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Large home libraries may have a long-term impact on proficiency: study
- fhood 8y agoI grew up in a household that had passed that 350 book mark, and beyond all of the actual meaningful improvements it has made to my life, it also meant that reading comprehension on standardized testing was laughably easy. So teach your kids to love books, and enjoy reading. It doesn't have to be high-brow intellectually challenging shit, just make sure that they associate books with fun.
- Insanity 8y agoI think that last part is especially true. Due to school and forced reading assingments, reading gets associated too often with work or boring assignments.
- ThetaOneOne 8y agoYeah, I strongly believe that all books carry significant value. You don’t need high level concepts to gain value. We sometimes over focus on the best case scenrerio ignoring what we can get kids interested in.
- fhood 8y agoIn elementary school we would have assigned reading periods, during which we were supposed to read one chapter of the book we were on. Turns out that if you read five chapters instead you just fail all the quizzes because you don't have a fucking clue what happened in chapter 12, given you read that weeks ago and can't really tie chapters to events anyway.
- maxxxxx 8y agoThat's true. I was reading a lot as a kid but I barely read anything we had to read for school. Reading assignments took the fun out of reading because now you had the pressure to be able to report on the reading.
- jlarocco 8y agoTo be fair, interpretation and writing are just as important as reading.
- fhood 8y agoI strongly disagree. I think enjoyment of reading is vastly more important that interpretation and writing. What is the point of these kinds of assignments if it causes the kids to have negative associations with reading? Even beyond school though, I find the idea that good novels require careful analysis antithetical to the concept of a good book. Good writing should be excellent at every level. It is wonderful if new narratives and ideas can be discovered upon careful analysis, but if that analysis is necessary for comprehension it ruins it for me. I believe that reading a story should be something natural and seamless.
- thrower123 8y agoThey tend to try to make reading excruciating, particularly before high schools. I don't know if they still do this, but for some reason it was a big trend when I was in grade school to break up into "reading groups", and you'd go around in a circle reading a paragraph at a time out loud. I still despise reading aloud for that reason; I always got a rash of shit for being a few chapters ahead when my turn came up again and having to page back to find the right spot.
- veebat 8y agoReading aloud is something I've returned to in later years as speaking practice, vocal warmup, and testing my own writing. It was, of course, a chore in school.
- kirsebaer 8y agoSchool assignments should always be voluntary.
- cweagans 8y agoIn a sense, they are. You'll just lose points for not doing the work. Clearly not what you were suggesting of course, but it's true. Can you clarify how you think this would work?
- AllegedAlec 8y agoWhat I really hated in primary school was that when you finished your homework, you were allowed to read a book. However, all the books were pretty dated and not all that interesting. Furthermore, when you'd finished it, you'd have to write a report on it. One year, I got sick of this system, so I found one book I enjoyed and basically read that one a couple dozen times over the rest of the year.
- TallGuyShort 8y ago>> it also meant that reading comprehension on standardized testing was laughably easy I'm actually curious to hear how various HNers have done on on standardized reading comprehension tests. I grew up with massive bookcases in the house, I've now populated my own, I read a lot, get a lot out of it, and enjoy it. On the ACT I had perfect scores on every category but a literal 0 on reading comprehension. As far as I'm aware, that's always been the case on my standardized tests, and I wasn't surprised because the questions seemed ludicrous to me (I nodded vigorously while reading [1]). I primarily read non-fiction and have wondered if I just don't grok fiction. What are other people's experience on that? [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2017/01/07/poet-i-cant-answer-questions-on-texas-standardized-tests-about-my-own-poems/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.980b67e62e34 https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2017/01/...
- hobs 8y agoI always found that the reading comprehension part of the test as the easiest by far, and would generally score at the highest level the test could predict.
- Izkata 8y agoWe were explicitly taught to read the questions first, then scan for the question's keywords in the text, and pick the answer based on the best match for that sentence alone. I agree; I typically finished a book a week just reading between classes in highschool (and more at night), and was one of the only ones who could fully read the passage and still have time to answer all the questions. They were weirdly analytical and overly-literal, not something that made any sense in a "comprehension" test.
