Reading up on reading
The Gist: Your child needs to hear lots of words. Make sure they reflect your worldview.
The average American child spends more time watching television than in school.
Only about 9% of an American’s life is spent in school before her 19th birthday: weekends, summers, Indigenous Peoples Day, etc. add up - and only so much of time spent “at school” is actually learning.
Yet the average child is spending 4+ hours on television (and now other screens for entertainment purposes) every single day. And it begins far too near the beginning of life. No surprise that continuously constantly switching to whatever is most entertaining is correlated with ADHD (and worse academic performance). It doesn’t even deliver on its glittery promises: proclaimed relaxing, instead screens offer some of the least effective stress relief strategies available. As if all that wasn’t bad enough, it’s a cultural wasteland. Harvard psychologist Robert Coles insists “If you as a parent don't take steps to educate your child's imagination, it's an almost sure bet that his imagination will be seduced by the power of popular culture. You need a way to inoculate his imagination against the electronic viruses he will be exposed to as he grows older.”
But TV is convenient.
This email is about a harder path to a higher point. There are about six ways for your child to best spend his time before age six; they require you to:
Teach your child to self-soothe to maximize his (and parents’) sleep
Feed your child the aftermath of mom’s good nutrition and, later, good nutrition himself
Take care of basic hygiene (my wife would encourage a relatively crunchy approach that takes a hard look at what materials are made out of)
Talk and talk and talk so that you narrate all the wonder of the world around you on an ongoing basis and build up your child’s morals and models
Read and read and read so as to expose him to words and situations beyond your personal experience and build a foundation for lifelong learning
Encourage him in thoughtful play that allows him to focus his attention, exercise self-control, and figure things out
This email is about (4) and (5).
Figure 1. This list is of course modern. No longer can your children bring home a little something extra for you as they get the benefit of working themselves in a factory. Notably, 19th century industrialists had as much tolerance for tantrums as they did for strikes.
The neuroscientist John Medina contends: “Speak to your children as often as you can. It is one of the most well-established findings in all of the developmental literature.” We naturally engage in “a high-pitched tone and a singsongy voice with stretched-out vowels” when talking to small children but it’s important to speak in real sentences and as much about your practical life as you can. Bring your child along for as many of your activities as possible and narrate exactly what you’re doing and why (“Folding laundry is like a puzzle trying to match all the socks together. Sometimes they like to play hide-and-seek, but I always find them”) as well as your observations (“Fossil fuels are miraculous substances that allow us to cheaply travel great distances, warm our homes, and more”). Introduce other adults, describe their professions, and ask them to give explanations for what they’re doing (“This is a mechanic. He fixes cars. Of course I completely understand everything you’ve suggested but can you explain it to this small child?”).
Figure 2. Everyone thinks that having a very small child is a wake up call for selflessness as you help this helpless creature with everything they do. Wrong! It’s a perfect time for your inner narcissist to shine as you get to endlessly talk and explain the world as you see it without interruption or contradiction.
Tend toward the concrete (young children can have a difficult time with abstraction) but talk as much as you can stand and you’ll build their model of the world. As they get older, shift from narration to conversation and ask lots of questions.
But this isn’t just a teaching mechanism, it’s about your relationship with your child. The nutritional biologist Alice Callahan remarkably reports: “In one experiment, mothers were asked not to talk to their newborns at all but to otherwise care for them as usual. (Can you imagine how unnatural this would feel?) Several hours after birth, these babies were shown photos of their mothers and a stranger, and they showed no preference for their mom’s.” To this end, make sure that your child can see your face as often as possible (including having a stroller where he looks at you rather than out).
Meanwhile, in your child’s first few months out of the womb (and indeed in the womb), read aloud whatever you’re interested in (or, as life may require, whatever you need to be reading): legal briefs, spy novels, newspapers, the collective writing of Grant Starrett, recipes, whatever. As the elementary school librarian Beverly Kobrin notes: "It doesn't matter whether or not youngsters understand all the words you speak; what matters is that they hear fluent, literate language." 9 months in, and we’re still mixing our own reading in.
Figure 3. If your child is a super-genius in the making, you can start tapping out great literature via morse code in the womb. This is actually easy enough. The real trick is getting him to tap back.
