The Family Firm: A Data-Driven Guide to Better Decision Making in the Early School Years by Emily Oster

Author:Emily Oster [Oster, Emily]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: parenting
Amazon: B08RF1SXNV
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2021-08-03T00:00:00+00:00

What the authors found—see one of their results in the above graph—was that comprehension of the story (measured in a large number of ways) was much better for those kids who were soccer experts, and this effect swamped any effect of general verbal aptitude. Basically, the kids with low verbal ability who knew a lot about soccer got a lot more out of the story than those with high verbal ability who did not know much about soccer.

Contextual understanding is hugely important for reading comprehension. And, by extension, for enjoying reading. If your kid has no interest in polar bears and no knowledge of polar bears, they are probably not going to enjoy reading a dense scientific treatise about polar bears.

And not every kid has the same set of interests. Various studies have shown that when kids are given a chance to choose what they read, it improves their interest in reading.37 There are a large number of (mostly school-based) interventions designed to encourage kids to read. The exact methods vary, but they tend to share the feature that they let kids choose the books they want to read and then encourage kids to talk about the books (thus providing more content and engagement).38

Flexibility in reading choice is really important. Yes, your kid is likely to have to read certain books for school—that’s inevitable and probably good for them. But if you want to pitch reading as entertainment, to have a “family reading time” or bedtime reading—you need to be prepared to let them pick what they want. You may have loved A Wrinkle in Time as a kid, but you shouldn’t force it down your child’s throat if they’d rather read The Land of Stories.

Some good share of the time, your kid is probably going to pick books that are below their maximum reading level. This is also okay. Entertainment reading time is not for pushing oneself to the maximum. You yourself are probably not going to read James Joyce for recreation.

Finally, this likely calls for some flexibility in book genre. Increasingly people are recognizing the value of graphic novels for engaging both reluctant and happy readers.39 For a couple of weeks in the fall of 2019, the bestselling book overall in the US was a graphic novel called Guts by the absolutely awesome Raina Telgemeier. Okay, so it has pictures. But it’s still reading. A similar point can be made for intermediate books like the Diary of a Wimpy Kid, Dog Man, and—I hesitate to mention—the Captain Underpants series.

No matter what you do, even with dedicated reading time and book choice, some kids just like reading better than others. This is also true of adults. This is perhaps one of the many times in parenting we should step back and remember that our kids are their own people and some things are out of our control. It is a hard lesson.

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