2023-02-22_How_to_Invest_in_Your_Children_at_a_Very_Young_Age_Part_5-Help_Your_Children_to_Become_Accomplished_Fluent_Readers
00:00:00.000 | Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, a show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge,
00:00:02.960 | skills, insight, and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now,
00:00:06.720 | while building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less.
00:00:09.920 | My name is Josh Rashids. I'm your host. Today we continue our series on how to invest into
00:00:16.000 | your children effectively at a very young age. Today we're going to continue talking about how
00:00:22.640 | to make your children smarter. By way of review very quickly, in episode one we talked about the
00:00:29.520 | importance of being careful who you choose to mate with, because the person that you choose to mate
00:00:35.280 | with is going to fundamentally drive the genetic potential of your children. In episode two,
00:00:42.400 | we talked about the importance of ensuring a good, strong, healthy pregnancy and a successful
00:00:48.240 | childbirth. In episode three, we talked about helping your children to develop their bodies.
00:00:55.280 | You want to invest into helping your children develop strong bodies. We talked about nutrition,
00:00:59.120 | sleep, movement, sunshine, etc. In episode four of this series, we talked about giving your children
00:01:06.240 | words and background knowledge. I explained that if you're going to invest into your children's
00:01:12.640 | minds, you begin with physicality, making sure they have good nutrition, no toxins, lots of
00:01:18.400 | exercise, etc. And then you need to start to build the mind. And when we think about making your
00:01:24.080 | children smarter, there are two basic components of that. Literacy and numeracy are a useful outline
00:01:32.080 | for us to work from. So we started by talking about the importance of giving your children
00:01:37.920 | words. And I focused heavily in that episode on the importance of giving your children words at
00:01:43.840 | the earliest age. I explained how if you want your baby to be smart, then you need to expose
00:01:50.320 | your baby to lots and lots of meaningful words. And if at all possible, you want that vocabulary
00:01:57.840 | that your child is exposed to to be extremely broad. You don't want to just work with the few
00:02:02.800 | thousand most common words. You want your child to be exposed to tens of thousands of uncommon
00:02:08.000 | words. And that the more your child hears at an early age, the farther ahead and the easier time
00:02:15.200 | your child will have in his academic pursuits. I broke that into the importance of background
00:02:21.680 | knowledge and the importance of words, just the sheer quantity of words. So in today's episode,
00:02:28.240 | we're going to continue on that theme. And I'm going to seek to impress upon you that point
00:02:33.920 | afresh of how important the number of words are. The number is, excuse me, the number of words is
00:02:40.000 | to your child's overall intellectual potential. And then talk to you about how do you actually
00:02:47.520 | do that in an effective way? How? And I'm seeking to make this very practical. How do you do it?
00:02:53.040 | How do you actually help your child to be smarter in ways that are going to be measured in cognitive
00:03:00.000 | ability, especially with regard to literacy? Remember, if there is a metric that is most
00:03:07.040 | important to track when your child is young in terms of his mental development, how smart he can
00:03:17.280 | be, that metric is simply the number of words that your child hears on a daily basis. In a perfect
00:03:25.360 | world, from this metric, your child would hear nothing but constant human speech in meaningful
00:03:33.120 | context and high quality, high level literature. Now, obviously, there are many other things that
00:03:38.080 | are important for your child's development. Sleep is important. You don't want his sleep
00:03:42.320 | interrupted by words. Play is important. You don't want his play interrupted by words. Silence
00:03:46.800 | is important to have time to think and to process, etc. Children shouldn't have words going into
00:03:52.480 | their heads all the time. But you're trying to maximize, within those other constraints,
00:03:57.120 | trying to maximize the number of words that go into your children's minds. And these words
00:04:02.960 | are going to give your child the background knowledge that he needs in order to understand
00:04:11.040 | the world in addition to improving his overall academic ability. Let me read a smart quote
00:04:23.440 | on this topic. I'm reading here from a book called The Read Aloud Family, and the author
00:04:29.920 | of this book is citing an interview that she performed on her podcast, The Read Aloud Revival
00:04:36.400 | Podcast with Dr. Joseph Price. "Dr. Joseph Price, Associate Professor of Economics at Brigham Young
00:04:41.920 | University, specializes in the economics of family and education. His research demonstrates that one
00:04:48.720 | extra day per week of parent-child read aloud sessions during the first 10 years of a child's
00:04:53.680 | life increases standardized test scores by half a standard deviation. That's as many as 15 to 30
00:05:01.680 | percentile points, a tremendous gain." In a separate note, "In The Read Aloud Handbook,
00:05:08.400 | Jim Trulise suggests that the academic benefits alone of reading aloud are so great, if someone
00:05:14.000 | invented a pill to deliver those benefits, there would be a line for miles and miles to get it.
00:05:19.440 | Parents would fall over themselves and pay enormous amounts of money to give their kids
00:05:24.080 | the benefit of this pill." He cites the 1985 Commission on Reading that I mentioned in Chapter
00:05:28.720 | 1. "The single most important activity for building the knowledge required for eventual
00:05:33.840 | success in reading is reading aloud to children." Trulise also describes the results of research
00:05:40.480 | conducted by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which showed that
00:05:45.040 | the more children are read to, the higher their test scores are, sometimes by as much as half a
00:05:49.840 | year's schooling. This was true regardless of a family's income. He goes on to say that reading
00:05:55.280 | aloud has proven to be so powerful in increasing a child's academic success that it is more effective
00:06:01.600 | than expensive tutoring or even private education. "Parents often ask me if they should play Mozart to
00:06:07.120 | their babies or buy them expensive teaching toys or prohibit television or get them started early
00:06:11.360 | on a computer," Trulise writes, "but the answer is much simpler. Read to your children." This is just
00:06:19.120 | the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the research and data that explains the power that
00:06:24.240 | reading aloud has on a child's academic growth. She goes on to, in another direction, to lay out
00:06:31.360 | some of the benefits of reading. The three benefits that she talks about in this book,
00:06:35.920 | benefit number one, increased vocabulary and highly sophisticated language patterns, that's
00:06:41.200 | benefit number one. Benefit number two, the ability to make connections, in other words,
00:06:46.080 | reading comprehension. And benefit number three is a love for reading. When you start to think
00:06:53.280 | about how to make your child smarter, there are different ways in which you can think about that.
00:06:58.720 | One is at the basic physical level. You can say, "How can I make my child physically smarter? How
00:07:05.040 | can I increase the number of neural connections in his brain?" Or you can think about it in the
00:07:10.960 | more common sense way. "How can I make my child smarter about this subject?" Well, if you want to
00:07:17.280 | be smarter, you need to expose yourself to information and wisdom in a meaningful context
00:07:22.880 | and then apply and express that. And that's why most of what we talk about in terms of reading
00:07:28.240 | aloud is going to usher in a lifetime of reading. Reading aloud is not something that is opposed to
00:07:36.080 | reading. I think that I myself am firmly convinced that reading aloud is a practice that should
00:07:40.960 | continue for life, both for children and for adults, because it adds all the benefits of reading
00:07:49.680 | and it brings some benefits that aren't otherwise there. Let me break this down so you understand it
00:07:54.720 | and then we'll talk about how to apply it. Reading aloud allows a child to access information and
00:08:02.800 | ideas that are beyond his current ability to read with his eyes. And this is something that you can
00:08:10.080 | use. This is a technique that you can use to challenge your children's brains when their eyes
00:08:16.080 | are not yet ready. I have the good fortune of having experienced this personally with my own
00:08:22.400 | reading journey quite recently, as well as tutoring and helping my children to become skilled readers.
00:08:30.400 | I've paid careful attention to this in my journey with reading in foreign languages,
00:08:36.560 | and I have learned how difficult it is to consume written content when you are not a skilled and
00:08:43.920 | competent reader. I primarily learn languages by reading. But reading, when you're not a good
00:08:51.120 | reader, when you're not a totally skilled reader, is something that takes work. It tires you out.
