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Read to your kids. It's a mantra from educators that President Obama likes to invoke, most recently in his address to Congress this week. For good reason: Plenty of studies drive home the connection between reading to your child and your child learning to read to himself. But what if this isn't the only path to early literacy? Wouldn't we welcome an alternative for children who can't sit still to listen to books—or for parents who fall asleep reading them? Except, uhm, if that alternative heads straight for another source of parental woe: keeping the house neat.
In a recent academic article with the Mary Poppins title of "Order in the House!" Anna D. Johnson and Anne Martin of Columbia's Teachers College, along with a couple of co-authors, looked at the effect of household order on kids' reading skills. Their sample is relatively narrow: 455 kindergartners and first-graders, all twins, who live in Ohio and western Pennsylvania, nearly all of them white and middle-class. The researchers divided the kids in two groups: those with mothers who have above-average reading skills and those whose mothers are average readers. For both groups, they controlled for socioeconomic status, meaning that their results can't be explained away by class differences among the kids. (Fathers are absent from this study, like many of its kind. The research was done only with mothers, because double interviews cost more and also, Martin says, because the mother is "usually the best recorder" of family events.)
Both groups of mothers were asked about how often their children are read to—and also how often they amuse themselves with books. Then the mothers were asked a separate set of questions about order at home, designed to get at what researchers call "executive function." A few sample responses: "It's a real zoo in our home," "The children have a regular bedtime routine," and "We are usually able to stay on top of things." A shout-out to all my endearingly, creatively messy friends (but not to my husband, who still shouldn't leave his shoes in the middle of the front hall): It's clear that by an "ordered home," Johnson and Martin do not mean a spotlessly neat and clean one.
Surprisingly, the amount of shared parent-child reading time did not matter, on average, for the reading skills of either group of kids. What mattered instead, for the kids of average-reader mothers, was how often a child amuses herself with books. What mattered for the kids of the high-reading moms was how orderly the family's home was. What to make of these not-so-intuitive results?
Well, they do not mean it's time to cancel bedtime reading. For one thing, as I said earlier, lots of studies support its importance. For another, we are talking about only one slice of kids here: the children of middle-class mothers. The authors also point out that even for this group, the results may reflect mostly timing. Much of the research on early reading research involves preschoolers, whereas this study focused on slightly older kids. Maybe "the effects of shared reading would have emerged earlier, and therefore was not detected in the present study," Johnson and Martin say.
They offer another theory to explain their findings about the benefits of order. It may be that "household order taps a more fundamental characteristic of parents or households, such as maternal industriousness, planning ability, or conscientiousness, that gives rise to both orderliness and better reading skills in children." This is the idea of executive functioning, which captures "planning and problem-solving abilities." Maybe order helps promote reading only among the children of the high-reading mothers because it's what the authors call a "higher order element"—in other words, it matters only once you've got the basics down, which means reading to your kids pre-kindergarten and surrounding them with books.
Emily Bazelon is a founding editor of Double X, and a writer and editor at Slate.
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