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Visit swithop.com today. - Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, a show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge, skills, insight, and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now, while building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less. My name is Josh Rasheeds, I am your host, and today we continue our series on how to invest in your children at a young age.

By way of review in the first episode in this series, we talked about the importance of carefully choosing your mate, because at its core, both the genetic material as well as the environment that your mate is capable of creating will dramatically affect the outcomes for your children in the long term.

In episode two, we talked about the importance of mothers and fathers being in excellent physical health prior to conception, and of the importance of supporting a mother's health during the gestation of her baby, as well as supporting her during childbirth. And infancy, as those physical factors will make a dramatic difference in the long term health of your baby.

In episode three, we started to talk about the ways that you can invest into your children in childhood, and we began by talking about investing into your children's bodies, by gaining for them the highest quality nutrition that you have access to, making sure that they sleep, making sure that they move a lot, making sure they get sunshine, et cetera, and anything else, and keeping their environment clean, and making sure that they're not exposed to any of the toxic substances that you're using.

And finally, we talked about investing into a child's body, and we talked about investing into their brain, and we talked about investing into their brain, and we talked about investing into their brain, and we talked about investing into their brain, and we talked about investing into their brain, and we talked about investing into their brain, and we talked about investing into their brain, and we talked about investing into their brain, and we talked about investing into their brain, and we talked about investing into their brain, and we talked about investing into their brain, and we talked about investing into their brain, and we talked about investing into their brain, and we talked about investing into their brain, and we talked about investing into their brain, and we talked about investing into their brain, and we talked about investing into their brain, and we talked about investing into their brain, and we talked about investing into their brain, and we talked about 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The second paragraph came from a newspaper story on the World Cricket Championship in 1999. Any confusion was because the less you know about a subject or the vocabulary associated with that subject, the slower you must read, the more difficult comprehension becomes, and the less you understand. Sounding out the cricket paragraph phonetically wouldn't have helped much, would it?

By the way, the author there is referring to the arguments for phonics as opposed or as contrasted with sight word reading, and again, I'm in favor of phonics instruction, but that's not everything. You understood, certainly, all of the words that are read in paragraph two, but just because you understood the words, that doesn't necessarily mean you understood the meaning.

Background knowledge is one reason children who read the most bring the largest amount of information to the learning table and thus understand more of what the teacher or the textbook is teaching. Children whose families take them to museums and zoos, who visit historic sites, who travel abroad, or who camp in remote areas, accumulate huge chunks of background knowledge without even studying.

For the impoverished child lacking the travel portfolio of affluence, the best way to accumulate background knowledge is by either reading or being read to. Yes, educational TV can help, but most at-risk children are not exposed to it often enough. The background knowledge of at-risk students took a further hit with No Child Left Behind when 71% of school districts narrowed their curriculum to math and reading, curtailing subjects like art, music, science, and languages.

The lack of background knowledge surfaces very early in a child's school life. In the Longitudinal Kindergarten Study, researchers found that more than 50% of children coming from the lowest education and income levels finished in the bottom quartile in background knowledge. So, once again, poverty rears its ugly head as an obstacle to learning.

Thus concludes this section on background knowledge. So, here's the first actionable item for you. One of your goals as a parent, in order to invest into your child's brain, is to help your child to accumulate broad and diverse experiences in life. Those experiences can be acquired first-hand based upon first-hand actions, right?

Taking your child to diverse places, as the author said, going to museums, zoos, camping in the backcountry, traveling abroad, etc., knowing diverse people, etc. So, they can be acquired first-hand or they can be acquired second-hand by living vicariously through the actions of others. And that most efficiently is acquired through reading.

With the background knowledge that your child has, the exposure to life in a variety of different ways is going to fundamentally affect his ability to understand the world around him and to see the opportunities that exist for him. So, one of my goals, one way that I personally seek to invest into my child is to enhance his background knowledge by exposing him to a very diverse set of life experiences.

