Someone said it at back-to-school night, or over Sunday dinner, the way people say things they’ve heard somewhere: if nobody reads at home, the child won’t read either. And it stuck, because your house runs on shifts, and the last book that came through the front door came home in a backpack.
There’s a finding that moves that conversation somewhere much more hopeful.
What predicts how many years of school a child will complete, independently of the education, job and social class of the people raising them, is that books are present in the house. The books that are there, ahead of who reads them. This is one of ten reasons a child won’t read, and the one most often delivered as a verdict. The research suggests reading it as an invitation instead.
What was measured: the books that are there
A research team looked at data from 27 countries and compared children raised in homes without books to children raised in homes with a library of five hundred.
The result, in their words: that difference “has as great an effect on the level of education a child will attain as having parents who are barely literate (3 years of education) compared to having parents who have a university education.” Both factors “propel a child 3.2 years further in education” (Evans, Kelley, Sikora and Treiman, 2010).
What matters most on this page is this: the effect shows up independently of the education, job and social class of the people raising the child, and of the country’s wealth and political system.
So a parent’s schooling counts, and the books in the house count on their own. Two separate levers, and the second one can be moved without anyone going back to school.
How far that finding goes
Three caveats, because a number like this can be used for the opposite of what it’s good for.
It’s an association. The two things were measured traveling together. Books may be doing something; a household that manages to gather books may also be doing ten other things. The study controls for a great deal, including education, job, class and country, and still leaves the direction open.
The size depends on where you live. In the United States, the effect was 2.4 years, against the 3.2-year average across the 27 countries.
Five hundred books marks the far end of the scale, and was never a target. The study compares two distant points so the effect becomes visible. Everything in between is a gradient: twenty books beat zero, and a hundred beat twenty.
How to build a home library without buying books
This is the part you can act on, and most of it is free:
| Where they come from | How |
|---|---|
| The public library | Borrowing. Ten books rotating every month fill a shelf and cost nothing |
| Swapping with other families | One box traveling between two houses with kids of similar ages |
| Old books from the family | Science ones, with their illustrations, work better than you’d think |
| Thrift stores, yard sales, used bookstores, Little Free Libraries | Secondhand children’s books are among the cheapest things sold anywhere |
| School | Many have books nobody takes out. Asking is usually enough |
| What’s already in the house | Cookbooks, manuals, atlases, magazines. Those are all books |
Books in your home language count just as much, by the way. A shelf that holds English and Spanish, or English and Tagalog, or French and Punjabi, is a shelf that tells a child both of their languages are worth reading.
Where the books sit matters as much as the books, and two rules cover it:
- At their height. A book on a high shelf is a book that requires asking permission.
- Covers facing out. A spine among thirty spines almost never gets picked up.
There’s a whole article on building a reading nook from what’s already at home, if you’d like to take the shelf a step further.
What counts as reading in a house where “nobody reads”
“Nobody reads in this house” usually turns out to be a question of definition. Plenty of reading is already happening; it just doesn’t look like a novel in an armchair.
What counts, and tends to get overlooked:
- The news on a phone, when it gets read out loud.
- The recipe followed step by step while cooking.
- An appliance manual, a medicine label, a lease.
- Subtitles on a show.
- Comics, which carry more rare words per thousand than a children’s novel.
Anyone doing any of those in front of a child is teaching them that reading is good for something. That’s the example, and it’s already happening in your kitchen.
The public library, which belongs to everyone
It’s the most complete answer to this whole question, and the least used.
A public library solves all three problems on this page at once: cost, variety and renewal. Ten books borrowed a month means a hundred and twenty books passing through a house in a year, without buying a single one. And whoever staffs the children’s room knows exactly what to hand a seven-year-old who has abandoned the last three.
What it takes: one afternoon, a library card, and knowing the opening hours. Many branches close early on weekdays, which is precisely the problem for households that work late, so ask about Saturday hours. When something falls short here, it’s on the side of the system: ten-hour shifts and libraries that close at six, not families who chose wrong.
Where to start
This month: one shelf at their height, with whatever is already in the house, covers facing out. And one trip to the nearest library branch for a card.
If you’d also like the time together without having to become a big reader yourself, start with how to read together in five minutes. The whole method is talking less, and it works just as well over a single page.
And if the shelf fills up and things stay the same, there are more reasons in the ten. Choosing what goes on that shelf gets easier with three things you can measure with the book in your hands.
Where these numbers come from
- Evans, M. D. R., Kelley, Jonathan, Sikora, Joanna and Treiman, Donald J., “Family scholarly culture and educational success: Books and schooling in 27 nations,” Research in Social Stratification and Mobility, 2010. DOI 10.1016/j.rssm.2010.01.002. Figures taken from the study’s press release. Source
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