- ip26 8y agoI read a ton as a kid, and I always struggled a bit on reading comprehension tests. To me it generally seemed like the "reading comprehension" questions would focus on minutia I didn't consider important, and simply didn't bother to remember. It's been a long time since then, but I want to say I'd read a story about a kid sledding on a hill with his friends, and then later to test your reading comprehension they'd ask you what color his shirt was. Maybe that is reading comprehension and I am just bad at it, but to me shirt color was unimportant.
- jriot 8y agoWe all can't be high brow, at times the VCR manual does the job. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNcMKWIuhBk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNcMKWIuhBk
- JamesBarney 8y agoI think most parents with large household libraries are probably pretty bright. And most kids from pretty bright parents are pretty bright too. You could fill a library with all the studies that tried to improve people's lives through increased reading. And none of them replicated in large way.
- simplemts 8y agoYou should check out '30 million words'. It's a book about the importance of spoken language on young minds, and books may be a means. Fascinating data in it.
- toomuchtodo 8y agohttps://smile.amazon.com/Thirty-Million-Words-Building-Childs/dp/0525954872 https://smile.amazon.com/Thirty-Million-Words-Building-Child...
- JamesBarney 8y agoBefore I invest the time.and money in buying a book. How did they deal with the confounds? And was there a study on the intervention you could point me to? Reading the summary of the book on Amazon, the experiments looked pretty confounded and it didn't mention any successful interventions.
- bsenftner 8y agoI grew up in a house of readers. My earliest exposure was a 500+ comic book collection before I knew how to read, which graduated to children's novels by early elementary, and devouring the classics beginning in 3rd grade. By high school I was finishing most the 'great american authors'. During HS french existentialists and the beatniks were perfect foundations for a too-smart-for-his-own-good arrogant teen. I am lucky to be alive. I dropped out of high school, but tricked my way into Harvard. Worked with Mandelbrot, was on the Sony PSX OS team, and quite a bit more. Primarily thanks to my exposure to multiple lifetimes of wisdom, generating inner confidence, thanks to reading. It's been quite entertaining, to say the least...
- wedge14 8y agoHow would growing up in a household with only ebooks, or a household with only physical books make a difference? (Assuming an equal number of both)
- wedge14 8y agoPerhaps completely irrelevant as long as an equal number are read?
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- arkitaip 8y agoMaybe, maybe not. These social studies are so poorly executed that you're just waiting for them to be debunked.
- nsomaru 8y agoWe had a room in the house that had a whole wall of books. There was a carpet on the floor. As a child I would wander in and become slowly transfixed by covers and just the pattern of the whole thing. I tried and failed many times to read books there, often falling back to simpler children’s encyclopedias. With perseverance I became able to infer word meanings through context (a skill that remains today), and slowly but surely titles were conquered one by one. Im eternally grateful to my grandfather for reading so much to me as an extremely young child and to my father who stocked that study with the equivalent of the best wine available. I don’t think that experience would have been possible with the kindle I now own :)
- Koshkin 8y agoAt an early age it is important to have contact with physical objects. (And no, an iPad wouldn't cut it.)
- innocentoldguy 8y agoI think it is important at any age. I've been reading on a Kindle or iPad for years. My daughter recently bought a physical book for me and I had a hard time reading it. I've never had a difficult time diving into a book, but reading a physical book after using a kindle for so long made immersing my mind into the book quite challenging for some reason. I bought some other physical books the other day to see if the issue was just the story I was reading or if there is indeed an aspect of reading physical books that has atrophied in my brain after using electronic books for so long. If the latter, that would be quite concerning to me.
- hereiskkb 8y agoAs a child in a boarding school I actually got to grow up in a literal library. I would say most of what I am today, the good parts, come from me getting the opportunity to be among books, and that too of such diverse nature.
- ldiracdelta 8y agoOr it could be only a correlation. Smart parents have books, but they also have smart children.
- drb91 8y agoMaybe.... natural predilection is no replacement for experience, though, and reading is a type of experience. Arguably a high quality one. Also, there are obviously countless examples of seemingly intelligent people having kids which aren’t.
- ldiracdelta 8y agoYes. Genetics is messy and non-exact, but on the _average_ IQ is highly heritable.
