From the July/August 2005 issue of The Horn Book Magazine

Editorial
And Your Point Is . . . ?

e’re all quite used to the cycles of conflicting advice as reported in popular media — drink /wait, don’t drink /yes, drink in moderation, etc. — and it’s understandable that we shrug our shoulders and say to ourselves, Okay, it’s probably all a crapshoot, but I’ll try to walk a bit more and cut down on carbs but ramp up the desserts and read to my bunny for, say, fifteen minutes a day.

Not so fast, buster. While no one is claiming (not yet, anyway) that reading to your children is bad for them (or you), a recent book proclaims that it doesn’t do much good, either. In their
best-selling Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything, Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner state that according to the U.S. Department of Education’s comprehensive Early Childhood Longitudinal Study (ECLS), reading aloud by parents does not correlate with better test scores for their children — although the presence of children’s books in the home does. They caution us that this presence of books should not be taken as a cause of higher test scores; rather, “most parents who buy a lot of children’s books tend to be smart and well educated to begin with. (And they pass on their smarts and work ethic to their kids.)”

For a book that cautions us to look with a gimlet eye on expert opinion, Freakonomics is surprisingly light on documentation, and we aren’t told how Levitt and Dubner analyzed the ECLS data to come to the conclusions they did. Kristin Denton and Jerry West’s ECLS analysis, “Children’s Reading and Mathematics Achievement in Kindergarten and First Grade,” tells a different story: “Being read to at least three times a week prior to entering kindergarten and being proficient at recognizing numbers and relative size at kindergarten entry also relate to children’s spring kindergarten and first grade reading achievement. Those who are read to at least three times a week are almost twice as likely to score in the top 25 percent in reading than children read to less than three times a week.” So which is it?

We can let Levitt & Dubner and Denton & West duke that one out. The real question is this: even if reading aloud to your kids had no impact on their test scores, would you stop doing it? While the advice to read aloud to children has been overcodified with rules, hyped with promises, and touched with the ridiculous (such as Tish Rabe and Dr. Seuss’s Oh, Baby, the Places You’ll Go: A Book to Be Read in Utero), we don’t need statisticians to validate it. Just as dessert tastes good regardless of the consequences of ingesting it, reading aloud is in itself a happy activity. Those who would do so only to get Junior into Harvard should perhaps reassess why they had children in the first place. R.S.

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READERS MAY HAVE noticed some small changes in the magazine: the index to books reviewed has moved to the penultimate page, and the back page is now home to brief items of interest to the children’s book world — poems, drawings, cartoons, appreciations, parodies (viz. Tim Wynne-Jones on Finnegans Wake in this issue), and the like. In the spirit of our mission to “blow the horn for good books for boys and girls,” we’ve named this feature “Cadenza”: “an ornamental passage performed near the close of a composition, usually improvised, and usually performed by a soloist.” Submissions are welcome.

And while we’re announcing changes: our website has been updated with new content and a new look. We hope you will visit www.hbook.com often for useful book lists, timely award announcements, author profiles and interviews, news of the children’s book field, and e-mail links to this office. Let us know what you think — right after renewing your own subscription or ordering a gift subscription for those overanxious parents referenced above! M.V.P.