By: Slate.com: Messy House, Messy Minds
Thursday, May 14, 2009
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.
To read the entire news release, see Slate.com at http://www.slate.com/id/2212318/.