- drb91 8y agoOn the average, IQ is 100. That is quite heritable. I’m not sure that’s meaningful genetically. Even correlated high IQ across generations can easily be a nuture over nature deal—see the above article for one hypothesis. Finally, even if high IQ is genetically heritable, it may still require cultural or experiential “activation” to nuture intrinsic ability. There are simply too many variables to casually state any causal relation.
- ldiracdelta 8y agoNo, the average of white people was normed at 100. I'm saying the average case is that people are the average of their parents. I'm not a genetic determinist and I am not an environmental determinist, but there is vast amounts of evidence that IQ is, for a large proportion of the causality, a heritable trait.
- amanaplanacanal 8y agoWikipedia says: "The heritability of IQ for adults is between 47% and 53% with some more-recent estimates as high as 70% and 76%."
- sna1l 8y agoI am unable to read the actual study (paywall) and this article doesn't really talk about the methodology, but did they account for socioeconomic factors? I would assume on average that the more books your family could afford, the more money they have.
- Symbiote 8y agoHere's the paper: https://sci-hub.tw/10.1016/j.ssresearch.2018.10.003 https://sci-hub.tw/10.1016/j.ssresearch.2018.10.003
- sna1l 8y agoGreat, thanks! It looks like they didn't account for family wealth unless I'm mistaken. In the omitted variables section: > However, prior research using longitudinal data from Australia with corrections for measurement error showed that a substantial impact of home library size on adult education existed net of the effects of academic ability (IQ) of adults or their father’s scholarly habitus (i.e. employment in occupations where use of books is common) as well as family income or wealth (Evans, et al., 2010).
- gumby 8y ago> I am unable to read the actual study (paywall) Here you go: https://sci-hub.tw/10.1016/j.ssresearch.2018.10.003 https://sci-hub.tw/10.1016/j.ssresearch.2018.10.003
- heyitsguay 8y agoThe relevant bit from the paper, emphasis mine: > Cross-sectional data with retrospective indicators of scholarly culture are affected by measurement error and indicators could reflect unmeasured influence of other confounding variables which may lead to over-optimistic estimates (de Vries and de Graaf, 2008). However, prior research using longitudinal data from Australia with corrections for measurement error showed that a substantial impact of home library size on adult education existed net of the effects of academic ability (IQ) of adults or their father's scholarly habits (i.e. employment in occupations where use of books is common) as well as family income or wealth (Evans et al., 2010). Although we have no means of correcting for these potential biases in ways available in longitudinal data, we argue that even somewhat optimistic estimates are of value as an initial step in proposing and assessing hypotheses for future, more stringent tests. To limit the potential for confounding adolescent and adult literacy-enhancing activities, we control for adult out-of-work activities related to literacy, numeracy and ICT skills that might correlate with scholarly culture experienced in adolescence but are indicators of adult scholarly culture.
- arkades 8y agoThe study this summary refers to studied books as an indicator of a “culture of scholasticism.” It didn’t even really try to disentangle socioeconomic effects, because it was looking to use books as a proxy for them. It did not say “books in the home make you smarter.” It was arguing “books are a reasonable cross-cultural proxy for orientation towards scholasticism in the home.” This summary, to my reading of the actual article, completely confuses cause and effect.
- _red 8y agoTheir confusion goes beyond using books as a proxy for scholasticism. No doubt its just a proxy for IQ itself (higher IQ people tend to read more books, thus own more books, thus score better on scholastic measures).
- codethief 8y ago> Respondents, who ranged in age from 25 to 65, were asked to estimate how many books were in their house when they were 16 years old. The research team was interested in this question because home library size can be a good indicator of what the study authors term “book-oriented socialization.” Participants were able to select from a given range of books that included everything from “10 or less” to “more than 500.” In order words, they just used the number of books as an indicator that very likely correlates with how much people used to read as kids, how many books their parents could afford and how much their parents cared about education and so on. If you accept this correlation, the results of the study become somewhat trivial. It's amazing how the people at Smithsonian Magazine maganaged to spin this as a causal relationship, though, in the sense of "Just surround yourself with books and it'll have a powerful, lasting effect on your mind." Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/552/ https://xkcd.com/552/
- bobcostas55 8y agoI liked how Matt Yglesias summarized the quality of this research: "Kids who grow up in households with lots of pants suitable for tall adults grow up to be tall as adults." Making causal claims without accounting for genetic confounds is simply pseudoscience, there are no excuses.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- drb91 8y agoSuggesting genetics is responsible instead (as opposed to any other variable) is no less pseudoscience. If only we could find some smart parents and get them to deny their kids books, we’d know for sure!