00:08:58.240 | I'm a very accomplished reader in English. For me, reading in English is effortless. Not to say that
00:09:06.480 | all materials are effortless. If I find something, a subject which I'm not skilled in, I need to go
00:09:11.840 | slow and carefully parse the words and understand the meaning, of course that's more tiring.
00:09:15.840 | But in general, generalized reading is effortless. But when I move into a foreign language,
00:09:21.280 | that effortlessness is gone and it's replaced with effort. So one of the tools that I use is I
00:09:28.640 | listen to an audiobook while simultaneously reading the material with my eyes. And that
00:09:34.640 | helps me to keep going, to keep pressing forward, because it's easier to listen than it is to read.
00:09:42.960 | The same is true with children. It's easier for them to listen than it is for them to read.
00:09:47.280 | So if you have that practice of reading aloud, your four-year-old can listen to something that
00:09:52.320 | he would never be able to read, even if he is able to actually parse the words. But yet he gets all
00:10:00.080 | of the benefits of reading at a very early age. Reading is a unique and special technology.
00:10:08.240 | A lot of times people contrast reading with things like absorbing content on the screen,
00:10:15.520 | a movie or a film or some kind of video production.
00:10:19.760 | I don't think that these things should be seen as in opposition to one another.
00:10:25.280 | Novels are not better or worse than movies. They are different technologies. There are things that
00:10:35.200 | are so much better learned and expressed through reading than movies. And there are things that are
00:10:41.680 | so much better expressed through movies than through reading. And so if we understand the
00:10:47.200 | distinctions between these technologies, we'll be able to use them where they are unique and
00:10:54.480 | most powerful. Of the two, generally I think reading is a more impactful technology than a
00:11:02.880 | movie for a few basic reasons. First, if you want your child to be smart, you need to stimulate your
00:11:10.560 | child's brain. And reading does that because reading requires active participation of the
00:11:18.160 | reader in the story. When you're reading a story and listening to a description, your brain has to
00:11:26.320 | build a mental picture of that description. And to follow the story, you have to carefully watch it
00:11:32.240 | through and your brain has to rely exclusively on words to form that mental picture. Reading is a
00:11:38.240 | much more involved tech—mental—it's much more mentally taxing than watching something on a
00:11:44.560 | screen. When you're watching something on a screen, you are just simply a passive observer.
00:11:50.880 | That what you're observing can touch you, it can touch your emotions, it can feed you
00:11:55.760 | inspiration, it can touch you with facts, it can help you just to see in a very accurate way.
00:12:01.920 | But you're still a passive observer. You're not as fired up. That's why most of us, if we have a
00:12:08.240 | long and tiring week and we just want to take it easy, very rarely are we going to go and pick up
00:12:13.760 | a Charles Dickens novel. Rather, we're going to go and say, "Let me goof around and find something on
00:12:19.280 | Netflix and find some rom-com that's going to fill up about two hours and allow me to relax."
00:12:23.520 | Watching TV, watching movies, is generally a relaxing experience. Reading can be a relaxing
00:12:31.680 | experience, but is often not. And it's because the brain requires more—reading requires more
00:12:37.120 | active participation from the brain. Another thing that is—another benefit to reading that I think
00:12:42.880 | is really important is the ability to get inside the mind of a character. When an author is writing
00:12:52.240 | a story, the author, as the omniscient God, can carefully describe every thought that every
00:13:01.040 | protagonist is having. And that can allow your brain to follow along these grooves along with
00:13:08.720 | the character. So, your brain can experience fear, your brain can experience anger, your brain can
00:13:14.720 | experience hopefulness or hopelessness in a very, very powerful way simply by going along with the
00:13:21.440 | thought patterns of the protagonist. If the author is describing for several paragraphs or, in some
00:13:28.160 | cases, several pages what the protagonist is thinking in the story, your brain will automatically
00:13:34.800 | be experiencing that just alongside him. This last year, I read the book Count of Monte Cristo and
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00:14:15.040 | It was, I had, I don't remember if I'd read it in English or not, I had seen the movie
00:14:21.520 | previously and this time I read the original unabridged version in French. And it was the
00:14:26.640 | most powerful book I read all year. It touched me so incredibly deeply. I was in tears. I sat
00:14:35.360 | in my chair sobbing and I'm not, I'm not engaging in hyperbole. I literally sat in my chair sobbing
00:14:42.080 | at several points throughout the book. It's a very intensely emotional book. If you have not read it,
00:14:47.600 | I would urge you read it. In whatever translation you want, grab the audiobook, but get the full
00:14:54.240 | original unabridged book. What stood out to me so much about the story was that I experienced
00:15:03.120 | the breadth of human emotion in reading the story. The book begins on a very hopeful note,
00:15:09.680 | and you're filled with joy and appreciation for the good things that are happening in the
00:15:16.960 | life of the protagonist. Then the book turns from hopeful to hopeless, and you experience this sense
00:15:24.800 | of despondency and despair. And the protagonist is treated so immorally, so evilly, that you're
00:15:36.160 | filled with this hatred for the people who are doing this to him. And there's a point in there
00:15:41.760 | which he's utterly hopeless, and I just remember the emotions of the experience. And I'm not going
00:15:48.480 | to go on through all the emotions, but you experience all of these things. You experience
00:15:52.320 | anger, you experience revenge, then you experience sympathy and appreciation of what happens when you
00:15:59.200 | take revenge on people. And it's something that I've never experienced a movie that could take
00:16:05.520 | me through those emotions in such a powerful way. And so, for children especially, I believe this is
00:16:11.840 | really, really important, a really important way for helping our children not only to be
00:16:18.880 | intellectually smart, but to be emotionally intelligent as well. Listen to this excerpt,
00:16:24.880 | this story that illustrates this. "When Rebecca Gonzalez was elementary school age, her mother,
00:16:32.000 | Toni, read aloud Johnny Tremaine by Esther Forbes. Set in Boston during the events leading up to the
00:16:37.360 | Revolutionary War, the book tells the story of a 14-year-old apprentice silversmith. After Johnny's
00:16:43.680 | hand is disfigured and disabled, he ends up working as a horse-riding messenger for the
00:16:48.080 | Sons of Liberty. As her mother read the book aloud, Rebecca fell fast for Johnny,
00:16:53.600 | thoroughly enjoying his adventurous story of loyalty and courage. The next summer,
00:16:58.960 | Rebecca attended vacation Bible school and came home each night to talk incessantly about her new
00:17:04.720 | best friend, Billy. Every night she told her mother about the funny things he had said,
00:17:09.200 | how smart he was at Bible memory, his cool t-shirt and stylish hair, his award for camper of the day.
00:17:14.960 | Toni wasn't able to meet Billy until the final day of VBS.
00:17:19.040 | When Rebecca called Billy over to introduce him to her mother, Toni received a surprise.
00:17:24.720 | Billy made his way over to Rebecca and Toni, leaning heavily on his walker.
00:17:30.080 | It was only then that Toni realized something. Billy had cerebral palsy. During all of those
00:17:35.920 | conversations about her new best friend, Rebecca had never once mentioned it. That day, Toni noticed
00:17:41.760 | that most of Rebecca's vacation Bible school classmates were uncomfortable in Billy's presence.
00:17:46.800 | When she asked her daughter about the new friendship, Rebecca credited her fictional
00:17:50.800 | friend Johnny Tremaine, who had taught her what it might feel like to be disabled,
00:17:55.200 | and therefore different from everyone else. That's an anecdote from the Read Aloud Family book.
00:18:04.160 | The point of the story is, we've all had that. There's an old saying, an old aphorism,
00:18:10.560 | it says something like, "Don't judge a man until you've walked a mile in his shoes."
