READ!
Smart, good kids correlated with reading…
This is not a particularly nice picture of a bookcase, but it’s just one of many in my house. Certainly the number of books my immediate family has acquired and read since my spouse and I started this household decades ago numbers in the thousands upon thousands. And I’m not the prolific reader in the family. That label goes to my two children and my spouse.
In my youth, I read some, but not a lot. Yet all of my close friends (I hung around the geeky smart crowd) were heavy readers of all things fiction. Let’s just say it was an early lesson in simple correlation – smart, good kids were also into reading for pleasure and entertainment. A lot.
So when my spouse and I delved into the frightening world of parenthood, we decided (1) we would read constantly to our children when they were very young, and (2) buy them all the books they desired when they could read for themselves.
In their youth, a weekend trip to Barnes and Noble or Borders cost me at least 100 bucks each time. We’d walk away with a stack of new books. Later, and more economically, it was Half Price Books and other used bookstores where the stack might be twice as high. In fact, my daughter worked at a used book store in college. Then comes Amazon and its roughly 33 million titles. Kindles, iPads, Nook, etc.
In the early days of parenting, I didn’t know I was doing the right thing. Just guessed I was. Now, one can find all kinds of evidence that reading for pleasure leads to good personal and social outcomes for kids beyond reading comprehension. There is some evidence that prolific readers are more relaxed (at least while reading, read less stress!), have an enhanced sense of creativity and imagination, greater emotional intelligence, better communication skills, more empathy, greater understanding of other cultural and social environments, and on and on.
Simply from reading for pleasure, you say? If you don’t believe it, research it for yourself. Conversely, it is quite difficult to find examples of overall negative aspects of reading.
Which brings me to a slight fear of mine. Reading is still a very popular pastime, yet our children (and the rest of us) are constantly bombarded with activities that are far less positively stimulating, and WE are the examples. What does binge-watching of the umpteen thousand shows on TV these days do to us? What kind of example are we? In fact, its even hard to read w/o disconnecting from the online world. We are all too busy looking at stupid memes, writing ugly comments on social media, scanning (not really reading) what is called news on our phones, writing blogs :), etc.
Best gift you could ever give to your children – the enjoyment of reading! Or in my case, they gave the gift to me…