- hackinthebochs 8y agoSuggesting that genetics could be the causative factor isn't pseudoscience. It's pointing out that this study cannot disambiguate between the two, and so claiming causation is false.
- drb91 8y agoThe “claim” the original poster complained about also hedged with the word “could”—it’s in the title ffs. I am really tired of people talking about correlation and causation and completely ignoring carefully hedged phrases. Can we save them for when articles actually make concrete claims about causal links? There’s still interesting stuff here to discuss, and you can even soapbox your favorite theory. But there’s little to gain from actually discussing the (obvious) lack of causal link here. Unless you can point out how you’d improve the study—it’s not entirely obvious to me what the next step would be as I’m not a scientist.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- izzydata 8y agoI grew up in a house that had a library with 1000+ books. Unfortunately I didn't read much of any of them. Nobody ever tried to get me to read them. However, I blame myself for not reading much as a kid. My point being that the mere presence of books is not enough.
- xvector 8y agoI don’t think it makes sense to blame yourself. It is absolutely the job of parents to encourage their kids to read from a young age. To kids, reading looks terribly boring, until they actually find a book they like - then they devour everything in sight. How much I miss the combination of childhood imagination and fantastic stories!
- philipov 8y agoI believe that talent is best understood as arising from liking the thing you do, thus seeking it out from a young age, during the period when practice is most effective. It is the fact that one does not find most things boring that makes a person talented. Having casual access to books at home is critical for cultivating a talent for reading, because it increases the likelihood of the child stumbling upon the books that will catch their attention.
- izzydata 8y agoI had mostly infinite access to all kinds of media so would always turn to video games and TV. These things are now so affordable that I imagine that is the norm for kids today. I am curious if there is a big difference between immersing yourself in video game worlds compared to a books. Books would require more imagination, but early video games were pretty sparse and often required a large amount of imagination as well.
- Izkata 8y ago> To kids, reading looks terribly boring, until they actually find a book they like - then they devour everything in sight. So important and always ignored. My mom read to us often, and I and my brothers hated reading. Later I encountered an Animorphs book and that was my gateway. One of my brothers, several years after that, discovered Redwall, and that did it for him.
- jondubois 8y agoI never enjoyed reading fiction. Fiction trains your mind to look for fictitious narratives in real life; it distorts your perception of life and makes the world a worse place for others who don't follow those narratives.
- tjr 8y agoI don't read much fiction, but usually when I do, I feel as if I ought to read more, because it seems to engage creative imaginative thinking in a way that non-fiction doesn't. Anecdotally, of course.
- tdb7893 8y agoDo you not watch TV, movies, or plays or play video games? I'm just curious, avoiding fiction us a really interesting worldview and I'm curious whether it extends to every medium.
- Koshkin 8y agoOne good thing about fiction is that the main character does not die in the middle of the story.
- coldtea 8y agoThat rule has been broken several times in fiction.
- philipov 8y agoSome of the best fiction I've read involves the main character dying in the middle of the story, and is written in the first person, where the reveal that the author is not actually who he says he was is the climactic moment of the story.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- coldtea 8y agoThat's cheesy fiction. Good fiction trains your mind to understand different world-views and other peoples' narratives of themselves and the world (as opposed to satisfying yourself with your own narrative as the "objective truth").
- cimmanom 8y agoHow much of this is simply attributable to parents who love to read inculcating their kids with a love of reading -- as opposed to the presence of the books themselves?
- innocentoldguy 8y agoI would say it is entirely parents inculcating a love of reading in their children. Kids could live in a library, but if they never read they wouldn't receive any benefit from their environment. That was the issue I had with the article. The author wrote it in a way that suggested the mere presence of books produced an effect. I believe the presence of books offers no benefit whatsoever unless kids read them.
