Do parents matter?

I didn't learn to read till I was like 12... Well, that's an exaggeration. I started reading at the 'appropriate age'. Whatever that was back then.

I was addicted to books at a very young age (I still am). My sister and I would race through our 10 books each (which was the maximum allowed to borrow at the library), on Saturday afternoons after church. Then I'd read hers and she'd read mine. My sister started reading younger than I did. We weren't allowed to do anything else on Saturdays, and we were actually frowned upon when we did read on Saturdays (as this was our family's "Sabbath"). So when our parents took their afternoon naps on this day, we'd open the books and read-read-read. It was what I would say the number one pleasure in life growing up. And now, it’s hard to even sit for an hour to read.

But I don't remember reading at age 4 or 5.

The other day, I had a migraine. I didn't want to watch TV, play baseball, surf on the net, write... nothing. I wanted to close my eyes and hear silence.

Jake was very kind as I explained this to him. So he decided to take out a book and 'read'. I quote the word 'read' because reading for him is like sounding out words and guessing on words that he doesn't want to sound out. It’s a little frustrating sometimes sitting with him.

His teacher says that he can figure it out, and we should let him instead of solving it for him. He can read, but it’s not about comprehending, it’s more like sounding out words, even when the word repeats. He sounds out words, it’s a struggle, and most of the time he gets them right.

At age TWO I had him recognize a few words from a Winnie The Pooh reading flash card set that shocked people. Words like GARDEN, FRIEND, KITE, etc. It was a select few words that he recognized without the pictures. He slowly forgot the words, or didn't want to recognize them anymore, when he started the 'real' way to read from his teachers.

I didn't want to rush him. But I've been very anxious for him to start.

I told him he could sit on my lap and read. He climbed up on my lap as I reclined and did his 'reading'.

And I was in shock. All of a sudden, what seemed like out of the blue, he was reading to me!

I couldn't keep my eyes closed because I wanted to see for myself. He was reading the words, slowly but surely. Each word wasn't sounded out unless it was hard. He'd read a word by sight, recognizing it as a word versus figuring it out every time as he once did.

We follow his schooling closely. When he finishes a new workbook, or reads a book we are informed and we praise him. Sometimes, and we should do it more often, we read a book to him before he goes to bed. But now, he's reading to me!

The headache temporarily went away as I sat there and watched him read the book again.

It was amazing! I was so happy.

But then again, it just reminds me... he's not a baby anymore and that makes me sad.

Here's a video of him reading at around 22 months: Jake Reading

Cute huh?

Here's some interesting information on Reading that I came across:

Study of children's reading habits shows encouraging results

According to a Tesco study that asked 2,600 parents about their children's reading habits, the perception that children spend their lives glued to a computer screen is either a myth or a huge exaggeration. About 40% of parents think their children read more than they did at the same age, which has given rise to the phenomenon of "crossovers" - books that children recommend to parents. The most famous example of a crossover is Harry Potter; others listed in Tesco's top 10 include Holes by Louis Sachar.

Caroline Ridding, the book buyer for Tesco, said, "Contrary to popular belief, children read more today than ever before. Far from being obsessed with TV and computer games, our study show their love of reading is greater than ever."

The most popular children-to-parent children titles were:
1. Harry Potter (books 1-5), JK Rowling
2. Adrian Mole series, Sue Townsend
3. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time, Mark Haddon
4. His Dark Materials (1-4), Philip Pullman
5. Holes, Louis Sachar
6. A Series of Unfortunate Events (1-11), Lemony Snicket
7. Sophie's World, Jostein Haarder
8. How I Live Now, Meg Rosoff
9. Junk, Melvin Burgess
10. The Scarecrow and his Servant, Philip Pullman

The most recommended parent-to-child titles were:
1. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, CS Lewis
2. The Hobbit, JRR Tolkein
3. The Borrowers, Mary Norton
4. The Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkein
5. Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll
6. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Roald Dahl
7. Famous Five series, Enid Blyton
8. Black Beauty, Anna Sewell
9. Mallory Towers series, Enid Blyton
10. Heidi, Joanna Spryi

This research came from http://www.literacytrust.org.uk/, a literacy organization in the UK.

I love that the top two on the most recommended parent-to-child titles were "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" and "The Hobbit". I tried to read "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardobe" to Jacob at the end of last year but it was boring for him. I might just bring out "The Hobbit" and start reading that to him.