00:18:13.840 | But it's hard to go and actually walk a mile in another man's shoes. The next best thing to that
00:18:20.000 | is to read about the mile that he's walking in his shoes and allow your brain to experience the
00:18:27.600 | same kinds of experiences that man is having. And so, reading stories fills in not only facts and
00:18:38.240 | background knowledge, but emotions and empathy, and it helps with the emotional maturing and
00:18:43.680 | emotional intelligence of our children in an extremely powerful way. I think this is why it's
00:18:49.440 | important that we expose our children to a broad range of literature. I want my children to know
00:18:54.560 | what it's like to be bullied and to bully. Not in reality, but vicariously through stories. I want
00:19:04.080 | my children to understand what it's like to be in different cultures, to be in different parts
00:19:10.480 | of the world, to understand the optimism that a man born in one life position feels, and the
00:19:16.320 | despair and pessimism that a boy born in another life position can feel and experience.
00:19:24.640 | And reading is the best way to fully engage the brain in these events. Back to reading aloud.
00:19:32.480 | Your youngest children are not going to be able to access the stories if they have to wait
00:19:41.440 | until they are physically capable of reading them with their eyes. But you can invest for years
00:19:49.200 | into their experiences by reading aloud to them. And they are always going to be able to access
00:19:56.880 | stories at a higher level if they're listening to those stories. You and I, as adults, can listen
00:20:03.920 | to material that is much harder than what we can read comfortably. And that's always the case.
00:20:09.520 | Again, I've proved it with foreign languages again and again, and I see it with my children
00:20:14.560 | again and again. So, reading aloud is your cornerstone. How do you do it? First thing you
00:20:20.160 | need to read aloud successfully to your children is you need books. You need access to books. And
00:20:25.120 | that starts with knowing which books to read. Here, since you're listening to me speak in English,
00:20:31.440 | I want to encourage you that assuming you're reading to your children in English, that you
00:20:36.000 | have an embarrassment of riches. I have searched the world, and I continue to search the world,
00:20:43.440 | for high-quality lists of children's literature in other languages. And I am amazed at the
00:20:48.480 | difference between English and other languages in terms of book lists. I can, off the top of my head,
00:20:53.760 | give you half a dozen book lists, all of which are excellent lists that you can use to choose
00:21:00.320 | your children's literature from. Let me go ahead and do that. First, if you have not read the Read
00:21:05.600 | Aloud Handbook by Jim Trelise, immediately get a copy of it. In the back of that book is a
00:21:11.360 | bibliography, a list of books that will be suitable and appropriate for you to read with your children.
00:21:16.320 | I today read two excerpts from the book called The Read Aloud Family. Look up The Read Aloud
00:21:22.880 | Family. In the back of that book are a couple of book lists. I like the book Honey for a Child's
00:21:28.960 | Heart, which is a book dedicated to book lists and filled with, again, high-quality book
00:21:36.960 | recommendations. There's another book I have called Books That Build Character.
00:21:41.360 | In this particular book is a book that is full of book lists, telling you books that talk about
00:21:48.000 | virtue and character development. Online you can find all kinds of reading lists. One of my favorites
00:21:58.480 | that I think is really powerful is the reading list for the free online homeschool curriculum
00:22:05.440 | put out at Ambleside Online, amblesideonline.org. If you go to the Ambleside Online curriculum page,
00:22:13.360 | for each year they have 12 years of curriculum prepared, which although not a perfect fit for
00:22:19.520 | first grade, second grade, third grade, because the grade level is somewhat meaningless, you can
00:22:26.160 | be a little bit ahead or a little bit behind and still be in the process of gaining an excellent
00:22:30.320 | education. It's a useful corollary to the American system of 12 school years. And for each year,
00:22:38.400 | they have a list of what are called free reads. And this is a wonderful list of books that you
00:22:45.360 | can read from, have your children read, and many of them are excellent read aloud
00:22:53.200 | recommendations. The Institute for Excellence in Writing publishes a great list of books. They
00:23:00.960 | have one that's called Books for Boys and Other People Who Would Rather Build Fortsall Than Read
00:23:06.000 | a Book or something like that. It's a great list of novels for active boys who want strong
00:23:11.280 | books with lots of action in them. Mensa publishes a book list. There are just so many book lists out
00:23:20.000 | there. Basically, what I'm encouraging is go find a book list and use those titles and start pulling
00:23:25.120 | from them. So, the first thing you need to get is books. And it starts with a book list, a list that
00:23:30.800 | you can pull titles from. Then you need access to those books. Here, the question would be,
00:23:39.360 | should I get them from the library or should I own the books? In general, I think obviously the
00:23:46.160 | library is a really great resource. Unfortunately, I'm much more cautious these days about the
00:23:53.760 | library than I was when I was younger. When I was a boy, I would go to the library with my mom
00:23:58.480 | once a week or so, and I would usually check out 50 books. I would take a big bag and I would check
00:24:02.640 | out 50 books, and then a week later bring them back and turn them in and go again. There's
00:24:07.680 | nothing better than a library for allowing a child access to a broad range of books.
00:24:13.440 | And remember, not all books are designed to be read from cover to cover. And in fact,
00:24:19.840 | this is one of the great advantages of the technology of books. Unlike the technology of
00:24:26.000 | audio, unlike the technology of video, the technology of books allows a book to be skimmed
00:24:33.280 | with profit. So, if you want to gain an overview of a subject, skimming a book and kind of dipping
00:24:39.760 | your toe in here and there is an important skill, and it's a perfectly valid form of reading that
00:24:48.080 | individuals should develop. If you can only consume a book from front to back, you are not
00:24:53.200 | a skilled reader. A skilled reader can consume a book in many different ways. And so, having access
00:24:59.680 | to a broad range of books is really, really important and useful. This also helps if you
00:25:05.920 | have access to huge numbers of books from the library, this also helps your children to develop
00:25:12.000 | background knowledge. I can distinctly point back and I can identify things in my own knowledge
00:25:18.240 | base that came from my broad skim reading of library books. When I was a boy, I learned how
00:25:25.360 | to fly a helicopter. I learned how to do organic gardening. I learned all about ultralights. I
00:25:31.680 | learned all these different subjects. Now, I say learned, of course, in a tongue-in-cheek way,
00:25:36.240 | I read about them. And while I don't, I certainly don't pretend that that knowledge is as good as
00:25:45.760 | real experiential knowledge, that broad knowledge base has given me many, many advantages in life.
00:25:53.600 | And it came from 50 books a week, basically week in, week out for many, many years.
00:25:59.120 | Unfortunately, I've lost faith, I've lost confidence in many of the local library systems.
00:26:06.080 | The last time I took my children into a library, the library was, they had pornography in the
00:26:10.800 | children's section. And it was really quite disturbing to see that. And so, most libraries,
00:26:20.000 | as a way of getting around that, most libraries will allow you to use their hold and reserve
00:26:25.040 | system. And what we have done is started to move to that hold and reserve system. Instead of taking
00:26:31.200 | our children, just letting them browse the shelves and pick their own books, we put the books on hold
00:26:36.480 | and then just go and pick them up. So, if you're dealing with a government library or something
00:26:41.360 | like that, then be careful in our current age as far as the things that your children will be
00:26:46.160 | exposed to. There is also an increasing movement towards what are called living libraries. The
00:26:52.400 | term living library is probably an offshoot of the term living book. And that term is hard to define.
00:26:59.680 | Here, a simplistic definition I would give is just simply a very high quality, very engaging,
00:27:05.680 | very carefully selected book. And if you have access in your area to a living library,
00:27:11.120 | sign up, pay the membership fee, and it'll be worth every cent. Just an amazing resource.
00:27:18.400 | When I browse one of our local living libraries book selections, I'm amazed at the high quality
00:27:25.680 | of those selections and how wonderful it is to have a dedicated librarian who is committed to
00:27:32.160 | choosing the highest quality books. So, check around in your area, see if you have a living
00:27:37.840 | library. These are usually independent. They're not affiliated with any large-scale organization
00:27:43.920 | or government entity. They're not necessarily intended to be a non-profit, but I think
00:27:49.360 | at least all the ones that I have seen wind up being non-profit organizations.
