to not invest ourselves to that end.
(Joan Hershberger is a reporter at the News-Times. E-mail her at joanh@everybody.org.)


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