Want Smart Kids? Here’s What to Do

Dang, physicsprof, I wish I had read your post before I ordered 501 books on Amazon. But seriously, it doesn’t even have to be a non-pc argument. For all we know parents having lots of books may signify that the parents understand that questions are answerable, and that knowlege may be sought. This may serve as a motivating factor for the children. In other words, it simply may be a sign of a family culture where, instead of saying “I wish I knew,” the kids learn to say “let’s find out!”

Danhimes, I’ll buy them from you for 50% of the price.As to your (and #3′s) argument, here is a quote from “Freakonomics”:”But how then to explain another famous study, the Colorado Adoption Project, which followed the lives of 245 babies put for adoption and found virtually no correlation between the child’s personality traits and those of his adoption parents.”

Validation at last…no longer am I just a compulsive children’s bookbuyer but a caring parent.

I often wonder who and what I’d be if I’d grown up in a home without books. Neither of my parents were intellectual and we never had conversations about ideas, but we all read constantly. And while their reading taste was pedestrian, it’s a habit that continues in each of us to this day. I beleive I owe much of my success in college and beyond to a love of reading.

I realize that this is a bit off-topic, but William Deresiewicz has a wonderful essay in the most recent issue of American Scholar. This essay, entitled “Solitude and Leadership: If You Want Others to Follow, Learn To Be Alone With Your Thoughts” is an adaptation of a lecture delivered to the plebe class at the US Military Academy (West Point) last October. Deresiewicz postulates that leadership is a function of solitary analysis, introspection, concentration, and vision. Moreover, he advocates a “great books” approach to foster these activities, for “the great books, the ones you find on a syllabus, the ones people have continued to read, don’t reflect the conventional wisdom of their day. They say things that have the permanent power to disrupt our habits of thought. They were revolutionary in their own time, and they are still revolutionary today.” His essay is a moving argument for the power of reading.

Fast-forward 20 years. The headline reads: “Kids College Success Correlated with Parent’s Kindle Downloads”.

I can remember the home I grew up in….my mother putting books in our hands that were above us (Kirkegaard, plays of Ibsen) and even the Childcraft series….ah the joys of “The Highwayman”…(‘and the Moon was a ghostly galleon, tossed on stormy seas”….)…her love of language and the books we had in our home instilled a love of reading, poetry and literature that spurred us (my two siblings and I) to academic excellence. 500? maybe not, but plenty of books that were always available….FL Prof

To paraphrase one of the Chronicle’s authors: Gee Wiz Billy Bob. Did ya know readin and writin might make ya smart.

I grew up in an apartment with exactly four books (three of which I still have), a dictionary, “Up Front,” a book of WWII Army cartoons by Bill Mauldin, “Quo Vadis”by Sienkiewicz (which I started a few times and never finished), and “Best Stories from the Best Book” by Ella King Sanders (has some neat bean plant germination drawings along with LOTS of illustrations from the Good Book and religious admonitions for the inquiring three-year old). Is it any wonder that I graduated about thirty from the bottom of my high school class? And all this time I thought I had a bad attitude! If only my single mom (an 8th grade graduate-bless her memory) had spent more of the $3,000 she made a year on books I might have gone to Harvard! We did, however, have a wonderful small branch library a city block away. Maybe that’s why I’m not pushing a broom today (although according to many of my students I should be). At one time I couldn’t even spell Ph.D. (thank God for spell-checkers) and now I are one! Thank God library cards are free.

Bdbailey (#17), Freakonomics talked exactly about the subject — whether having books at home would make any difference, see starting from page 172. It also talked about Blagojevich $26 mil a year initiative to mail books to all children of Illinois.

I think it has to do with placing value on books…which conveys an attitude toward learning. Neither of my kids were avid readers growing up, but now they have multiple graduate degrees between them. And, interestingly, we went through our books, taking the ones they wanted…most were children’s books but each wanted a copy of my thesis and dissertation!

MrMars — how funny; but, you do have a valid point. Use the public library–kids should be encouraged to do so.

I wonder if children whose parents have many pills in their homes are healthier than those who have few pills (only pills because the tactile sense of swallowing is clearly more authentically medicating). If so, it would make as much sense to put more pills in homes to increase children’s health as it would to put more books in homes to increase academic achievement.