00:27:53.840 | There is a membership fee where you sign up, pay a membership fee, but the librarians usually have
00:27:59.200 | such a passion for quality literature that they wind up spending all of their would-be profits on
00:28:04.800 | more books for their library. So, they're non-for-profit endeavors, but they're just a
00:28:10.960 | wonderful resource. You also need access to the books and you need time to read them.
00:28:18.720 | Those amounts of reading should be large. It should be significant. So, I mentioned
00:28:27.120 | in the previous episode, my personal target is two hours a day. A number of years ago,
00:28:32.960 | I read a great book called Teaching the Trivium by Harvey and Lori Bluedorn, and they said this
00:28:39.120 | is this should be the goal, two hours a day. I like it when people give me a goal, and so I set
00:28:44.320 | that as my goal, and I do pretty well. I probably hit that five days a week, four to five days a
00:28:49.040 | week. Not every day, but I hit it four to five days a week. Then my wife also reads to the
00:28:54.000 | children, and so I don't track her hours, but it varies sometimes a lot, sometimes less.
00:28:59.200 | But it's important that you note that with children, you can't do it all at once,
00:29:04.560 | nor would you want to. It's exhausting and tiring to do a good job reading for an hour straight,
00:29:09.600 | and children don't have the attention span to engage with books for that long of a period.
00:29:17.120 | What you do is you intersperse your child's day with little chunks of reading here and there.
00:29:24.880 | I read sometimes a book before breakfast with a couple of children, and now that my children's
00:29:31.440 | age ranges vary quite a lot, I want to make time for the picture books with the younger ones and
00:29:36.400 | make time for special books with the older ones. I read at the breakfast table, I read at the lunch
00:29:41.360 | table, I read at the dinner table, sometimes before dinner, many times after dinner, etc.
00:29:46.880 | But if you put in chunks of 15-20 minutes here and there, pretty soon you can get to an hour,
00:29:51.280 | hour and a half, two hours or more per day. And then that works really well with the children's
00:29:57.360 | attention span. The other thing I do is I try to be thoughtful in terms of when and how I read
00:30:02.880 | certain books. So picture books that really engage the interest of my littlest children,
00:30:08.720 | I of course read those on the couch where we can snuggle up and they'll be totally focused.
00:30:12.640 | Longer chapter books that I think are really wonderful and powerful books, but that aren't
00:30:19.040 | going to engage my younger children. If I want them to be listening, because again I want them
00:30:23.040 | to grow their attention span and their ability to pay attention, but they're going to need something
00:30:28.720 | to do with their hands, so often I'll do those at meal times. Their hands are busy, their mouths are
00:30:32.240 | full, they don't get too wiggly, and it helps to stretch them out. And even just listening to an
00:30:38.240 | audiobook or listening to a book being read to you, that is a skill that helps your child to
00:30:43.520 | develop attention span, develop the ability to sit still, to focus, etc. I don't want to go too
00:30:49.120 | deeply into more tips here. I would urge you again read aloud a handbook and read aloud family, two
00:30:53.840 | good resources, but don't expect your children to be totally still. Many times make a snack,
00:30:59.040 | give them food, read to them at times when their hands are busy. I'll go and when I go through an
00:31:05.440 | episode of my day and show you how I try to put all the stuff into a normal day,
00:31:09.200 | all these techniques and tips that I'm talking about, I'll go in detail through it, but
00:31:14.480 | I build little traditions. And so, you know, at 10 30 in the morning we have a protein shake.
00:31:19.760 | Well, that's the time that we read this book, and then at noon we read the other book, etc.
00:31:24.400 | And so, you're just building up your children's stamina over time and doing it in a soft way,
00:31:30.720 | but with a goal of stretching them out to a very long attention span, so they can start moving and
00:31:37.920 | developing not only the intellectual ability, not only the words, not only the linguistic skills,
00:31:43.840 | but also things like being able to do long, huge amounts of deep work in the future,
00:31:49.680 | which will help them. I see it as a valid investment into my youngest of children
00:31:54.800 | that I'm helping prepare their brains to focus intently on difficult work for long periods of
00:32:02.240 | time in the future. And I want to engage with the subject of audiobooks, because I believe audiobooks
00:32:10.640 | are a magic tool that we have today that has not been nearly as accessible as even 10 or 20 years
00:32:20.880 | ago, and yet can really supercharge our results. And we owe this tool primarily to the existence
00:32:28.400 | of Audible and other audiobook platforms. People reading books aloud has been around forever,
00:32:39.040 | and in fact, oral traditions were far more common. If you went back a couple thousand years,
00:32:43.680 | you would find that it was very common to have a reader. All of the Hebrew and New Testament
00:32:51.040 | scriptures were designed to be read aloud. There would be one scroll or one letter that made the
00:32:56.080 | rounds and then a reader to read it. It's a tradition of people reading aloud. So, in many
00:33:01.520 | ways, you would say that the technology of each person having an individual book and reading that
00:33:05.840 | book is fairly new. But it wasn't as…audiobooks were not as accessible in the past as they are
00:33:13.520 | today. And I think that we need to pay attention to how good this has gotten. I did not grow up
00:33:21.760 | listening to a lot of audiobooks. We had a few treasured cassette series that we listened to
00:33:28.160 | again and again, but the prices were high, and we listened to those same books again and again
00:33:33.360 | and again, usually on family car trips. Then CDs came out, and that made the technology better,
00:33:40.000 | and then libraries started to acquire audiobook series and CDs. But over the last decade,
00:33:46.000 | we've of course enjoyed the digital revolution, where most of us now listen to audio that's
00:33:51.520 | linked to our digital device rather than a CD or an audio cassette. And libraries have also
00:33:58.880 | supported that. And so, now you can borrow from your local library audiobooks.
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00:34:34.640 | So, which is a wonderful, wonderful solution as well. In addition, of course, you have the
00:34:41.760 | paid versions of Audible, Audiobooks.com, etc., where you have access to great, great audiobooks.
00:34:50.240 | Years ago, in the histories of Radical Personal Finance, I did a podcast dedicated to all the
00:34:54.320 | different options. At the time, I was using several different audiobook platforms. These
00:34:59.680 | days, I've pretty much just standardized on Audible as being one of the best solutions out there.
00:35:06.320 | Today, you can get an Audible membership that basically brings almost any title to a maximum
00:35:14.560 | cost of $11, which means that if you sign up for a plan of two or three books per month,
00:35:23.120 | for $20 or $30, you can gain access to 30 to 60 to possibly more, shorter books, 15 to 50 hours
00:35:33.920 | of audio per month that's available to you of the highest quality audio. And the audiobook selection
00:35:40.160 | is huge and is growing. Audiobooks are really valuable to helping you enhance the intellectual
00:35:49.760 | abilities of your children because they take most of the benefits of reading aloud and they
00:35:55.920 | add those benefits beyond what you yourself as a parent are able to provide to your children.
00:36:03.040 | I don't think that audiobooks are better than you reading aloud to your children, which is why
00:36:10.560 | I intentionally focus on my doing the reading aloud to my children, because there are a whole
00:36:18.400 | host of other relationship benefits associated with that. I'm building an emotional connection
00:36:23.840 | with my children when I read aloud to them. They're snuggling on my lap, or they're snuggled
00:36:28.800 | up next to me, or they're hearing my voices, my rendition. I can stop, I can explain things,
00:36:34.960 | we can talk about the subject matter of the book if it's controversial, etc.
00:36:41.360 | And then also, by having these things together, it becomes part of our family culture.
00:36:48.240 | One of the great benefits of reading books together with your children is they become
00:36:54.880 | useful skills or useful tools for you to talk about life, but to do it in an impersonal way.