- geebee 8y agoThis particular instance of correlation and causation has always been fascinating to me. Is it possible to have a non causal correlation that is impossible to bring about without increasing (causing) the effect. For instance suppose you tried an experiment of getting 500 books into a household with a new infant and zero books. Let’s say you did this with no special attempt to produce the cause, but made no attempt to ensure the process of getting 500 books over there had no influence either. How would you go about this? Ask for donations? Collect books? How would you find donors, how would you find families to donate to? My guess, which I make purely on a hunch, is that you would have to make dramatic (perhaps unconscionable) efforts to ensure that this process would not bring about the effect of higher literacy on average. Not sure by how much but I think (just a thesis) that it would be meaningfully measurable
- bluGill 8y agoBooks are cheap. I'd get 500 books from a used bookstore and put them in a hut in some primitive village. Note that books would not be in the native language, and nobody in the village can read anyway. My hypothesis is that books will make no difference. An interesting and useful experiment would be to place books in the homes of poor people who can read but don't. Turns out cities all over the US are doing this experiment on a large scale right now (often paid for by United Way). While the experiment isn't completely controlled anyone who cares to can collect data and analyse it.
- geebee 8y agoSounds like they’re running the experiment. The first scenario you described is a good illustration of the kind of effort it would take to ensure no effect. The second? I’d be interested in knowing how they find families and decide what books to include. I’d expect (and I admit I hope) it will have a measurable efect. I’ll search for it but please post a link if you have one.
- bluGill 8y agohttps://1000booksbeforekindergarten.org/ https://1000booksbeforekindergarten.org/ They claim studies support the idea, but I'm not able to figure out which
- tryauuum 8y agomaybe being surrounded with 350+ books correlates with rich parents. And rich parents have an opportunity to pay for higher education for their children.
- rossdavidh 8y agoHalfway through the article, when I saw the part about how the number of books varied between nations, I thought, "oh cool! They're going to use that to address the possible confounding affects, since otherwise you might just be measuring whether parents who make sure their kids are well educated end up with a lot of books in their home. If kids in the 90th percentile for their country (for number of books in their home) have less similar outcomes than kids with the same number of books (from different countries), this would be indicative that the books that actually matter." If that point is in the article, though, it's sure not in Smithsonian's article, and since it's Elsevier I can't look at the original. :(
- SamReidHughes 8y agoI'll bet you equally good correlations can be found when the parents have a Kindle library that the kid doesn't have access to. You'd expect articles like this to have a paragraph, "The researchers controlled for biological heredity by ________" but it seems they don't want you to take them seriously. Edit: Oh, they also show that growing up in a home full of books makes you more numerate, too. So, no surprise, there's a general intelligence factor involved that has nothing to do with books.
- dragonwriter 8y ago> when I saw the part about how the number of books varied between nations, I thought, "oh cool! They're going to use that to address the possible confounding affects, since otherwise you might just be measuring whether parents who make sure their kids are well educated end up with a lot of books in their home Per the abstract to the original article, they didn't need to address parental education as a confounding factor by such an indirect means, since parental education (as well as the subject’s education and occupation) was one of the directly studied factors, and the library size contribution existed even after taking those other factors into account. > and since it's Elsevier I can't look at the original. Well, yeah, I'd like more than just the abstract and secondhand reporting, too.
- nsomaru 8y agoObligatory Schopenhauer: https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/s/schopenhauer/arthur/essays/chapter3.html https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/s/schopenhauer/arthur/essays/... On reading and books.
- baccheion 8y agoWide availability of access to the internet could have a similar effect, unless time is mostly spent on sites like Facebook. Reading became a lot easier (wouldn't space out) once taking acetyl L-carnitine + alpha-GPC. SEMAX + selank + alpha-GPC is even better. Iodine protocol.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- jackconnor 8y agoThere is supposedly a huge correlation between reading speed and standardized test scores, like the SAT/GRE/GRE, which while not the point of this article is still a powerful argument for reading books as a kid. And, this could be any book, it just matters that you're practicing reading.
