
What's Going on in Your Child's Brain When You Read Them a Story? - devy
https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2018/05/24/611609366/whats-going-on-in-your-childs-brain-when-you-read-them-a-story
======
dmlorenzetti
_All three versions came from the Web site of Canadian author Robert Munsch._

Hearing Robert Munsch read his own stories can be a revelation. He puts so
much energy into the reading, in a way that kids seem to really enjoy. He also
often deviates from the published text. Listening to him made me willing to
take a lot more risks as a reader.

I read "Paper Bag Princess" to my daughter's kindergarten class, and then
played them Munsch's rendition [0]. Whenever I go back, the kids ask if they
can hear an author reading their own book.

[0] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hIPrb-
sA6Uo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hIPrb-sA6Uo)

~~~
b0rsuk
There's a hilarious trick you can pull off. Insert references and made-up
characters into stories you read. I got the idea from an audiobook, which
described someone who kept inserting "spotted female mule" into stories he
read. See what's the most outrageous but harmless change you can get away
with.

~~~
codetrotter
> See what's the most outrageous but harmless change you can get away with.

I don’t think I could keep a straight face for more than a couple of minutes
at most if I tried to insert my own ideas into a story XD

~~~
b0rsuk
At least you do have a sense of humor. I know too many people who don't smile,
and definitely don't laugh out loud.

~~~
codetrotter
I do :) and sorry to hear about those people. Hopefully they laugh and smile
sometimes, just you haven’t seen it.

------
jedberg
One thing I've noticed as a trend in children's books lately is that a lot of
them are "novelizations" of single episodes of cartoons. For example, you can
find a bunch of Star Wars Clone Wars books, and it turns out each book is an
episode in the series.

I discovered this because we got my kid the books first, which I read to her a
bunch of times, and then one day we sat down to watch the show together, which
I'd actually never seen, and realized that the first two episodes I'd already
read to her as books.

What was really cool though was that she had a much deeper understanding of
those first couple episodes than the subsequent episodes, and actually
preferred the books to the show.

Anyway, my whole point is that my single point of data seems to support this
research -- that she processed better when read to.

~~~
wirrbel
I read the book editions of the first 3 Star Wars Movie (the Luke ones) and
did not see the movies for years. This was in the nineties.

------
keerthiko
This corroborates my hypothesis for why the majority of book readers like
their books better than visual renditions of the same (HP, LOTR, etc), because
they use their imagination to construct the world and characters and voices
when reading, and thus find a more appealing interpretation for every aspect
of the story, whereas a directed audio-visual experience is unlikely to match
my impression as well.

For example, if I'm a PoC I'm likely to see some of the characters as PoC as
well even if they're not explicitly described so. So many other things like
"what do these dragons look like" and "how tall is this character relative to
others" etc. Because we were actively involved in creating the world, we'd be
more attached to it too.

~~~
2sk21
This is so true! I am rarely impressed by movie versions of my favorite books.

On a related note, I have been reading Judea Pearl's new book, "The book of
Why" (truly wonderful book incidentally). I think that stories must, in some
way, help us learn counterfactual reasoning. That is, help us create alternate
versions of reality to conduct "what if" experiments in our mind.

------
jonbarker
Pediatricians I know can basically immediately tell the difference between a
kid raised by the TV/phone and one primarily read/spoken to. Obvious
differences in verbal ability.

~~~
dvdhnt
That’s pretty crazy considering smart phones have become ubiquitous relatively
recently.

I like to think my kids enjoy devices and digital stimuli in moderations, and
do try to read to them often, but I wish there was a decent way of checking
their development.

~~~
keerthiko
Not a parent so I'm not familiar with working with the constraints, but
something a friend of mine raising kids champions: limit digital interaction
to "activity, creation and expression", and use other media for consumption.
So let them doodle, play puzzle games, write stuff/create music/etc, but don't
give them free access to youtube videos, cartoons, etc. When they want to
consume something, prefer offline stuff.