I couldn’t get to a public library by myself. My parents would have to take me (which meant I’d have to ask, which I never would have thought of doing). The few times they did take me there, librarians kept steering me into the children’s section and even stopped me when I tried to leave it. When I did manage to sneak into the adult sections, I found the shelves way too tall, even with stools … and they didn’t allow me check out anything from those sections anyway. Even bookstores were nicer and better than that horrible library (Allentown, 1962-1968). I had no desire to go back. I liked reading my parents’ books at home much better.(Mbelvadi, I am now also a librarian — academic, not public. Why did I become one? I liked the concept of libraries, if not the reality I’d experienced.)

One way to get at the correlation/causation dilemma might be data on the type of books. For no particularly good reason, we saved literary classics and now out-of-date science texts. Others may have large collections of popular non-fiction, NatGeo, etc. If differences between such putative cohorts could be teased out, it might be revealing.

There you go again – every time there is even a speck of potential controversy (dust mite in this case), the grumpy curmudgeonly naysayers feel that they simply must spew their bile – on a study which they haven’t even seen! Really – how many of you are actually academics? Frankly, few I know would give themselves a tag that announces their supposed professional standing…It’s a twenty-year study – in twenty-seven countries. Aren’t you just a bit (scientifically) curious to read the results and findings before blasting it – or does that take away the pleasure of stepping right into it uniformed but heavily opinionated?

I posted this over at Brainstorm, but I’ll do it here as well. For those who don’t have free access, it looks like a pre-print version of the article is located here.I still haven’t had a chance to read the article, but it looks to me as if the study suggests that parents’ commitment to “scholarly culture” strongly correlates with the amount of time their children spend in school and whether they graduate from college, and the amount of books in a household strongly correlates with the parents’commitment to “scholarly culture.” I imagine that if someone were to be able to draw a correlation between Kindle and a commitment to scholarly culture, then, according to this study, they would be able to show a correlation with academic success at school. But I think they have struck on a novel way of classifying parents, rather than showing what causes academic success per se (after all, I’m not sure if we have established why students drop out in the first place: is it because their reading skills are proficient enough, or is it because their commitment to academic success at school isn’t high enough, or it because of some other reason.

I’m not an expert on correlation/causation, but I do know what inspiration can mean to a child. My parents grew up during the Great Depression, Mom on a very rural farm without electricity and Dad in the city. Dad struggled in school after the loss of his mother at age twelve and his father had to frequently travel very long distances out of town in order to house and feed not only his son but his parents and other relatives. His grandmother read to him about Charles Lindbergh and scraped together enough money to buy him a birthday flight on a biplane. It opened a whole new world to him and later inspired him to try for Army Air Corp flight school after volunteering the day after Pearl Harbor. Without a college degree but with frequent letters of support from his grandmother, he mastered the intricacies of mathematics, aerodynamics, navigation, cartography and a host of other sciences to fly. As a pilot he went on to fly in the first elements of airborne paratroopers that began the liberation of Europe and evacuated wounded from front-line air fields to hospital in England. After the war he used some of those skills to design and build a host of things. Mom’ mother, aunts and teachers encouraged her learning and efforts to make more of herself. She and Dad became true partners throughout their lives in building a family and businesses together. They made many small and large personal sacrifices throughout their early years together to see that their kids could have books, magazines and maps to explore their world. The stories they shared of the hardships and adventures of their lives, the Childcraft series, National Geographics and Life magazines to name but a few, fed an insatiable hunger in us that we hopefully have handed on to our children as well.

@richardtaborgreene (comment # 15):I trust that your comment was merely sarcastic. Of course, talking with one’s children, reading and instructing them, …, is a necessary condition, but I’d argue that it’s not a sufficient condition and that books help by creating a better learning environment.@bdbailey (comment # 17):I strongly disagree: What one reads does matter, a lot. However, reading anything at all (sans Twits and Facebook updates) is probably better than reading nothing. But lexile level does matter, as does quality.@mrmars (comment # 18):Of course, having access to a well-stocked library helps. Owning books creates a different home environment, an environment designed for learning, however. Owing a book is simply not the same thing as borrowoing a book from a library, yet in some (many?) cases it may be the best (only?) option: Unfortunately, good books are often quite expensive.@citizenship (comment # 36):I applaud your parents. I’m pretty sure that if the world had more parents like your parents, it would be a much better place.