- baccheion 8y agoThis could make sense. The hardest part of the English SAT section was my abysmally slow reading speed.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- tombert 8y agoMy parents would basically (with a few exceptions due to price) buy me any book I wanted growing up (without it hitting into my allowance); they thought it was incredibly important to grow up well-read, and even more important to learn how to teach yourself stuff, and similarly every standardized test I took was insultingly easy. I'm definitely not some pillar of intellectual vigor either (I don't even have a college degree), so the fact that my reading comprehension is good, I think, is because of the exposure to books. That said, I realize that one anecdote doesn't mean anything.
- kurttheviking 8y ago>That said, I realize that one anecdote doesn't mean anything. Nevetheless, I appreciate the hack you suggested of excluding books from allowance. As a parent, that's something I'll now implement. Thanks for sharing.
- solipsism 8y agoDo you charge your kids' allowance for food? Rent? If you all go out to eat? It's odd to me that anyone would ever think of charging their child for a book.
- amanaplanacanal 8y agoI have heard of parents making kids buy their own clothing out of allowance, as a way of teaching them the value of money and how to shop responsibly.
- dwiel 8y agoMy parents never bought us (or themselves) books, but they took us to the library all the time, and we all like to read. I now take my kids to the library often as well. Buying as many books as we read as kids would have cost a fortune.
- georgeecollins 8y agoLeaving aside the poor science of this study, I wonder if there is any impact to the fact that I have a large collection of books that sit on my kindle. Living in my parents house I was surrounded and influenced by their books. My children read a lot, but they may not be as aware as I was of what their parents are reading. And there is a lot less of that social signaling that happens when a guest sees a book on the bookshelf that they read or are interested in.
- jdlyga 8y agoDefinitely. When I was little, my parents had this amazing book about each of the planets in the solar system from the late 80s. It had all these theoretical paintings of what the surface of each planet looks like (or the interior of Jupiter). I didn't understand the science since it was more adult-focused. But it was definitely good to have around.
- kirsebaer 8y agoNational Geographic Picture Atlas of Our Universe (1980). I loved that book as a kid!
- innocentoldguy 8y agoI completely agree with this article, based on my own anecdotal experiences (I don't think the science behind this article was the best, but I'll save that for another post). My great grandma never had the chance to go to school, but she loved to read. She would work, save up, and buy books whenever she could. Books were all she ever wanted for her birthday or Christmas. Even though she had no formal education to speak of, she was an intelligent woman and wrote prose and poetry as good as any I experienced in college. My great-grandmother's love of reading has been passed down through four generations now (down to my children). I have over a thousand books in my house, some of which belonged to my great-grandmother. I learned software engineering by reading books I borrowed from my local public library and built a successful career through reading and studying these freely available tomes on my own. When my kids were in school, I told them to put all their efforts into reading. I knew from personal experience that if they could read well they would be able to learn anything they wanted to. So far, that has been the case. If I could only have one life skill, it would be reading. Having access to hundreds of books growing up certainly helped me and made me who I am today. Of course, having books around does nothing for you unless you crack them open and read. The only downside has been schlepping all those books around every time we move.
- sandov 8y agoMy house didn't have that many books (less than 100), but I didn't have a computer (I'm from a developing country), so when I got extremely bored I just picked up whatever book I could to keep myself entertained for a couple of hours. This is how I fell in love with Asimov's stories and eventually got into programming.
- austinheap 8y agoWhen I would get in trouble as a kid my mom would ground me for a certain number of books. As I got older/wiser/in-more-trouble the requirement moved from # of books to # of pages and she'd test me on random sections of the readings. A++ productive way of dealing with a difficult child!
- frockington 8y agoI would've loved to see the creativity that went on between you trying to get through as many pages as possible and your mom trying to ensure you read them
- mti27 8y agoEven without reading them, the books on my parents' shelves had an affect on me due to the wacky titles. They stuck in my mind and to this day, I can still remember them: "Blind Ambition" or "The Winds of War" or "The Greening of America" - seeing these as a kid caused me to ask lots of questions, i.e. who is John Dean and why is America turning green? :)
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- StillBored 8y agoI wonder how outdated/lagging these studies are. When I was a kid I was reading nearly every waking moment between say 3rd grade and 9th because It was the only form of entertainment I had (until I got a computer). That is because my parents thought that TV rotted a child's brain and didn't have one in the house until after I left. Today, my kids read, but they have phones, TV's, computers, and a ton of other distractions that have proven nearly impossible to control without an outright ban in the whole house.