00:37:02.720 | So, let's say that you want to talk with your teenage son about women, or your teenage daughter
00:37:15.280 | about relationships. It can be difficult to do that, especially if you want to point out something
00:37:23.200 | in a, let's say you notice someone in your friend group, or someone at your church, or someone in
00:37:28.560 | your company who just has this certain behavior that is totally inappropriate. You don't want to
00:37:34.000 | tell your son or daughter, "Listen, child, you see that person over there and what they're doing?
00:37:38.000 | How horrific. Don't ever do that." That's a wrong way to, that brings people down. It's a wrong
00:37:43.360 | thing to do, generally speaking. But if you read a book together, and you read Pride and Prejudice,
00:37:49.680 | and you get all this intrigue about all these relationships, etc., you now have an opportunity
00:37:54.080 | to say, "Well, what do you think about this protagonist's actions? Or what do you think
00:37:57.680 | they should have done?" etc. And so, having a book that's in common, and books that have positive
00:38:04.000 | examples, and books that have negative examples, gives you a really great springboard for discussing
00:38:10.480 | important and serious topics with your children, but doing it in a way where you're not harming
00:38:15.200 | other people, you're not talking down about other people, or gossiping about other real people.
00:38:19.840 | It's one of the reasons books are so important. So, reading aloud is important, but audiobooks
00:38:25.600 | provide all those benefits of intellectual growth, and they fill in around the edges. Remember,
00:38:33.760 | the basic metric that we want to count is the number of words heard by the child. That number
00:38:39.680 | of words, we don't want 24 hours a day of words, but we do want the number of words to be high.
00:38:44.960 | But I get tired. I get tired as a reader. I get tired of certain things. That's where audiobooks
00:38:51.680 | come in. Audiobooks allow us to listen to stories in the car. And for some families, there may be
00:38:58.000 | five hours a week, ten hours a week of great audio. By the way, I think the car is often best
00:39:03.920 | reserved for conversation, but what I have noticed with my young children, though I believe that
00:39:09.200 | conversation is really valuable, my young children aren't so great at it yet. And car rides often
00:39:16.160 | become loud and quite unpleasant if there's not some activity. So, listening to a family audiobook
00:39:22.240 | in the car together is a wonderful way of exposing your children to high quality, to all these
00:39:30.960 | benefits, a great story together, and it's a great way of making use of the dead time. And back to
00:39:36.320 | the concept of children being capable of far higher reading levels. One of the techniques I use
00:39:48.480 | with audiobooks is I use the car as a place where they're a captive audience. Let me take a slight
00:39:54.160 | detour for a moment into a topic of how reading can be used to make you smarter in the long run.
00:40:03.840 | There is a model of education that is often called the classical model. And this idea of
00:40:10.080 | classical model of education, it's hard to pin down, hard to define accurately, and there are
00:40:14.960 | different definitions depending on who you're talking to and in what context you're using it.
00:40:18.240 | But a component of the classical model generally involves some relation to what is called the
00:40:24.560 | trivium. The trivium is an allusion back to the classic Greek and Roman conception of the three
00:40:32.400 | basic areas of knowledge, which they called grammar, logic, and rhetoric. And in the neoclassical model,
00:40:39.760 | these ideas of grammar, logic, and rhetoric are often applied on an age perspective, right? You
00:40:44.800 | start in the beginning with grammar stage of learning, logic stage, rhetoric, etc. I look at
00:40:50.320 | these as a natural encapsulation of how you learn about something. And one of the important things
00:40:57.040 | we want to teach our children is how to learn. And so we want to, if you're going to go into a new
00:41:01.600 | subject, the first thing you'd learn is you learn the basic grammar of the subject, all of the basic
00:41:06.480 | words, their meanings, the basic arguments, etc. You learn all the basics of the subject. Then you
00:41:12.560 | go on in your learning and you start to think about the arguments inherent in those subjects.
00:41:17.920 | And then later you express your own perspectives or your opinions using rhetoric related to the
00:41:24.320 | arguments of those subjects. So let me give you a financial example. If you were brand new to
00:41:30.000 | personal finance, you would begin by learning the grammar. And let's say I use terms like tax
00:41:36.000 | brackets or tax rates or tax itself or income tax or employment tax. These are all words that need
00:41:45.040 | a definition. And once you understand what those are, right? What is a tax? What is an income tax?
00:41:49.680 | What is employment tax? What are tax brackets? What are tax rates? What is a wage base, etc.?
00:41:56.800 | That's all part of the grammar stage. Then in the logic stage, you can start to deal with the
00:42:00.720 | arguments of a position, right? People will argue that taxes in the United States are going to go
00:42:08.240 | up because the government is running a deficit. People can argue that taxes are going to go down
00:42:12.720 | because the government wants to stimulate the economy, etc. And then eventually you can opine
00:42:17.280 | yourself on whether somebody should participate in a traditional 401k or a Roth 401k based upon
00:42:24.640 | their idea of tax brackets, tax rates, wage base, etc. and how those things are likely to be applied
00:42:33.040 | to you as an individual taxpayer. If you want to help your children to be very smart, I think one
00:42:40.640 | of the best things you can do is expose them to the grammar or the basics, especially the basic
00:42:48.240 | definitions of the most important subjects at a very young age. The younger the better. But we
00:42:57.200 | want to do this in a very thoughtful way. So I use audiobooks as a way of accomplishing this.
00:43:04.400 | And as an example, I quoted several episodes ago, I quoted extensively from the book Deep Nutrition.
00:43:11.440 | I believe that nutrition is a fundamental topic that all successful human beings need to understand
00:43:20.800 | in order to fuel their body. And so I want my children to study at a very deep level nutrition.
00:43:27.600 | And so the way that I do that is I have the audiobook version of Deep Nutrition, and when
00:43:34.080 | we're in the car, about a couple times a week, I'll play about 10 minutes of it. And the children
00:43:40.960 | don't have the capacity. Remember, I've got a nine-year-old, seven-year-old, five-year-old,
00:43:43.520 | three-year-old, and newborn. The children don't have the capacity to listen to two hours of it
00:43:50.240 | and gain anything meaningful from it. But they do have the capacity to listen to 10 minutes of it.
00:43:54.800 | And the terms, all of the terms of that book start to make them think about nutrition and starts to
00:44:03.760 | give them a context for conversations. So then when I guide their nutritional choices, and I say
00:44:09.520 | we're going to choose this because this is where the protein value is, this is where the protein is,
00:44:15.040 | or this is where the nutritional value is, etc., then there's a context for that. And I know that
00:44:21.120 | in the future, as they go forward over the years and they read five more books on nutrition or
00:44:26.160 | follow whatever the developments are in their own life, they'll have the ability to understand those
00:44:31.200 | topics. Or other things, human relationships, right? We, as a family, I've read it to them
00:44:36.880 | before, but now we're doing the audiobook version of How to Win Friends and Influence People.
00:44:40.880 | I believe this is a fundamental book that really all people should probably read once a year.
00:44:46.320 | And so I just play a chapter in the car when they can't really do anything else and they kind of
00:44:52.720 | have to listen. It's one of those things that doesn't, I have read it at the breakfast table,
00:44:55.920 | but it's not as interesting as a great story. And so I play it in the car and now we have a context.
00:45:00.960 | So rule number one, don't criticize, condemn, or complain about other people. And it gives me,
00:45:06.480 | it gives us a common family framework to where I can teach them about human relationships.
