If you haven't been reading the guestbloggers over at Attackerman the past month or so, you've been missing out. I've meant all week to highlight this post by Shani on the study linking the number of books families have in the house to their children's academic success. She writes:It’s clear that having books is merely representative of something larger: a desire to understand, question, and get answers. And that desire dovetails perfectly into what school does, when it’s at its best, so it’s no wonder kids who grow up in a “scholarly culture” are more likely to stay in school....
Most disadvantaged families just don’t have the resources to cultivate a “scholarly culture.” After all, books are expensive (and we already know that it’s more expensive to be poor), and it takes time — time a single working parent may not have — to read books.
But I am curious about how a library membership fits into this study. Is the question merely the number of books your family owns? How much weight is placed on the number of books you actually read? Would growing up in a home with 500 romance novels be as beneficial as a weekly trip to the public library?
I absolutely agree that it would be useful to see much more context on this research. In my memories of my childhood, the moments that powerfully reinforced my desire to read were the ones that made reading experiential. It was crying with my mother once we finished the
Little House on the Prairie books because there weren't any more. It was reading poetry every night at dinner, leaving my brain scattered with fragments of rhymes and broken lines. It was understanding that reading, and reading deeply, gave me access to different levels of conversation and exchange, a realization that took shape over time. And I agree with Shani that getting a kid to that realization takes a great deal of time and energy. I'm lucky my parents had it, and that we had the books in the house to hand, whether we'd bought them or they were from the library. I don't know how we get everyone that kind of parenting--or teaching--time and attention. But the results are worth the effort if we can find a way to make it.