Development of early literacy skills has benefits beyond academics, according to researchers at the University of Washington. They studied children for five years and found that students whose parents read to them at home improved both their progress in school and in life skills such as self-regulation and goal-setting.

The project followed children in grades one through five or three through seven. It looked at their reading and writing activities at home, school progress and skills according to their parents’ reports and annual assessments, writes Dr. Perri Klass in a study summary article for The New York Times.

The study, published in May in the Journal of Educational and Psychological Consultation by Dr. Nicole Alston-Abel and Dr. Virginia W. Berninger, asked parents to rate their children’s ability to pay attention, set goals, control impulses and regulate their level of activity.

Berninger, professor emerita of educational psychology at the University of Washington, said, “It’s not just the skills the parents teach at home, it’s also how they help their children’s self-regulation, sometimes called executive function.”

Writing, Beringer said, was just as important as reading, and the children in the study tended to struggle harder with writing and to get more help with those assignments from their parents.

“When we talk about those early literacy skills, from vocabulary to book handling to dialogic reading, we are talking about critical brain development, about so much learning that can happen when all the pieces are in place before children get to school,” said Klass.

 

“A caring adult who is … not too distracted … a household sufficiently organized to allow for routines, a ‘print-rich’ environment in which there are appealing books available suited to the child’s age, and a pattern established early of reading together for pleasure” are all beneficial ingredients which can set a child up for academic success, according to Klass.

“The love of reading does begin in the parents’ arms, and it is a sign of love to read to your baby,” Klass writes. “And, because it’s a sign of love, because it links books and written language to the parental affection and attention that babies are built to crave, and to elicit, it does help children acquire a range of early literacy skills. And, continued attention by parents to reading and writing activities as children grow up and go to school seems to help them learn how to study and learn.”