Ensuring a Child’s School Success
By Mark W.F. Condon, Unite for Literacy vice president
Family members are a young child’s first teachers. Family assumes the critical role of orchestrating the joyful development of children in that all important time frame from birth to the beginning of school. The love, guidance, and stimulation family members provide a child during the first five years is much more impactful in the long run than the lessons they will learn throughout their formal schooling.
In the first five years of life children develop and learn to use 90 percent of their brain power, much of their language and thinking capability, and an enormous number of high-impact concepts about how the world works.
How the brain develops hinges upon early life experiences between the ages of birth to 5 years. Different areas of the brain are strengthened by different life activities, like eating, sleeping, hugging, playing, talking, reading, and so on. The areas of the brain that get stimulated grow stronger. The areas that get little stimulation tend to atrophy and never reach their full potential.
The brain that shows up at the schoolhouse door is what educators then work to refine and sharpen. Yet from Kindergarten through grade 12, teachers influence only 10 percent of this most powerful “tool” for thinking and feeling. That percentage is enormously important of course; nobody would wish to neglect 10 percent of a child’s brain development.
Fortunately, children who become successful in school do not require parents with genius IQs or fabulous incomes. In fact, research conducted in 27 countries over decades found that the single surest indicator of academic success was not family income or parental education, but rather the number of books in the home.
According to those researchers, what makes a difference is a family’s scholarly culture. Now, “scholarly culture” may sound sophisticated, but it merely means that families with lots of books read them together and discuss what’s in them. That’s it. (That’s also a Golden Rule for supporting children’s school success.)
Reading books together tends to stimulate the brain in the language and conceptual enrichment that leads to success. Conversing about books leaves children with enriched language abilities and a broadening understanding of the world, its people, places, events, and things. Reading and reflecting about books primes kids for learning more in school and for life beyond school. As a bonus, reading together and talking with small children also is loads of fun for older siblings and for adults, too.