Back to the title of this post. "Do Parents Matter?"

One of my favorite blogs is written by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner. Their blog is called, "Freakonomics". On May 5, 2005 they wrote an article for US TODAY that dealt with reading, education and role of the parent. I found it interesting.

Do parents matter?
It's who you are — rather than what you do — that makes the biggest difference in the development of children.

By Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt

By now, the letters have landed.

The fast-track nursery schools and the “gifted and talented” public schools and the Ivy League colleges have mailed their acceptance letters, and parents everywhere are either a) congratulating themselves for having shepherded their children into the dream school or b) chiding themselves for having failed.

In the first case, the parents may tell themselves: It was those Mozart quartets we played in utero that primed her for success. In the second case, they might say: I knew we shouldn't have waited so long to get him his first computer. But how much credit, or blame, should parents really claim for their children's accomplishments? The answer, it turns out, is a lot — but not for the reasons that most parents think.

The U.S. Department of Education recently undertook a monumental project called the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, which tracks the progress of more than 20,000 American schoolchildren from kindergarten through the fifth grade. Aside from gathering each child's test scores and the standard demographic information, the ECLS also asks the children's parents a wide range of questions about the families' habits and activities. The result is an extraordinarily rich set of data that, when given a rigorous economic analysis, tells some compelling stories about parenting technique.

A child with at least 50 kids' books in his home, for instance, scores roughly 5 percentile points higher than a child with no books, and a child with 100 books scores another 5 percentile points higher than a child with 50 books. Most people would look at this correlation and draw the obvious cause-and-effect conclusion: A little boy named, say, Brandon has a lot of books in his home; Brandon does beautifully on his reading test; this must be because Brandon's parents read to him regularly.

But the ECLS data show no correlation between a child's test scores and how often his parents read to him. How can this be? Here is a sampling of other parental factors that matter and don't:

Matters: The child has highly educated parents.

Doesn't: The child regularly watches TV at home.

Matters: The child's parents have high income.

Doesn't: The child's mother didn't work between birth and kindergarten.

Matters: The child's parents speak English in the home.

Doesn't: The child's parents regularly take him to museums.

Matters: The child's mother was 30 or older at time of the child's birth.

Doesn't: The child attended Head Start.

Matters: The child's parents are involved in the PTA.

Doesn't: The child is regularly spanked at home.

Culture cramming may be a foundational belief of modern parenting but, according to the data, it doesn't improve early childhood test scores. Frequent museum visits would seem to be no more productive than trips to the grocery store. Watching TV, meanwhile, doesn't turn a child's brain into mush after all; nor does the presence of a home computer turn a child into Einstein.

Now, back to the original riddle: How can it be that a child with a lot of books in her home does well at school even if she never reads them? Because parents who buy a lot of children's books tend to be smart and well-educated to begin with — and they pass on their smarts and work ethic to their kids. (This theory is supported by the fact that the number of books in a home is just as strongly correlated with math scores as reading scores.) Or the books may suggest that these are parents who care a great deal about education and about their children in general, which results in an environment that rewards learning. Such parents may believe that a book is a talisman that leads to unfettered intelligence. But they are probably wrong. A book is, in fact, less a cause of intelligence than an indicator.

The most interesting conclusion here is one that many modern parents may find disturbing: Parenting technique is highly overrated. When it comes to early test scores, it's not so much what you do as a parent, it's who you are.

It is obvious that children of successful, well-educated parents have a built-in advantage over the children of struggling, poorly educated parents. Call it a privilege gap. The child of a young, single mother with limited education and income will typically test about 25 percentile points lower than the child of two married, high-earning parents.

So it isn't that parents don't matter. Clearly, they matter an awful lot. It's just that by the time most parents pick up a book on parenting technique, it's too late. Many of the things that matter most were decided long ago — what kind of education a parent got, how hard he worked to build a career, what kind of spouse he wound up with and how long they waited to have children.

The privilege gap is far more real than the fear that haunts so many modern parents — that their children will fail miserably without regular helpings of culture cramming and competitive parenting. So, yes, parents are entitled to congratulate themselves this month over their children's acceptance letters. But they should also stop kidding themselves: The Mozart tapes had nothing to do with it.

Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt are the authors of Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything.

See article: "Do Parents Matter?

Although I believe this research is not at all a very complete one as they also state: "the data show no correlation between a child's test scores and how often his parents read to him", I thought it was an interesting coorelation between books and education.