Somebody said it at a parent evening, or over Sunday lunch: if nobody reads at home, the child won’t read. And it stuck, because your house works shifts and the last book that came through the door came from school.
There is a finding that moves that conversation somewhere else.
What predicts a child’s years of schooling, independently of the education, occupation and class of whoever raises them, is that books are present in the house. The books that are there, ahead of who reads them. This is reason 9 of ten reasons someone won’t read, and the one most often delivered as a verdict.
What is measured: the books that are there
A team looked at data from 27 countries and compared children raised in bookless homes with children raised in homes holding a five-hundred-book library.
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).
And the part that matters on this page: the effect shows up independently of the education, occupation and class of the people raising the child, and of the country’s GDP and political system.
Put differently: 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 going back to school.
What that finding says and what it doesn’t
Three warnings, because a number like this can be used for the opposite of what it is good for.
It is an association. The two things were measured travelling together. Books may do something; a household that manages to get books may also be doing ten other things. The study controls for a great deal — education, occupation, class, country — and still leaves the direction open.
The size depends on where you are. In the United States the effect was 2.4 years, against the 3.2-year average across the 27 countries.
Five hundred books is the far end of the scale, and was never a target. What the study compares are two distant points so the effect becomes visible. What lies between them 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 travelling between two houses with children of similar ages |
| Old textbooks from the family | Science ones, with their illustrations, work better than you would think |
| Thrift shops, yard sales, used book stalls | Second-hand children’s books are among the cheapest things sold anywhere |
| School | Many have books nobody takes out. Asking is usually enough |
| What is already in the house | Cookbooks, manuals, atlases, magazines. Those are all books |
And two rules about placement, worth as much as getting hold of them:
- 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.
What counts as reading in a house where nobody reads
“Nobody reads in this house” is almost always false, and the falsehood sits in the definition.
What counts, and gets discounted at home:
- The news on a phone, if it gets said out loud.
- The recipe followed step by step while cooking.
- An appliance manual, a medicine label, a contract.
- Subtitles on a series.
- 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 is the example, and it is already happening.
The public library, which belongs to everyone
It is the most complete answer to this reason, 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 is a hundred and twenty books passing through a house in a year, without buying any. And whoever staffs the children’s room knows what to hand a seven-year-old who has abandoned the last three.
What it takes: one afternoon, a card, and knowing the opening hours. Many close at six, which is precisely the problem for households that work late — which is why the Saturday hours are worth asking about.
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 local library for a card.
If you also want the time together without having to become a reader yourself, here is how to read together in five minutes. The whole method is talking less, and it works just as well over one page.
And if the shelf fills up and things stay the same, there are eight 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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