If you want to try to engage a child’s interest, you might lead out of the womb with simple black and white images to accommodate their limited color palette but then move on to intentionally colorful fare. Soon, children will appreciate the sound of rhymes, which may suggest some order to their universe. But they may not actually appreciate a plot until they’re 2.5 years old. In fact, the Read Aloud Family characterizes books before age 4 as “delicious,” meaning that your child will most likely want to eat any and every book you try to read. Which is fine! Various designs make children’s books hardy - but you can also distract their teething curiosity with another object.
Figure 4. Entree and dessert
Really, though, you want to establish a culture of reading in which your life is overflowing with books. Display them around the house, especially wherever your child spends time (including the bathroom and in the car.) As ever, your child pays close attention to you, so you best model reading yourself.
Former Secretary of Education Bill Bennett insists “a child wants to learn how to read in part because he wants to please his parents, whom he sees reading and who encourage his own efforts to read.” Make reading as cozy an experience as possible. Read-Aloud Handbook author Jim Trelease suggests adding “a third dimension to the book” like having blueberries to eat when reading Blueberries for Sal.
Above all, make sure you remain interested in the books you read to your child or else your child will soon realize it’s just a chore. My wife and I read all prospects, score them separately out of 10, and if a book doesn’t average a 7.5+, then we give it away. This is perhaps all the more important because kids very soon appreciate the endless repetition of their favorites.
While there may have once been a time where you could just trust your childcare provider or pick up whatever happened to be displayed on a library or bookstore shelf and just start reading, that no longer holds. My own formulation is to let your child pick a topic and you pick the books. Know that even “classics” have wide variations and a variety of illustrations. The authors of Books that Build Character insist: “Don't choose a book simply on the basis of its reputation. Reading the book yourself is the only sure way of knowing if it reflects your outlook on life.” This is pretty easy at the most basic level, where it takes a matter of seconds to review but gets harder as the kids age and the books lengthen. Yet that’s exactly when children will be becoming most aware of their content. Books that Build Character insists "It's not enough to know what's right. It's also necessary to desire to do right.” And, interestingly:
“Reread some of the great classics of literature and you will be surprised to find how often the plot revolves around simple moral failings on the one hand, and simple kindnesses on the other. More often than not the protagonists are faced not with thorny ethical dilemmas (of the type that many of today's educators love to throw at students) but rather with temptations of gambling, anger, lust, lying, and thievery.”
I recently read Paul Johnson’s History of the American People and it’s not surprising but I was struck by just how present the living God was in the daily (hourly?) lives of the Puritans. If you aspire to raise your children in your faith tradition, how much are they engaging with it on a daily basis through your narration (and prayer) and the books you read? How often are you reading aloud to your child the source of your faith itself (or at least a child adaptation)? Why not everyday?
Policing moral instruction is a fairly easy sell, but here’s a more controversial take: go light on fantasy. The great pedagogue Maria Montessori observed that children under 6 are desperately trying to figure out how the real world works and that unrealistic stories only serve to confuse them (or, in the case of religious texts, undermine their unique truth). This approach is rather unpopular, even among Montessori’s modern adherents, because it means a reduction (or even elimination) of all those talking animals and absurd situations that many consider core to childhood. Of course, even within this recommendation, such tales are welcome after age 6, and I’ll say personally that striving for realism actually filters toward more thoughtful books.
Figure 5. If your eggs and ham have become green, the reality is that you shouldn’t be so keen; though they may look like a tasty treat, their emerald hue could mean spoiled meat!
Eventually, you’ll want to curate a collection from which your child can choose to pursue his own interests. According to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Samuel Johnson is “arguably the most distinguished man of letters in English history;” he advised:
“I would put a child into a library (where no unfit books are) and let him read at his choice. A child should not be discouraged from reading anything that he takes a liking to, from a notion that it is above his reach. If that be the case, the child will soon find it out and desist; if not, he of course gains the instruction; which is so much the more likely to come, from the inclination with which he takes up the study”
Figure out what your child is interested in and feed that curiosity - get as many books on those subjects as they can handle (this will also reveal discrepancies and teach them not to actually trust everything they read). The librarian Kobrin’s favorite answer to her childrens’ questions was “I don’t know! Let’s find out!”
