When Parents Teach That Reading is Fun, Children Are More Likely To Become Early Readers

Research tells us that children’s earliest experiences influence their development, academic success and later outcomes (King et al. 2010) and that a family’s home  environment plays a large role in early childhood experiences. What aspects of the home environment and family culture influence young children’s literacy development?

Research reported in the Journal of Family Psychology followed young children and their families in order to see what aspects of their home lives influenced children’s early literacy development (Serpell et al 2002). The researchers found that a parent’s interaction with reading is a strong marker for their child’s literacy development. Specifically, the more often that a child reads with an older person; the degree to which parents believe that reading is pleasurable – not simply a skill to develop; and the degree to which a family had established routines – for dinnertime, reading aloud, & homework – all correspond to children’s literacy development. 

The researchers measured children’s literacy competency using reading skills and reading comprehension subtests from the Woodcock-Johnson Psychoeducational Battery, a widely used assessment for academic achievement.  They recruited individuals from public schools in Baltimore, Maryland (a city comparable to Memphis in population size, ethnic diversity, and number of people living in poverty (U.S. Census Bureau, 2010) with ethnically (African American and European American) and economically (low-income and middle-income) diverse backgrounds and followed them for 3 to 5 years.

Their findings are dramatic: not only do these components of a  family’s home life contribute to children’s literacy development; but they account for a much larger share of the variance in early literacy development than other factors, including income and ethnicity.

In fact, the most important determinate of a child’s performance on 3rd grade reading scores seems to be the degree to which their parents made it clear that reading was enjoyable, and that homework was an expected part of their family’s routine. Although these dimensions of a family’s home life accounted for the majority of the variance in children’s literacy development, there were significant differences in some of the components based on ethnicity and family income. Middle-income parents, for example, were much more likely than low-income parents to report that they made a priority of reading with their children. Similarly, middle-income and White parents  were more likely to tell their children that reading was pleasurable, while low-income and African American parents were much more likely to see literacy as a skill to develop.  Similarly, mothers with more education were more likely to invest in doing homework as a family routine.

The take-away seems to be that the sooner that children learn to read for pleasure, the better. But this may be a difficult lesson to learn in Memphis, where more than a third of adults have a difficult time reading (King et al., 2010).

A bright spot in this story is the Imagination Library / Shelby County Books from Birth program, which helps to influence the culture of family literacy, and is helping to build a culture of reading with young children in Memphis and Shelby County. This organization’s mission is to help prepare all Shelby County children to be successful in kindergarten and elementary school by providing children birth to five-years-old with free, age-appropriate books each month. Additionally, they are promoting healthy relationships between children and their parents or caregivers by encouraging them to read together. This program fosters both endorsement of reading as a fun activity parents and children can do together. For more information, visit the Shelby County Books From Birth website.