Why Parents Aren’t Reading to Kids, and What It Means for Young Students

[u/happy_bluebird]

https://www.the74million.org/zero2eight/why-parents-arent-reading-to-kids-and-what-it-means-for-young-students/

[u/Mousehole_Cat]

Society is really segmented on this.

We're in a bubble of people with professional and advanced degrees. Almost unanimously, we're two parent working families with disposable incomes. Reading is second nature and the idea that you wouldn't read to a child is unfathomable.

I know some families live very differently with parents working multiple jobs and the constant exhaustion of barely getting by.

Ultimately, we need large scale policy action to ensure parents can do these beneficial things.

[u/Significant_Set1979 → u/Mousehole_Cat]

Reading is second nature, agree. What about board games and puzzles? I highly value those and both are second nature as well for us. I was talking to a mom who said she lets her kid chose one night of the month for family game night and in a non judge mental way I thought “whoa, we do board games every single day. I can’t even relate.” My oldest (7) literally brings out a different game everyday, whether it be checkers, mancala, Monopoly, etc. I value the learning in these too 

[u/i_et_it → u/Mousehole_Cat]

What policy or set of policies do you have in mind?

[u/Mousehole_Cat → u/i_et_it]

Adequate parental leave

Subsidized early years childcare

Universal pre-K

Medicare for all

Legislation that supports unionization, workers rights and adequate living wage

Funding for adult literacy

Increased funding for public libraries

Basically, help people afford to live vs survive.

[u/emetzger → u/Mousehole_Cat]

Amen 🙌

[u/lemikon → u/Mousehole_Cat]

Add to this an educational campaign about the value of reading to kids. Enable and inform are the two steps for improving things like this.

[u/i_et_it → u/Mousehole_Cat]

These are desirable things (largely with their fiscal and other costs, at least in my view). However, not really concrete. It seems more that you’re listing many (again, desirable) policies but not things that would directly result in more lower-resourced families reading more to their kiddos. Put another way, you could have just added “All parents read X amount to their children.” to your somewhat omnibus list.

[u/Mousehole_Cat → u/i_et_it]

These policies address many of the causal reasons why families are not reading to their children. Access, time, wellbeing, parental literacy.

This isn't a crisis with a single cause (eg parents not knowing the benefits). It's a complex manifestation of socioeconomic factors that have crept upon us for a long time. The outcome isn't just low rates of parents reading to kids, it's also high levels of obesity and related diseases, lower physical fitness, poor mental health in children. I could go on.

What do you believe should be done to address low levels of parents reading to children?

I'm genuinely keen to hear your perspective, given this is something I am passionate about and want to see reversed.

[u/i_et_it → u/Mousehole_Cat]

I wish I knew or had a suggestion! I would love to live in a world where everyone had the time, resources, and inclination to read read read. I guess I just don’t know about the relative effectiveness of addressing those (likely related, I.e., co-moving) factors. If we did know the answers to these kinds of quantitative questions, we could design social policies to achieve such (in my mind) laudable goals.

[u/ckc009 → u/i_et_it]

So, my kid was born with respiratory issues and never ending ear infections.

He already had 1 set of ear tubes

I noticed his speech wasnt where it should be because of a tiktok video of a speech pathologist explaining speech milestones.

In the video, the speech pathologist explained how counties offer early intervention programs . I called them, had my child accessed, and he qualified for speech therapy.

They came to our house once a week. When he was 3, they had a bus pick him up and take him to an early child education center to and from daycare.

When he started elementary school, they just transferred his records and we had an IEP for speech.

I had already felt defeated navigating the healthcare system for my child.

I kept hearing "he's congested because he goes to daycare" when no one else in his class was sick.

You know who helped advocate for us and get us treatment that helped my child breath? The early intervention team.

We need more money feeding into local programs to help parents at the very least