------
argiope
Here's a link to the text only version:
[https://text.npr.org/s.php?sId=611609366](https://text.npr.org/s.php?sId=611609366)

~~~
tobltobs
I prefer the version which enables the publisher to pay for his cost.

~~~
PuffinBlue
I prefer the other one where they do so without farming my personal data.

~~~
tobltobs
Can you explain how they "do so".

~~~
isostatic
If they didn't they wouldn't need to worry about GDPR.

~~~
asaph
False. GDPR is broad. Anyone running a non-trivial website needs to invest a
non-trivial amount of time and energy into ensuring compliance.

------
newman8r
Anyone who's interested in this might find the field of cognitive narratology
interesting as well, he's a nice resource: [http://wikis.sub.uni-
hamburg.de/lhn/index.php/Cognitive_Narr...](http://wikis.sub.uni-
hamburg.de/lhn/index.php/Cognitive_Narratology)

------
stickfigure
I'm pretty sure that what goes on in my 9-month-old's brain when I read him a
story is: "Mmmmmm, that book looks delicious."

~~~
pbhjpbhj
OT: Teach him sign language and he can tell you he wants to eat the book long
before he can vocally do the same! I recommend starting at 6 months.

~~~
empath75
It's also useful even after they learn to talk, because you're still gonna
have a hard time understanding them until they're well into their second year.

Signs my kid has learned and used, without a lot of prompting from us: "All
done" "Please" (also means 'yes' \-- "Do you want jelly?" "please") "help"
"water" "milk" "food"

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Absolutely, my primary motivation initially was to enable our first to tell us
when he needed the potty [I'm a kook, we start potty from 5-6 months], though
initially for the first it was mostly telling us he wanted milk/food or saw a
light/bird.

We read a lot, and always do sign and speech together. Eldest is in Secondary
School (UK) now; if it retarded his speech/language skills as some claim it
might then it didn't matter because he and middle child are highly literate
(several years advanced in reading age).

Mum, Dad (none of my kids bothered with that sign much), food, drink, milk
(both kinds), sleep, tired, hungry, more, finished .. all useful starter
words.

From 2+ we start faltering with signed vocab so sign (a modified and
simplified BSL somewhat of our own) tends to naturally give way to speech -- I
mean what's the sign for gazelle, or pneumatic drill, or to say "it tastes
bad" rather than just that they "don't like" whatever new food we're trying to
get them to try ...

~~~
stef25
Dad of a 1 year old here.

How do you start potty at 6 months?

And how do you go about teaching signs?

~~~
astura
[https://www.parentingscience.com/potty-training-
age.html](https://www.parentingscience.com/potty-training-age.html)

>Infant potty training: 0-12 months

>It sounds bizarre to many Westerners. But for parents in places like India,
China, and East Africa (deVries and deVries 1977; Boucke 2002), the
traditional potty training age is early infancy. In these societies, parents
learn to recognize their babies’ body signals and to use these signals to
anticipate when their babies eliminate.

>When the infant is ready to go, the parent holds him over a sink, bowl,
toilet, or the open ground. As the infant voids, the parent makes a
characteristic sound or gesture. The baby learns to associate this parental
sign with voiding, and, eventually, the parental sign becomes an invitation to
void. When the baby feels the urge to go, he learns to hold back for a brief
time until his parent gives him the “all clear."

~~~
jacobush
Works the same in dogs

------
brylie
Didn't consent to third-party tracking, and then couldn't access the article.
I hope that this doesn't become a widespread pattern, where companies disallow
access to services when people decline to be tracked/profiled, now that we
have an increased legal mandate for clarity and user rights online. NPR, being
a public benefit non-profit, should really act in the public interest, and
allow people to access the content without being subject to surveillance from
ad companies and social media.

~~~
po1nter
I didn't give them my consent so I got redirected to the plain text version of
the website on which you can read the article without being tracked
[https://text.npr.org/s.php?sId=611609366](https://text.npr.org/s.php?sId=611609366)

~~~
ghusbands
As long as one can find it. It's not trivial when you're just thrown to the
front page and there's no obvious search feature.