00:45:11.760 | Because I believe that one of the basic skills that successful people need, all successful people
00:45:16.160 | need, is they need to understand how to handle people, how to deal with people. And so we have a
00:45:21.280 | resource that we can then use. Now these are of course adult level books, but children can take
00:45:26.240 | them in small doses. And I use audiobooks as a convenient way to meter out those doses and I
00:45:33.200 | put them in strategically. Now it doesn't have to just be non-fiction. I believe that fiction
00:45:40.320 | should be the cornerstone for really for most people, but especially for children. I don't know
00:45:47.360 | that fiction should be a cornerstone for an adult, but it should definitely be something an adult to
00:45:50.960 | read. But fiction is really, really important for children. But we can use audiobooks to access
00:45:58.080 | fiction that is beyond what we ourselves might want to read. So in our family right now, we are
00:46:04.640 | nearing the end of book two of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. And we are listening,
00:46:12.160 | and have been, it's been a year that we've been working our way through The Hobbit and book one
00:46:16.960 | and book two, and we're not done with book two yet, and we'll move on to book three. But we've
00:46:20.720 | been, we're working through the Andy Serkis recording that is available of The Lord of the
00:46:25.920 | Rings. This book is an exquisitely excellent example of fantasy fiction. Very involved and
00:46:38.880 | intricate plot dynamics, high-level vocabulary, beautiful English construction, exceedingly poetic,
00:46:47.360 | full of interesting plot lines and, you know, betrayal and success and despair and hope and
00:46:56.240 | courage, etc. And then when you add in Andy Serkis's performance, which just takes it over
00:47:02.080 | the top, he's the most gifted voice actor I have ever heard. Incredible. Incredible. I think that
00:47:08.960 | listening to The Lord of the Rings, with his production at least, is superior to reading it,
00:47:15.440 | because it fills in so much beauty to it. And the children love it. But they only love it,
00:47:22.880 | like, they can't love it three hours at a time work. But 30 minutes here, 45 minutes there,
00:47:28.480 | etc. It's wonderful. Reading your way through The Lord of the Rings is a mammoth undertaking
00:47:33.120 | as a parent, but listening your way through Lord of the Rings is a much less mammoth undertaking.
00:47:40.240 | And it can be, it'll take you a year to two years probably if you do it, but it's wonderful. And I
00:47:46.240 | noticed that the language, so again, pretty high level, right? Definitely high school level
00:47:54.240 | language in terms of normal Lexile scores, etc. But my children all enjoy it. The five-year-old
00:48:01.840 | definitely enjoys it. And his hearing of rich amount of words. So, audiobooks are a way to
00:48:07.760 | achieve this. Use audiobooks as a tool in your household. And if you'll carefully choose your
00:48:15.840 | audiobook selections, and then allow your children to engage with those, in many ways, it'll give you
00:48:22.560 | a superior option versus other forms of just vegging out. So, remember that the basic concept
00:48:31.200 | of success in life has to do with opportunity cost. And in every decision, there is an opportunity
00:48:37.680 | cost. There's something that is not being done because you've chosen to take the action or make
00:48:42.880 | the decision of the thing that you're doing at this moment. Reading or listening to audiobooks
00:48:48.800 | is not always the best decision. If you tell me to have the choice between a child playing outside
00:48:55.280 | several hours per day versus a child not playing outside several hours per day and listening to
00:48:59.200 | audiobooks, I'm going to say, "No, we need to play outside." But if you have the choice of
00:49:03.200 | listening to an audiobook versus consuming a mindless cartoon, the audiobook is a superior
00:49:11.520 | option. And so, audiobooks also allow you as a parent a tool to give your children a very high
00:49:18.000 | quality option for those times when they need entertainment. So, screens in movies and videos
00:49:25.600 | are very useful. Apps, certain apps can be very useful. But too much of a good thing can turn it
00:49:33.200 | into a bad thing. And those technologies have certain traps. I want to encourage you that
00:49:41.280 | many of the times when you are looking for an electronic babysitter for your child,
00:49:47.840 | if you'll choose an audiobook, it'll fill something in in a powerful way. And then you can do
00:49:54.800 | multiple things. So, for example, sometimes when the children are wild and crazy and I need them
00:50:00.880 | calmed down, etc. But maybe I'm busy, my wife's busy, etc. A common tool would be to say, "Let's
00:50:08.080 | go to a screen." But I think a superior option in many of those cases is everybody come to the
00:50:14.240 | kitchen table, we're going to listen to an audiobook, and we're going to draw pictures.
00:50:18.240 | And so, you have a moment, say, let's have 30 minutes, listen to a high quality audiobook,
00:50:22.240 | you're getting words, all the benefits of words, of unique language, really high level language
00:50:27.680 | that's often not involved in screens or apps, etc. And you're also saying, "Let's practice
00:50:33.920 | artistic ability." So, everyone has colored pencils, here's a book on how to draw,
00:50:38.240 | practice drawing the shapes, and let's work on artistic ability. And by the way, this also has
00:50:42.160 | the benefit of helping strengthen the child's muscles to make writing a less onerous and
00:50:46.000 | difficult task, etc., which will help your child's skills in schooling. So, use audiobooks as part of
00:50:53.120 | the portfolio. They shouldn't replace reading aloud, but they should be a really valuable tool
00:50:58.080 | that gives you a more passive experience, but is a superior to many other options.
00:51:03.280 | By the way, I frequently hate on screens and apps and devices. I want to be consistent and say,
00:51:11.920 | "These are really valuable and wonderful tools, but they can do so much more." So, we use them,
00:51:19.200 | I use them, but I want to use them very intentionally, not mindlessly. And by the way,
00:51:24.240 | screens and apps and such have benefits in a different application. I'm not going to talk
00:51:31.520 | about multilingualism in this episode. I think I'll do it in the next episode. But screens can,
00:51:40.400 | all the downsides of screens, all the downsides of movies can actually become positive things
00:51:47.120 | when you move into the world of multilingualism. So, there's a little teaser for the next
00:51:51.440 | discussion on that topic. For this entire episode, I have been talking with you about reading,
00:52:00.640 | but I've been talking about reading with your ears, not with your eyes. This is a fundamental
00:52:07.840 | step to build fluency that will lead to reading with your eyes. If you want to make your child
00:52:15.440 | smarter and help your child to develop his mind, his brain to the highest potential level,
00:52:20.480 | you want your child to be a committed and highly skilled reader with his eyes.
00:52:30.560 | In the same way that the number of words that your child hears will drive his academic success,
00:52:39.040 | I think the basic metric that you're trying to track and maximize in the development of a child's
00:52:48.320 | mind is the number of pages read, or the number of words read, either way. A child who has a very
00:52:57.920 | high page count of reading is a child that is going to be considered and be obviously very,
00:53:07.120 | very smart, very learned, very educated, regardless of that child's interaction with
00:53:14.080 | the school system. A child who reads a huge amount will fly through formalized schooling
00:53:22.480 | with very little difficulty. That was my experience. I never struggled in school,
00:53:27.760 | ever, primarily because I was a reader. A child who reads a lot can bypass the formalized school
00:53:38.080 | system and succeed without a problem in almost any field, because the basic skill of education
00:53:46.240 | or self-education is reading. I don't want to give you a long, drawn-out disquisition on
00:53:54.400 | why this is so. I just want to state it as a blunt fact. It is so. And while many incredible
00:54:03.680 | technologies can be applied to enhance learning, reading is the fundamental skill.
00:54:12.480 | So how do you teach your child to read and to read well? At its core, I believe the magic tool
00:54:19.760 | is reading aloud. You want your child to associate books with pleasure, and well-chosen books read to
00:54:30.480 | the child extensively over time make that link. There are other things that you can do. You want
00:54:37.120 | your child to see you reading, modeling the behavior. You want to make sure that your home
00:54:42.640 | is full of books. There is good research that…actually, let me go ahead and mention it.
00:54:48.640 | It's important in the context of talking about how to invest in your children. Earlier,
00:54:55.120 | I mentioned libraries, but a big way to invest in your children is to have books in the home.
00:55:01.200 | Right now, my home library has a total of
00:55:05.040 | 2,518 titles in it. Right here in our home library. 2,518. I have purchased every one of those books.
00:55:16.960 | It has not been cheap, and I have thousands of more books that I will be purchasing in the coming
00:55:21.680 | years. The reason I make this investment is books purchased for your child are some of the cheapest
00:55:29.280 | possible money that you could ever spend to help your child do well. Let's talk about the money for
00:55:34.640 | a moment. No, let's deal with…excuse me. Let me go through the numbers for a moment.
