
For a baby’s brain to benefit, read the right books at the right time - rhema
http://theconversation.com/for-babys-brain-to-benefit-read-the-right-books-at-the-right-time-83076
======
salmonellaeater
> After three months passed, the families returned to our lab so we could
> again measure the infants’ attention to our storybook characters.

The researchers are rash to think that an effect observed after three months
have passed will still be observable after five years or twenty. The
psychological literature is full of examples of interventions that raise
intelligence in the short term and have no long-term effect [1]. To date, I'm
not aware of any childhood intervention (aside from adequate nutrition) that
has an appreciable effect on adult intelligence.

[1]
[https://www.researchgate.net/publication/284123208_The_envir...](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/284123208_The_environment_in_raising_early_intelligence_A_meta-
analysis_of_the_fadeout_effect)

~~~
bunderbunder
I don't know about intelligence, but the Perry Preschool Study comes to mind
as an example of a controlled experiment that showed dramatic (in terms of
practical, if not statistical, significance) outcomes that lasted for many
decades. Also ones which matter more than intelligence, at the end of the day,
such as income and jail time.

I'm not sure how much better than that you might expect to get, given the
amount of effort and money involved in conducting this kind of study for even
a small sample size.

~~~
themgt
Perry Preschool results still look much less impressive at the age 40 followup
(e.g. 36% of those w/ the intervention had been arrested 5 times vs. 55% of
the control group). I think almost anyone who's seriously looked at this topic
agrees early interventions have some effectiveness and are the
sensible/ethical thing to do.

If you agree that we shouldn't expect to do "much better" than 36% being
arrested 5 times, 35% not graduating high school and 40% having a job earning
less than $20k/year, then you probably agree w/ the parent commenter.

[http://library.intellectualtakeout.org/sites/default/files/P...](http://library.intellectualtakeout.org/sites/default/files/Perry%20Preschool%20Study%20at%2040.jpg)

~~~
bunderbunder
36% isn't great in absolute terms, no. But if you're willing to accept
improvement and not demanding utopia-or-nothing, reducing the rate at which
members of a subpopulation are being arrested repeatedly by ~1/3 would be a
big deal from a public policy perspective.

My criticism of that statistic would be different. Ones that are structured
like "X% reduction in Y happening more than threshold level Z" smell of
p-hacking. A simple "Gets arrested X fewer times (p=0.15)" is more trustworthy
to me than "X% less likely to get arrested more than 5 times (p = 0.03)".

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taneq
Could we please, please stop trying to micro-optimize our children from birth?
Give them love, food, shelter, and a rich environment, but also give them
_space_. Give them room to breathe and explore and learn. Let them be bored
sometimes. Let them make their own mistakes and choose their own projects and
learn their own lessons. Let them be children.

~~~
maroonblazer
Is it unreasonable to want the best for your child?

Being deliberate in what you read to them and when doesn't preclude also
giving them love, food, shelter, space and everything else you listed. If
there's a significant difference to be realized by adopting these reading
habits (I'm not saying there is) one could argue you're ethically obligated to
do so. In the same way that not supplying your child with a balanced diet
could be considered negligent.

~~~
nostrademons
The challenge with the "want the best for your child" way of thinking is that
very often you end up micro-optimizing for whatever definition of "the best"
was in the latest pop-science article, to the detriment of other important
skills that haven't recently been written about.

The experimental results were that reading books with named characters
resulted in increased attention to those characters. Is paying more attention
to storybook characters a skill you want your child to develop? Maybe? What if
further research showed that those same infants showed less attention to their
parents? Or that they had stronger verbal skills, but weaker mathematical
skills? Would you still consider this "the best" for your child? (These
actually would be interesting follow-up studies to do, but I doubt any parent
would be able to consider all the relevant results together.)

My dad very much wanted "the best" for me, and as a nuclear chemist, he taught
me math and science from a very early age. I got some leverage out of the math
skills, but this generation happens to be a singularly shitty time to be a
scientist, and it turns out that for skills that _are_ valued by the market at
this point in history (selling software, for example), things like emotional
intelligence and social skills are actually quite a bit more helpful. Being a
math prodigy is far less valuable than knowing when someone's trying to take
advantage of you, but I suspect the former is desired by a lot more parents.

~~~
jxub
I am convinced that there is always a "inertia" of values and goals, and as a
result people fool themselves thinking they are getting towards the
local/global maximum.

Many times, experience or external fomo/fud from the environment point towards
something that is no longer as optimized as while this experience or viewpoint
has been coagulating. Parents should be aware of that.

~~~
wolf550e
People copy the attributes (sometimes very superficial ones) of the elite of a
generation ago. It is similar to how militaries always prepare for the last
war.

~~~
jxub
And not only the elite, it's mostly about coping the aspirations of their
socioeconomic stratum (simplyfing there is the general dinamic where rich
people seek freedom through biz and middle-class people look to have more
money, by working hard in a "good job".