------
assblaster
As someone who has studied extremely detailed information for most of my life,
I have found to this day that the most useful presentation of information is
text coupled with diagram.

Which makes more sense to you? Reading a wall of text, or looking at a
properly formatted table and graph where your brain can study and make sense
of trends?

Would you rather have a wall of text or audio description of the human arm, or
would you rather have one illustration to distill the relevant features?

Children's brains, I assume, work like adult brains, and this article agrees.

------
giarc
I wonder if a TV show with static images and spoken words would still induce
the zombie like behaviour of kids? Would this be more beneficial over
animation?

~~~
giancarlostoro
Sorry to say this but that sounds like radio? Though also there are audio
books nowadays.

~~~
js992
The article says that audio alone causes kids to struggle harder with
understanding. The whole point of what he is asking is to meet in the middle
where kids can understand and get the most out of the media.

~~~
giarc
Bingo - I have a 3 year old and the effect TV has on them is astonishing...
complete trance. We read books every night and she gets really engaged and
remembers very specific details weeks later.

As every parent can attest to, there are just times when putting a kid in
front of a TV is helpful (airplane rides, when caring for other children, when
you need a break etc) so it would be nice to retain some brain activity, or as
you say, meet in the middle.

------
mncharity
I created some animated science education videos and guerrilla-street-
usability tested them, mostly with adults. As a hobby project. I was surprised
by the dramatic impact of reading-listening interference and cognitive load.
It turned out to be well known, but lacking that background, I found it
bizarre to have an character and simple environment appear, read text on the
screen, and then when I hit pause, and asked for feedback, get "well, you
might add mention of <thing that was just moments ago said and shown>". And at
least once, when I replayed the same video, get "oh yes, this version is much
better".

As VR/AR UI/UX design becomes a thing, there's a body of expertise around
multimedia learning that will need to be integrated.

------
dharma1
Bought my 8yo son an Echo for his birthday, we usually read together but he
also loves the unabridged Harry Potter series read by Stephen Fry on Audible.
Such a good reader, fun for tens of hours when parents have a sore throat :)

------
tannhaeuser
GDPR'd in EU.

~~~
seba_dos1
Here's the text only version you get redirected to when you don't agree to
profiling:
[https://text.npr.org/s.php?sId=611609366](https://text.npr.org/s.php?sId=611609366)

It's second time I've seen something like that today. The first one was even
minimally, yet aesthetically styled. It's awesome! I wouldn't expect GDPR to
increase UX of the Web so much :)

~~~
eli
That site always existed, they didn't create it for this.

------
anonu
tldr: the old school way is still the best. Read a real book to your kid.

------
cvaidya1986
Probably could my mom/dad pick something age appropriate next time?

------
craftyguy
HN's duplicate article detector is broken. This was previously posted here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17150550](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17150550)

The url is identical. I've noticed this happening quite a bit. Here's another
example, in this case an article I posted then someone posting the identical
article a few hours later:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17138682](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17138682)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17143429](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17143429)

@dang, what gives?

~~~
andrewla
My understanding is that if a post did not get a lot of attention, then the
duplicate will be allowed through.

> Are reposts ok?

> If a story has had significant attention in the last year or so, we kill
> reposts as duplicates. If not, a small number of reposts is ok.

> Please don't delete and repost the same story; accounts that do that
> eventually lose submission privileges. Deletion is intended for things that
> shouldn't have been submitted in the first place.

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html)

~~~
craftyguy
Ok, so how do you explain this one then?

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17154175](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17154175)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17157649](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17157649)

Both posts are ~6 hours apart, each one has a decent number of points and
comments, and each one points to the exact same url.

~~~
qznc
Afaik HN checks its _cache_ for duplicates. This means if the cache is used up
by something else (e.g. a long discussion about GDPR) the old submission gets
flushed out quite early and a duplicate submission after only a short time is
possible.

