Reading and Geniuses
Tue Jan 15, 2008 at 09:48:51 AM PDT
Cross-posted at Fussbucket
Get ready to feel guilty. Or smug. A report released a couple months ago from the UCLA Center for Healthier Children, Families, and Communities found that less than half of parents aren't reading enough to their young children.
For children, early exposure to books -- including being read to aloud each day -- is critical for long-term academic success. Research has shown that up to one-third of American children enter kindergarten underprepared to learn, mostly because their early years leave them without the necessary language and literacy skills.
According to an executive summary of the report, called "Reading Across the Nation, A Chartbook," reading aloud is the single most important activity for building the knowledge required for reading success later on.
A news article from McClatchy Newspapers (which I can't find an online link to, sorry), says the survey found that parents typically read the least to children under age one, the most to children who are three years old, and less so when kids turn four or five.
"Maybe some children at 5 are starting to read themselves," says Shirley Russ, associate clinical professor of pediatrics at UCLA who is one of the lead authors of the study. "I'd encourage parents to keep up the reading at ages 4 and 5." One reason, she said, is that "parents can read to children with much richer language than children are initially capable of reading to themselves."
While nearly any kind of reading aloud offers some benefit, child-development experts are increasingly recognizing the value of "dialogic reading." This involves bringing children more actively into the process by having them point to certain items in the pictures, asking them questions about what might be coming up next, or encouraging them to think about how the book might relate to their own lives.
Okey doke. But let's not get carried away. According to this recent column in Newsweek, parents in cities like New York and L.A. are smitten with the idea that their child is a genius. The writer calls it an "epidemic of specialness."
Let's face the painful truth: 95 percent of our kids are not gifted. They may be funny and good at soccer and quite possibly more knowledgeable than we were at their age. But that doesn't make them gifted. Statistically speaking, that means even my own dear child may not be gifted, though I would never admit such a thing in public.
There are many wonderful qualities that I would list for my four-year old - he's loving, funny, silly, outgoing and enthusiastic - but genius? Not so much. In fact, the letter "G" really gives him a headache when he tries to write his name. And as for counting, once he gets past eleven or twelve, who knows what number's coming next.
But I'm not worried. I assume that by the time he needs to fill out college applications, he and "G" will have made their peace.
My little one, however, in him I see potential. Just today, you wouldn't believe what he was doing...
Oh wait. Do I really want to go down this road?
It's hard to blame parents for believing their kids are brilliant, but there is a downside. Children who grow up hearing that they are the smartest kids on the block can get the idea that everything they do should be easy, which can make it really scary to try new things. If our kids aren't actually gifted—only well above average, say—we're giving them false expectations of the way the world will treat them. And telling your kid that she is vastly superior to her classmates is probably not going to help her make friends in the lunchroom.
Why is it that having smart kids has become the status symbol for parents? A few decades ago, parents saw their kids as having a variety of strengths. One might be brainy, but the others might be great at making friends or superstars on the soccer field.
During the 1990s, though, researchers began to think that a child's early experiences played a greater role in development. It wasn't long before parents got the message that gifted kids could be created through intelligence-enhancing parenting techniques. Marketers fed into their anxiety such products as Baby Einstein videos and "smart" baby food spiked with fish oil that promise to help transform the average toddler into a high achiever.
So this brings us back to reading aloud. It's good, old-fashioned parenting. It doesn't involve gizmos and it doesn't promise to turn my average, unexceptional but super-fantastic kids into anything other than school-ready students. I can live with that.
What do you think? Is your child a genius? Do you read aloud to your children even if they know how to read by themselves? And lastly, how do you teach a four-year old how to write the letter "G"? ;)
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