And yet amidst all this book love, it’s not totally obvious how much time you should aspire to read to your child every day except “more.” The classic guide to classical education, the ever-rigorous Well-Trained Mind, recommends from birth to age 5, preparation for reading, writing, and math at “10 minutes a day for each subject, gradually increasing to about 30 minutes a day by age 5.” The Read-Aloud Handbook says “in nearly all these studies, attention spans during infant reading time averaged only three minutes, though several daily readings often brought the total as high as thirty minutes a day.” Our own family goal is at least a half hour a day.
Figure 6. Just think of this as the opposite of what happens with adults, where TikTok has managed to reduce attention span to an average video length of 32 seconds!
Along a similar vein, can reading aloud be done in the background as a child plays or must he be, as much as is possible, compelled to concentrate? Certainly the most powerful benefits occur when a child is into the experience and, in particular, as a child ages, when you actively engage them in questions about the book (in this sense, I suspect Charlotte Mason’s approach of asking kids to narrate back what you’ve read in their own words is especially smart). Relatedly, though some reading enthusiasts recommend, when adults are busy, playing an audiobook or podcast, there appears to be little evidence that it does much. A more interesting question is whether the background audio actually harms concentration on thoughtful play (there’s definitely evidence of this happening with background television; the Montessori material I’ve read to date and the neuroscientist Medina also are so keen on hands-on experience in the young age demo that even reading itself gets comparative short attention.)
And if concentration is what matters, how fast should you try to teach your kid how to read by himself? All pedagogies appear to agree that a book-rich, daily-reading-aloud household is ideal for cultivating young readers. But Finland, which enjoys higher-end reading scores on international tests, doesn’t formally teach reading until seven. Singaporeans, who enjoy better scores, freak out if their children aren’t reading by four or five. Reviewing the literature, the economist Emily Oster says: “If you are inclined to teach your four-year-old to read, you can probably make some progress” with phonics (the slow sounding out of words).
But even when your child can read by himself, keep reading aloud! Younger children can still follow stories they hear that they’d have more difficulty reading by themselves. Reading and listening levels only converge around age 13; before then, a child can usually follow something meant for someone 2-3 years older. You might also contemplate leaning into material that was meant to be heard like speeches or certain poetry.
Oster insists that “There is a large body of literature showing that children whose parents read to them as babies and preschoolers have better performance on reading tests later.” Yes, yes, as ever, it could be correlation, but, again, why not lean into it? As a practical matter, most Americans believe they should read to their kids. They just don’t do it at the level of their aspiration. So the question is: how, practically, can you make sure that you regularly read to your kid? Here are some ideas:
Make the desirable thing (reading) easier and the undesirable thing (alternatives) harder. Redesign your life: Try to make reading to your child as delightful as possible by getting rid of books you dislike and creating a maximally cozy experience with conveniently accessible favorites. Get rid of your television to remove a temptation, talk to your boss about making sure you get home in time to read to your kids before bed. Each Sunday, plan your week’s reading ahead to anticipate and counterplan obstacles.
What gets measured gets managed. Track how much time you spend reading to your child every day and adjust your life so as to hit your goal. Hang a big calendar in your child’s room and mark each day you read for a half hour or more with a big red X. Don’t break the chain. If you publicize this to friends, you may be even further motivated.
Create simple rules: if x, then read. The classic is the bedtime story: every night before little ones go to sleep, read. But there are others: every time you breastfeed, read. If mom is cooking, dad reads. If dad is driving, mom reads.
These are just some generic starting points: how can you apply these to your own life?
And yet while every American parent seems to ask each other about books, every Singaporean parent asks “But what do you do for math?” In fact, Maya Thiagarajan, the author of Beyond the Tiger Mom who has taught in both places, said “not once in America was I ever asked what I did for math” for her own kids. Part of the answer is going to come in a future email about thoughtful activities - but you also should be conscientious about reading books with math themes, asking mathematical questions about what is happening in all books, and incorporating math into your narration.
Singaporean parents draw special attention to the numbers and shapes and patterns in their families’ lives which, of course, are everywhere. Our family counts steps every time we go up and down the stairwell. Kitchens are laboratories of measuring and timing. Grocery stores are cornucopias of capitalism: if we buy these three things, how much will it all cost? If this costs x, what is its price per pound? What products traveled the shortest and farthest to get here? I recently told my son: “I’m packing for our trip, how many days are we gone? 5? Then we’ll need 5 pairs of socks, that’s 10 socks!”