And that happens, I invest quite a lot of money in first-hand knowledge and experience as well as in second-hand. And I'll elaborate this more carefully in a moment when we talk about reading. Now, let's talk for a moment about the skills that a child needs for kindergarten. The first contact that your child is going to have with the school system, the academic system, is going to be kindergarten.

So, what are the skills that your child needs for kindergarten? Reading from Trulise's book again. Let me make an analogy here. Inside a child's brain, there is a huge reservoir called the listening vocabulary. You could say it's the child's very own Lake Pontchartrain, the famous estuary outside New Orleans that overflowed because of all the water brought by Hurricane Katrina.

That extra water breached the levees and tragically flooded New Orleans. We want the same thing to happen, but not in a tragic way. This time, the levees will be breached inside the child's brain. The first levee would be the speaking vocabulary. You pour enough words into the child's listening vocabulary that it will overflow and fill the speaking vocabulary pool.

Thus, the child starts speaking the words he's heard. It's highly unlikely you'll ever say a word if you've never heard the word. More than a billion people speak Chinese, so why not the rest of us? Because we haven't heard enough Chinese words, especially in our childhoods. The next levee is the reading vocabulary.

It's nearly impossible to understand a word in print if you've never said the word. Finally, there's the writing vocabulary. If you've never said the word or read the word, how in the world will you be able to write it? All the language arts flow from the listening vocabulary, and that has to be filled by someone besides the child.

Simple. As you read to a child, you're pouring into the child's ears and brain all the sounds, syllables, endings, and blendings that will make up the words she will someday be asked to read and understand. And through stories, you are filling in the background knowledge necessary to understand things that aren't in her neighborhood, like war or whales or locomotives.

The one pre-kindergarten skill that matters above all others, because it is the prime predictor of school success or failure, is the child's vocabulary upon entering school. I don't wish to be pedantic, but I do wish to emphasize this and burn this into your brain, so please allow me to repeat.

The one pre-kindergarten skill that matters above all others, because it is the prime predictor of school success or failure, is the child's vocabulary upon entering school. Yes, the child goes to school to learn new words, but the words he already knows determine how much of what the teacher says will be understood.

And since most instruction for the first four years of school is oral, the child who has the largest vocabulary will understand the most, while the child with the smallest vocabulary will grasp the least. Once reading begins, personal vocabulary feeds, or frustrates, comprehension, since school grows increasingly complicated with each grade.

That's why school entry vocabulary tests predict so accurately. Now, back to the metrics. We want to expose our children to lots of background knowledge, and we want to make sure that our children's vocabulary is as expansive as possible, because this is the single most important metric that will drive our children's academic success.

If we know that the metric that will drive our child's academic success is vocabulary, then the way that we can invest into our children, especially at a very young age, prior to school, is by increasing their vocabulary to the highest and greatest extent possible. We'll talk about how to do that in a moment.

But I want to emphasize why this is. Allow me a short but meaningful divergence here. When we talk about educational models, there is a model called the classical model of education. That means different things to different people. It's actually quite difficult to define. But if we're going to agree on a definition of classical education in the modern age, most likely we're going to at least agree on the importance of what is called the trivium.

Now, as I say that word, your vocabulary will immediately fill in. If I say the trivium, and you know what that means, then you know where I'm going. But if you're not familiar with that word, you don't know what the trivium is. Allow me to explain, because I'm making a meta point and an actual point.

The trivium was the classical model of education, where you began with grammar, that's part one of the trivium. Then you continued with logic, studying logic. And then the third thing was to study rhetoric. Grammar, logic, and rhetoric. And then later they followed up with the quadrivium, which were four other subjects.

But to the extent that the classical model incorporated subjects, these were they, the trivium, grammar, logic, and rhetoric. Now, the way that classical educators apply this is to say that in order for you to understand a subject, you need to begin by understanding the basic concepts, even the very words of a subject, the grammar of the subject.