00:55:39.440 | Reading here from the Read Aloud Handbook by Jim Trelise.
00:55:43.200 | Did you ever notice the similarity between reading scores and rodeo scores? For the sake of
00:55:50.320 | discussion, let's say the nation's leaders suddenly decided that rodeo was the most important subject
00:55:54.720 | in our school's curriculum. This is not as far-fetched as you might think. If the price of
00:55:59.600 | gas keeps rising, some people are going to be looking very differently at horses. There would
00:56:04.720 | suddenly be new courses created around horsemanship, saddles and equipment would have to be
00:56:09.280 | ordered, riding coaches credentialed, and mandatory riding and roping instruction begun in rodeo lab
00:56:15.360 | classes. All of this would culminate in mandatory grade-level rodeos, including exit rodeos for the
00:56:21.200 | high school seniors, to ensure that no rider was left behind and everyone would be racing to the
00:56:26.800 | top corral. And sure as the sun sinks in the west, in this scenario, there would be states that
00:56:33.440 | excelled and those that failed. In fact, to show this idea isn't all that wacky, set your browser
00:56:39.040 | for the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association and look at any of their standings. You'll find the
00:56:43.840 | high scorers all come from states like Utah, Texas, Nebraska, Oregon, and Colorado, rich with
00:56:51.200 | ranches, horses, and cattle. Already we could easily predict which states would be on the
00:56:56.480 | "failing schools" list for rodeo, places that have the fewest horses, like New Jersey, Illinois,
00:57:02.000 | Delaware, and Maine. It's tough to get good at rodeo if you're missing a horse, right?
00:57:05.920 | The same role played by horses in the rodeo world is played by print in the reading world.
00:57:13.200 | Like Texas or Oregon with rodeo, there are places in America where they annually have the highest
00:57:18.240 | reading scores. And in the same country, under the same government, there are homes, schools,
00:57:23.520 | and communities that scarcely have seen a new book in decades, and newspapers seldom hit their
00:57:28.960 | doorstep. It's difficult to get good at reading if you're short of print. Government programs like
00:57:35.760 | No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top ensure that children who are behind in reading are
00:57:40.240 | entitled to after-school tutoring and extra help with phonics. Nice! But giving phonics lessons to
00:57:45.600 | kids who don't have any print in their lives is like giving oars to people who don't have a boat.
00:57:50.080 | You don't get very far. And now here we go into some charts. So here is the verbal results of a
00:57:57.280 | couple of charts. Number of books in the home of those who have a high interest in books, 80.6.
00:58:03.920 | Number of books in the home who those children who report having a low interest in books, 31.7
00:58:09.280 | books. Also have a chart of books in the home and average science scores in grade 12. Reported
00:58:16.240 | number of books at the home, more than 100 books in the home, average science score 161. 26 to 100
00:58:22.880 | books in the home, average science score 147. 11 to 25 books in the home, average science score
00:58:29.280 | 132. Zero to 10 books in the home, average science score 122. So if you want your child
00:58:39.360 | to read books, you need to spend money and fill your home with books. Fill your home not just with
00:58:45.680 | any books, but fill your home with the best books. Carefully chosen, carefully curated,
00:58:50.400 | but the best books. And what you will find is if you're doing these things, if you're reading to
00:58:56.080 | your child and if you have filled your home with books, your children will naturally read books.
00:59:05.280 | It'll happen. By the way, you'll notice I haven't yet said if you teach them to read or focus on
00:59:10.320 | phonics or something like that. That stuff's important. But I have, I obviously have a baby,
00:59:16.720 | no let me say it, I have three non-reading children who all love books because I have a
00:59:21.840 | home filled with books and we read books constantly. And so I will routinely say to my
00:59:29.360 | children, we have a library in a home, I'll say, you know, it's five o'clock or 5.20, we're getting
00:59:33.440 | ready for dinner, have them get their baths, et cetera, go to the library and read. And all of
00:59:38.880 | my children, with baby accepted, will go to the library and sit and pleasurably read books for
00:59:44.400 | 30 minutes with no problem, including the non-readers, because books are a source of
00:59:52.960 | pleasure. And they know that. And of course, they will spend most of their time reading books with
00:59:58.160 | beautiful pictures and repeating the stories themselves, books that we've read many times.
01:00:02.000 | Sometimes they'll basically recite the book, sometimes they read the books to each other,
01:00:04.960 | et cetera. But you need to have a home filled with books if you want your children to be readers.
01:00:11.120 | If you'll fill your home with books and then create and make easy access to those books,
01:00:17.360 | your children will be able to follow their interests among those books. If you choose
01:00:23.440 | a broad variety, they can enjoy all of the different things that are available to them.
01:00:29.840 | You want your children to do well in school? Buy books. Let me give you the math that I think about.
01:00:34.240 | Let's say that you buy a $50 book, a fairly expensive book. If you're in the United States
01:00:41.520 | and you can order your books on Amazon, most of your books are going to be $10 to $20,
01:00:45.600 | in some cases $4. But let's say you buy a $50 book. I buy many $50 books, partly because I do
01:00:51.920 | foreign language books, partly because I buy expensive books, et cetera, but I buy a lot of
01:00:55.440 | $50 books. A $50 book will have at minimum five hours of consumption if it's read. In many cases,
01:01:06.560 | it's much, much higher. But let's go with five hours to make easy math and make my point exceedingly
01:01:12.640 | conservative. Here's how I think about it. Let's say that I go and I buy a $50 book. I ordered it
01:01:18.880 | in from overseas, again, foreign language, out of print, something I'm doing to get a high quality
01:01:23.440 | book. And I have my first child who reads the book. $10 an hour is my cost for that child to
01:01:32.080 | read the book. But that $10 per hour is gaining me access to a world-class teacher or tutor on
01:01:41.200 | that subject. That $10 book is gaining me access to someone who's passionate about a subject.
01:01:49.840 | The best teachers in the world are available to me for $10 an hour. By the way, notice,
01:01:54.960 | this is a $50 book. In many cases, it's a $10 book. Right now, my eldest child is reading
01:02:02.400 | a biography of Marie Curie written by her daughter, Eve Curie. It's an intense book,
01:02:09.840 | but he's right there shoulder to shoulder with Pierre and Marie Curie in their laboratory.
01:02:15.600 | Or a story, right? You're riding across the ocean with a... I mean, I don't mean to go on.
01:02:20.480 | A book gains access to the world's best teacher, somebody who's invested thousands of hours into
01:02:30.960 | experience and learning, etc., and is articulating those into five hours. It's incredibly compact.
01:02:36.240 | $10 an hour is an exceedingly cheap price to pay. It's even cheaper if it's $15 for the book and
01:02:44.000 | it's $2 an hour. You will never get a better deal for your child's tutoring than a book.
01:02:48.080 | Then, of course, bring that on to multiple children. I have five children. All five
01:02:54.400 | children will read the book. So now my per hour consumption cost drops to $2 an hour,
01:02:59.920 | spread out across. And by the way, many books, they'll put in 30 hours' width,
01:03:04.560 | 50 hours' width. The hours just grow and grow. When I was a child, I used to love reading
01:03:09.600 | encyclopedias. And so I bought a lot of encyclopedias. Dorling Kindersley at DK is a
01:03:14.320 | publisher that produces these incredible encyclopedias. Fill your home with encyclopedias.
01:03:20.080 | Your children will read them if they're readers. And so you're getting the best access to
01:03:26.080 | scientific information, historical information, all the stuff. And your children will go again
01:03:32.720 | and again and read those again and again and again, following their interests. So you're not
01:03:38.240 | going to get something better that you can spend your money on that will improve your children's
01:03:42.720 | outcomes, academics, test scores, etc. than books. Get good lists, buy good books, always buy your
01:03:50.480 | children the best books that you can afford. Fill your home with them and then give them ample time
01:03:55.440 | to read them. Why am I so passionate about the idea of investing in your children when they're
01:04:00.800 | young? It's because there's a whole bunch of parents that start to freak out when their 9th
01:04:05.280 | grader gets bad test scores. And they'll go out and they'll spend $30 an hour, $40 an hour,
01:04:10.480 | or more to try to bring in a tutor. And that tutor has dozens and dozens and dozens and dozens and
01:04:17.040 | dozens of hours to put in to try to make up for where the child is behind. There should be no
01:04:23.600 | need for it. You should be able to hand your child a book and say, "This book has the information you
01:04:29.040 | need for what you're struggling with." But if your child is not a reader, that's going to fail.