Figure 7. Just be careful about your choice of bedtime story. After teaching Knox just after he was born about the federal reserve’s multiplication of the money supply in the last few years, he didn’t sleep well for months!
Thiagarajan recommends playing all kinds of math games: “Make up activities using a measuring tape: measure your furniture; ask your kids to jump as far as they can (long jump), mark the starting line and the place where they land, and then get them to calculate how far they jumped.” Or: “Think of a number, then give the kids some clues (it’s a multiple of two, it’s less than ten and more than four), then let them guess what number could it be.” Or “arrange license-plate numbers in ascending or descending order.” Or: “Look, we’re riding up and down a number line. If we’re on the fifth floor now, how many more floors till we get to the eleventh floor?” You might even consider making bets with your kids. But it’s really quite simple: as you narrate, make math matter.
We’ll end where we began, having picked up a few more things along the way. If language acquisition is so important, why can’t TV provide it?
Angeline Lillard, the author of Montessori: the Science Behind the Genius, suggests that television has two particular problems for very young children, both related to their attempts to learn how the world really works: extremely fast pacing and fantasy. In her review, SpongeBob SquarePants is absolutely disastrous for children’s executive function (self-control) and even a slower fantasy program is worse than a faster nature program. A different study found that Sesame Street better taught children than television alternatives - but that it was far outperformed by adults reading books to children. Medina instructs that “The greatest pediatric brain-boosting technology in the world is probably a plain cardboard box, a fresh box of crayons, and two hours. The worst is probably your new flat-screen TV.” Oster agrees: “there is a tremendous amount of evidence suggesting that exposure to TV—and, more generally, to any screens—is associated with lower cognitive development. Researchers have shown that kids who watch more TV are less healthy and have lower test scores.” The Self-Driven Child piles on: “If you’re a kid, the formula begins to look like this: the more technology you use, the poorer your self-regulation.” Medina says, specifically about the very young:
“TV also poisons attention spans and the ability to focus, a classic hallmark of executive function. For each additional hour of TV watched by a child under the age of 3, the likelihood of an attentional problem by age 7 increased by about 10 percent. So a preschooler who watches three hours of TV per day is 30 percent more likely to have attentional problems than a child who watches no TV.”
And a big problem with television is opportunity cost: how much sleep was lost due to time and blue light? What book or social interaction might have been had versus this passive consumption? Read-Aloud Handbook author Jim Trelease responds to parents who say they have no time to read to their kids that, if that were true, Netflix would be bankrupt. And he points to a study that among those children with a high interest in books, less than 40% of their parents watch TV themselves, meaning that ideally you’d model the best behavior. Basically every pedagogy (except perhaps unschooling) declares war on the medium.
Medina says “the amount of TV a child should watch before the age of 2 is zero.” After age 5, the evidence isn’t quite as harsh, but it’s not great. Oster suggests if you watch to distract your (older) kids while you’re taking a shower, fine, but don’t expect anything other than distraction. If you do TV, turn on closed captions so they have the chance to read, and make future tv conditional on a good attitude of turning it off.
But if you can exercise screen restraint, it seems rather worthwhile. Instead, focus your child’s time and attention on the big six: long sound sleep, good eats, basic hygiene, conversations about the world, many books, and thoughtful play.