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around_here
Many researchers out there state that it just doesn't matter very much:
[https://fredrikdeboer.com/2017/07/31/the-academic-success-
se...](https://fredrikdeboer.com/2017/07/31/the-academic-success-sequence-get-
lucky-at-birth-mostly/)

------
anigbrowl
I see they glossed over their variable isolation strategy of pairing named or
generic 'characters' with computer-generated pictures of something vaguely
resembling a rotting chicken.

I realize that it would have been hard to measure attentive engagement if they
had used more visually distinctive and rich graphics like cartoonish or
photographic animals, but the randomly-generated pink/green blob shapes are so
bad as to undermine the whole thing.

------
DoreenMichele
Or we could, like, bring back that old fashioned much maligned practice of
having a full-time parent at home, at least while the kids are little.

------
pavel_lishin
I wish there were more concrete advice at the end of this blog. My child will
apparently benefit from certain types of books more at her age than others;
but what characteristics should I be looking for?

~~~
logicallee
If you want the biggest possible benefit to your baby's brain, read her a book
on data science or machine learning: as a result, you will have $100,000 in
extra disposible income[1] by the time she's 12. Save that up, and spend it on
laboratory equipment for her of whatever kind she wants and is interested in
at the time.

(In case it's not clear, I mean only pretend to play with your baby now, while
putting that time into improving your career secretly, as I have described.)

[1] I assume you're a programmer, if not, read a read a book on Javascript
instead

~~~
yorwba
It might not even be pretending, who says children can't enjoy hearing about
the stuff their parents are involved in?

My early memories are a bit hazy, but I still remember my father explaining to
me the similarity between a rotating wheel and the vibration of a spring. I'm
not sure what explanation he actually gave, but it might have involved
gestures.

So you probably shouldn't expect your children to understand and remember
everything you tell them, but random bits and pieces might stick to resurface
later in the process of learning them "properly".

~~~
sandos
I was very fascinated by telephone books before I was 5 years old. I also knew
that I wanted to work with "data" when I grew up. I was awestruck by how much
information was in the telephone book, I just could not understand how so much
data could even exist!

This was the early 1980s, I had never seen a computer in my life, but possibly
on TV. Not surprisingly I was intrigued by a Basic-manual when I was 9 and
started writing small programs.

I definitely had some drive toward... something intellectual? A very vague
feeling but I know for sure my brain was already influenced in my fourth year
in some way to make me like "data", and reading.

------
hprotagonist
(petty quibble: one of the weird grammatical quirks I really loathe is the use
of "baby" as a singular proper noun. "For _the_ baby's brain..." or "For _a_
baby's brain.." are both perfectly fine ways to start a sentence, but the
article-dropping form is everywhere on parent blogs and it drives me up the
wall in ways I had not expected. )

That aside: I've increasingly come to understand the urgent need for public
libraries for young families. The children's room in your average US public
library is probably the most used and most important room in the building,
just as a way to provide everyone with access to diverse reading material --
both for your child's sanity, and your own.

~~~
Terr_
It's not that weird, people are just following the same grammatical pattern
that is coming accepted for parental words like "mother" or "father".

The noun becomes a contextual nickname or way to address them. Compare:

For baby's brain, do X.

For mommy's sanity, do Y.

~~~
inanutshellus
GP has a point and the examples you provided are not equivalent, as "Mommy" is
a nickname given to every mother, but a child is not nicknamed "Baby" unless,
well, Patrick Swayze is ready for the catch.

So it's:

"For [a] baby's brain, do X"

and

"For Mommy's sanity, do Y."

or

"For a mother's sanity, do Y."

~~~
sanderjd
> "Mommy" is a nickname given to every mother, but a child is not nicknamed
> "Baby"

I think this is what you're missing: "baby" is indeed becoming / has become
just such a nickname. It is used the same as "mommy" (or more often in my
experience, "mama") by most folks involved in pre- and postnatal care. I don't
think it is actually shorthand for "a baby" or "the baby", but rather for
"your baby" (that is: it is more intimate). It's just stylistic (like all
slang).

------
dzdt
So if you read babies boring books for months, then their expectations are
that books are boring. (Not boring = named individuals and recognizable
faces.)

~~~
megaman22
More importantly, if you force them to read boring, badly written books for
more than a decade, crushing any enjoyment out of the experience of reading,
they aren't going to take much interest in reading afterwards. JK Rowling, and
_gulp_ Stephenie Meyer, have probably done more for western literacy single-
handedly than millions of elementary English teachers accomplished.

My folks were more in the Tom Clancy, Louis L'Amour and Stephen King era of
pulps, but without those lifelines of more engaging content during the
wasteland years of dreck that was pushed 3rd-10th grade...