01:04:34.000 | So put in the investment when your children are young and make sure that they become skilled,
01:04:42.400 | fluent, competent readers who love to read and who read very widely. And you will never have a need
01:04:50.640 | to pay for a tutor. You'll have a child who is at the top of his class in academics. You'll have a
01:04:56.240 | child who you never need to pay for a tutor because you did the hard work in the early years.
01:05:03.760 | If you want to develop your child's brain, your child needs words. Those words should be heard
01:05:10.960 | and those words should be read. And the child who has huge portions of his life dedicated to
01:05:17.520 | listening to the best words, the most beautifully presented words, the most advanced and appropriate
01:05:24.880 | words, and who reads those for years and years and years, will have the most highly developed
01:05:31.920 | mind among his peers. But what's more important than that, will have established the foundation
01:05:37.120 | for what he needs to go on and be impactful as an adult. Consider how you can use these
01:05:45.120 | very simple techniques to help your children have more words. Technique one, reading aloud. Get a
01:05:51.360 | book list, get books. Read to your child, set a target of two hours a day. Remember that as with
01:05:58.160 | most things, the numbers that are used by people are laughable. I read this, I saved this infographic
01:06:08.320 | a number of years ago, came across, and here it is by Scholastic. And here's what the infographic
01:06:14.160 | or the little chart says. Here's the impact of reading 20 minutes per day. It says, "A student
01:06:18.640 | who reads one minute per day will be exposed to 8,000 words per year and is more likely to score
01:06:24.320 | in the 10th percentile on standardized tests. A student who reads five minutes per day will be
01:06:30.080 | exposed to 282,000 words per year and is more likely to score in the 50th percentile on standardized
01:06:37.120 | tests. A student who reads 20 minutes per day will be exposed to 1.8 million words per year
01:06:43.920 | and is more likely to score in the 90th percentile on standardized tests." So reading 20 minutes per
01:06:50.960 | day puts your child with a high likelihood of being in the 90th percentile. Reading 20 minutes
01:06:57.840 | per day, friend, is laughable, or to use the literary term, risible, right? It's risible. It's
01:07:06.560 | utterly, it's absurd. If reading 20 minutes per day makes it likely that your child will be in
01:07:14.400 | the 90th percentile of academic outcomes, what does reading two hours a day do? What does reading
01:07:24.080 | five hours a day do? What does reading six or eight hours a day do? There's an element where
01:07:31.920 | we need to be careful about age appropriateness, but I think for most school-age children, say,
01:07:37.280 | third grade and on, the norm should be about five to eight hours a day of total reading
01:07:44.080 | divided up, as I have described it, with reading aloud, audiobooks, and then personalized reading.
01:07:49.360 | If you do two hours a day of reading aloud plus one to two hours a day of personal audiobook
01:07:57.200 | listening, let's just call it two hours a day for easy math, plus about four to five hours a day of
01:08:02.000 | focused academics, let's call it eight hours a day, that's actually not that much in terms of
01:08:08.560 | children having lots of time to play, lots of time to move, etc. Lots of times to do all kinds of
01:08:14.640 | other stuff. In some cases there'll be free reading on top of that, but let's just assume an
01:08:19.760 | average reading speed of 8,000 words per hour, about the rate of normal verbal spoken, right?
01:08:26.800 | Of course, a child who's a skilled reader will be reading far faster than that when reading silently,
01:08:31.120 | but assume 8,000 words per hour times eight hours per day is 64,000 words per day of reading.
01:08:40.960 | That seems pretty normal to me. Probably to most homeschoolers I know, I would say that's
01:08:46.880 | pretty normal, right? Four hours of academics. Maybe we should dial it back because at least
01:08:52.400 | an hour or two of that academics is going to be math, which isn't reading words. So let's just
01:08:56.800 | cut it back to 48,000 words per day, okay? 48,000 words per day and let's say that that happens
01:09:02.880 | 300 days per year, that's 14.4 million words. Compare that to the scholastic chart of a child
01:09:09.520 | reading 1.8 million words and you can quickly see the difference. Reading 10 to 20 million words a
01:09:17.440 | year is probably a pretty average year for, I think, most average children who are given the
01:09:27.360 | freedom, the books, the encouragement, the example. Children have people read to them,
01:09:31.840 | all these preconditions, but this seems pretty normal to me.
01:09:36.480 | I want to add one more technique if you're working to help your child be a skilled reader.
01:09:43.680 | Don't, or be quick to use the benefit of your child listening to an audiobook of the exact
01:09:51.440 | book that he's reading so he can hear someone read it to him while he's reading with his eyes.
01:09:56.160 | This is a technique that I figured out as being exceedingly useful in foreign language acquisition
01:10:01.920 | and my seven-year-old, my seven-year-old daughter was having some trouble learning to read. There
01:10:10.400 | was a time where my wife and I were focusing a lot, say, "Okay, is she dyslexic? What's going on
01:10:16.000 | here?" Etc. And since then we've made a lot of progress, but we were really focusing on,
01:10:21.920 | she was slower to read, what was going on, what was happening. And we made good progress,
01:10:28.000 | just continued to work with her, and again, people develop at their own stage. She still flips a lot
01:10:33.040 | of stuff. I don't know if she's dyslexic or not. I don't think she is, but it's not severe like
01:10:37.680 | some parents struggle with. But one of the techniques that I've watched that was so powerful
01:10:44.080 | was this technique of listening to books while having them read to you. And this is a skill that
01:10:49.600 | you can help your child to do much larger amounts of reading, but to be helped along. Again, I've
01:10:55.040 | experienced this myself and realized how helpful it is. I've been talking to my wife a lot. I was
01:10:59.120 | like, "We should use this more just in our own language," and we do use it a lot now.
01:11:03.840 | If a child is struggling with a difficult book that is advanced, add in an audiobook and have
01:11:10.240 | the child listen to the audiobook while reading with his eyes. And that will help the child to
01:11:15.040 | become a skillful reader. My experience has been this. There's a stage at which reading is a lot
01:11:22.240 | of work, and you just want to make it simple with lots and lots of easy reading stacked up,
01:11:28.640 | lots of easy reading. Then reading becomes doable, but it's still a lot of work. Audiobooks help the
01:11:34.640 | child to pass over that hurdle, listening while reading. And then there comes a stage where the
01:11:40.000 | reading is so effortless that the audiobooks annoy the student because they're too slow.
01:11:44.480 | So at that point, dump the audiobooks and just allow the book to shine itself. If you want to
01:11:50.080 | develop your children's minds to their highest potential capacity, you want your children to be
01:11:55.440 | smart. There is no substitute for there being very strong readers. Your best possible investment
01:12:04.160 | is to make sure that your children are good readers and love to read. The way you do that,
01:12:12.000 | read to them a lot. Aim for two hours a day, add audiobooks whenever possible of the highest
01:12:18.480 | quality books. Let them see you reading. Help them with a phonics instruction program, appropriate.
01:12:24.400 | Help them with lots and lots of readers, lots and lots of practice, and then make sure they have
01:12:29.280 | lots of books surrounding them and lots of time to read those books. And if you do that,
01:12:34.640 | you will never need to pay for college. You will never need to pay for expensive tutors.
01:12:42.000 | A few thousand dollars spent early in the child's life will save you hundreds of thousands of
01:12:48.160 | dollars later in life. Thank you for listening. Be back with you very soon.