- fein 8y ago> and a ton of other distractions that have proven nearly impossible to control without an outright ban in the whole house. So your parents were right.
- bigger_cheese 8y agoI grew up in similar environment my parents restricted how much TV my sisters and I were allowed to watch. We were given a certain number of hours of TV a week that they would let us watch (something like 3 hours per week) and as punishment for failing to do chores or similar we would have some tv time taken away. As a result we read a lot of books. I also spent a lot of time playing with things like Lego and as I got older I was into Meccano and building Model aircraft/cars etc. Eventually I got into Computers. In my mid teens I bought a second hand computer (a 386) from street market. It wasn't working so I read up on how it all worked tracked down spare parts etc and once I got it booting I spent hours everyday on the thing.
- lowdest 8y agoI was fascinated by D&D rulebooks when I was a kid. The systems captured my imagination as much as the fantasy aspect. Because of that, my vocabulary included excellent words like "melee", "flail", and "barrage" while I was still in the single digits of age.
- chiefalchemist 8y agoThis feels like another version of nature vs nurture. That is, if your parents had books, lots of books, there's probably a reason(s) for that. I would think, the ultimate study would be of adopted and/or children who do not share DNA with their parents, or other siblings. Is the environment an equalizer, so to speak? This is certainly interesting, but it's more correlation than cause.
- sudosteph 8y agoI never had much of a home library my formative years (would estimate < 50, maybe < 30), but I always had such easy access to public libraries (in my schools, and more importantly one within walking distance in my town) that I still easily consumed 1-3 new books a week for most of my childhood and teenage years. While 500 books in a home library is impressive, I almost think that would have been more constrictive to my learning options compared to the selections available from a public library system. One thing I noticed, and a reason that I depended on my local public library so much more than the school ones, is that the selection for libraries in schools before high school is way too age restricted. I once tried to donate a few of my favorite paperbacks (Stephen King novels) for future students, but the librarian told me the school system would just end up transferring those to a high school library. Anyhow, my point is, I would be interested to know if living within walking distance of a public library is similarly correlated with better outcomes.
- solipsism 8y agoI'll be the devil's advocate. There's this idea out there that you should get your kids reading, no matter what they read. I see the idea expressed here, and I see it expressed in my kids' school. I wonder what that idea is based on. Any actual experimental studies that imply a causal link between any kind of reading and intelligence or success or some such metric? Anything to show how a heavy-reading childhood compares to a heavy-videogames childhood? The answer is of course no. You can't run such a study and have it be experimental. So I'm extremely skeptical of this idea. Not that I keep books from my children. Reading is one of life's great joys, and that's enough of a reason to encourage it, in my opinion.
- resalisbury 8y agoGrowing up in homes advantaged enough to have large libraries could indicate you are, in fact, advantaged!
- resalisbury 8y agoI could just say correlation != causation and move on. ...but I thought I would at least give it 5 minutes of googling. Here's the first randomized controlled trial I could find testing whether access to libraries had any impact on literacy. TLDR (for this one study): access to libraries does not improve literacy. "We conduct a randomized controlled trial of an Indian school library program. Overall, the program had no impact on students' scores on a language skills test administered after 16 months. The estimates are sufficiently precise to rule out effects larger than 0.053 and 0.037 standard deviations, based on the 95 and 90 percent confidence intervals. This finding is robust across individual competencies and subsets of the sample. The method of treatment, however, does seem to matter--physical libraries have no effect, while visiting librarians actually reduce test scores." I will repeat the last line "visiting librarians actually reduce test scores." That seems counter intuitive. Maybe we should write articles w/ titles "LIBRARIES INCREASE ILLITERACY." That would be a dump article to write, but only slightly more dumb than the current article ;) https://www.nber.org/papers/w18183 https://www.nber.org/papers/w18183 p.s. I like libraries.