IX. Elaine Reese Ph.D.

Your Child's Brain on Books

What's happening in your child's brain when you read a bedtime story?

The New York Times recently profiled a study of what’s happening in your child’s brain while you’re reading a bedtime story. According to the study’s lead author, “It really does have a very important role to play in building brain networks that will serve children long-term as they transition from verbal to reading.”

Unfortunately, it’s not what the study actually demonstrated.

The main point of the article, and the focus of The New York Times report, is based on a single and dubious correlation: Parents who reported reading and owning more books had children whose brains showed greater activation when hearing the sentences. In fact parents feel a strong pressure to overestimate how often they engage in activities, such as book-reading, that are widely touted by experts as good for children.

Just as crucial, the researchers didn’t control for children’s language development in the correlation between their book-reading frequency measure and the children’s brain activation. Children with more advanced language would almost certainly have shown greater activation when hearing the sentences, simply because of their advanced vocabulary and mastery of sentence structure. Most likely, the highlighted correlation reflects children with better language skills having parents who report more frequent reading.

Certainly, book-reading is important for advancing children’s vocabulary. A plethora of correlational and experimental studies shows us that children learn new words from books, and that book-reading is a richer context for rare words than everyday conversations about, say, eating your mac ‘n cheese. But book-reading is not a panacea for children’s language development. In studies that have observed what parents are actually talking about in the home, conversations about past and future are much more frequent than book-reading sessions, and they contain more complex language than talk about the here-and-now.

This “narrative” talk about past and future is especially helpful for older preschoolers’ acquisition of complex language skills, such as embedded phrases. This complex language is the foundation for the academic language that children will soon encounter in their reading in school. My colleagues and I found that children’s narrative skill predicted their later reading success, over and above the role of their vocabulary. Importantly, parents from all income levels and language backgrounds talk about the past and future with their children, whereas book-reading is more prevalent in white middle-class families.

Narrative talk about past and future could thus be a valuable tool in closing the word gap between rich and poor children.

So should you ditch your child’s bedtime story? Of course not! Keep on reading, and keep on talking. Both of these activities will enrich your child’s language development, and eventually their reading skills and success in school.