Figure 8. Click here to acquire the Read-Aloud Handbook by Jim Trelease, which has plenty of good thoughts though distracting politics (e.g. “If we can rebuild Iraq and Afghanistan, we can fix all the urban schools and public libraries in America”). Still, Trelease has plenty of passages that support a more conventional fact-based presentation along the lines of ED Hirsch and even argues “the harsh reality here is most teachers don’t read much. [In one small survey of teachers] More than half said they had read only one or two professional books in the previous year, and an additional 20 percent said they had read nothing in the past six months or one year. What did they read beyond professional material? Twenty-two percent read a newspaper only once a week. Seventy-five percent were only “light” book readers—one or two a year.” Trelease has some good ideas, including making your own book of pictures of objects around your house with the appropriate textual labels (I should also mention here the Well-Trained Mind’s suggestion to sing the ABCs every time you change a diaper). Trelease sets expectations:
“Here is a forecast so you’ll not be discouraged or think your child is hopeless. At four months of age, since he has limited mobility, a child has little or no choice but to listen and observe, thus making a passive and noncombative audience for the parent, who is probably thinking, ‘This is easy!’ Your arms should encircle the child in such a way as to suggest support and bonding, but not imprisonment, allowing the child to view the pages if you’re reading a picture book. By six months, however, the child is more interested in grabbing the book to suck on it than listening (which he’s also doing). Bypass the problem by giving him a teething toy or other distraction. At eight months, he may prefer turning pages to steady listening. Allow him ample opportunity to explore this activity, but don’t give up the book entirely. At twelve months, the child’s involvement grows to turning pages for you, pointing to objects you name on the page, even making noises for animals on cue. By fifteen months and the onset of walking, his restlessness blossoms fully, and your reading times must be chosen so as not to frustrate his immediate interests.”
Figure 9. The previous book has recommendations in its long appendix but I honestly haven’t dug into them very much so far. Books that Build Character opens with a heartbreaking anecdote about attending a pediatric ward and a dying child who only wants to be good - honestly, it’s worth reading these couple of pages alone to understand the importance of the effort. Its appendix of recommendations I have gone through and is getting at the right thought. Amazingly, for a book by self-described centrists in the 1990s, it includes this passage: "The Civil War, our greatest national tragedy, ended slavery once and for all. But not even the most biased historian would argue that the war was a battle between forces of pure good and pure evil. Both sides demonstrated bravery and compassion, and both produced outstanding leaders. In remembering this traumatic period of our history, we can place Robert E. Lee alongside Abraham Lincoln as a man of equal moral stature."
Figure 10. Click here to acquire Eyeopeners II by the Mountain View librarian Beverly Kobrin. This collection is focused on nonfiction, which she feels is underappreciated as a genre for children. She also insists that nonfiction children’s books should be fairly recently published in order to accommodate the most recent facts - if true, then this book is useless because it is decades old. But I found it interesting to see what categories interested her children - the ancient world, animals, biographies, bodies, buildings, cookbooks, cowboys, dinosaurs, experiments, large equipment, scientists. Kobrin also recommends: "Stop before their span of attention ends, so that they look forward to tomorrow's session when they can be 'grown up' and 'read' quietly. Remember you want to establish a habit of enjoying a private time with a book"
Figure 11. Check out my two-part series on digital restraint: Intervention (thoughts on how tech is designed to distract you from your priorities) and Say No to the Glow (specific, escalating steps to spend less time with your favorite screen). I highly recommend The Tech-Wise Family by Andy Crouch, who advises no screens until your kids’ ages are in the double-digits. He insists “We most often give our children screens not to make their lives easier but to make our lives easier.” Indeed, “The less we rely on screens to occupy and entertain our children, the more they become capable of occupying and entertaining themselves.”
Figure 12. Click here to acquire Beyond the Tiger Mom by Maya Thiagarajan. Thiagarajan was born in India to a South Indian father and American mother, got a Harvard education degree, and has taught at a variety of public and private schools in the United States, Singapore, and India. Her politics can also be distracting (English is “the language of the colonizer, the language of power”) but the book is nevertheless a useful study in the contrasts of east and west. In addition to Singaporeans’ incorporation of math, I appreciated their desire for honest and critical feedback about how their children were doing (versus the American practice for respecting self-esteem and awarding everyone a trophy) and the greater incorporation of adults into children’s lives such that they were better looked up to than peers.
Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this, forward it to a friend: know anyone who is thinking about having a child? Or grandchild? Or was once a child themselves?
For more, check out my archive of writings, including Newborn, my review of several books about the importance of marriage, sleep, and diet to your very young child.
If you’ve received this email from a friend and would like more, sign up at www.grantreadsbooks.com or shoot me an email at grant@grantstarrett.com with the subject “Subscribe.” I read over 100 non-fiction books a year (history, business, self-management) and share a review (and terrible cartoons) every couple weeks with my friends. Really, it’s all about how to be a better American and how America can be better. Look forward to having you on board!