And then after you understand the words of the subject, you can move on to the logic of the subject. And here, what we mean by this word logic is arguing the arguments, the hypotheses, the conjectures in a subject. And then we move on to rhetoric, where you may be qualified then to actually present new ideas or to effectively and persuasively argue for the positions that you believe are correct.

Now, the reason that the trivium matters is because this is how all subjects are learned. If you're going to learn a subject, you need to begin with understanding the grammar of the subject, the simplest, most basic elements of that subject, the words that are involved, etc. So in finance, there is a basic grammar of finance, words like interest or compound interest.

When I speak them to you, I assume that you know them, but your kindergartner can't define them. In order for you to be competent in the field of finance, you have to begin with understanding the basic grammar. Again, things like interest or dividends, compound interest. And then you move on to more specialized grammar, such as retirement accounts or tax-deferred accounts or what we call qualified accounts, etc.

Roth IRAs, 401(k)s, IRAs. All of these words have meanings. In order for you to be successful in understanding how to manage your financial affairs, you have to learn these words and their meanings. The higher you go in a subject, the more words matter. So a straightforward example is that when I use a term "qualified account" as a professional financial planner, I'm referring to something very specific.

I'm specifically referring to the types of tax-deferred retirement accounts that were authorized under the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of what was it? I forget the year of it. Now I'm getting old and losing my data. ERISA is what it's commonly called, right? The Employee Retirement Income Security Act.

And a qualified account is different than a non-qualified account. And for a financial planner, this is exceedingly important as a distinction because the rules for qualified accounts and the specific attributes of qualified accounts are very different than the rules of non-qualified accounts and the attributes of non-qualified accounts. So when I'm doing, say, asset protection planning, the distinction between an account that is a qualified account and a non-qualified account is the distinction between you're keeping your money when you go bankrupt versus not keeping your money when you go bankrupt.

Similarly, the distinction between a qualified retirement program and a non-qualified retirement program is the difference between you being able to put $50,000 a year in, as long as you're matching your employees' contributions, and the difference between you being able to put $5 million a year in. They're meaningful differences.

But these words, such as qualified and non-qualified, only have sense or meaning in a specific context. And as a financial planner, you begin the process of learning the vocabulary of financial planning. Then you proceed forward by understanding the deeper meanings, the logic and the grammar, etc. And then at your highest and best stage, you're arguing on the Internet about whether somebody should fund his Roth IRA or his Roth 401(k) or his traditional 401(k).

And that's where you're engaging in rhetoric based upon the logical arguments, but you have to understand the grammar for. So this concept of the trivium is a very useful model for learning. Let's go back to your elementary age or kindergarten student. If a kindergarten student comes in with a very large vocabulary and that kindergarten student is being exposed to a new subject, and he understands perhaps 90% of the words that the teacher is saying, then because he understands the words that the teacher is saying, he will have a much easier time grasping the new concepts that are being taught by the teacher.

The important thing that he's going to be tested on is not the words, but the concepts, the meaning, the specific facts. But in order to understand those facts, he needs to understand the words. If the child understands only 60% of the words the teacher is saying, he's going to have a vastly more difficult time grasping the concepts on which he will be tested.

And so vocabulary is the metric that we need to measure in order to know that our children have the highest possible chance of becoming excellent students as measured by academic ability. Moving on. How is it then that some kids get a head start on vocabulary? Now for a limited time at Del Amo Motorsports.

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Visit Del Amo Motorsports in Redondo Beach and get yours. Offer in soon. See dealer for details. Conversation is the prime garden in which vocabulary grows, but conversations vary greatly from home to home. The eye-opening findings of Drs. Betty Hart and Todd Risley at the University of Kansas from their research on children's early lives demonstrate the impact of this fact.

Published as "Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children," the research began in response to what Hart and Risley saw among the 4-year-olds in the university lab school. With many children, the lines were already drawn. Some were far advanced and some far behind. When the children in the study were tested at age 3 and then again at 9, the differences held.

What caused the differences so early? The researchers began by identifying 42 normal families representing three socioeconomic groups – welfare, working class, and professional. Beginning when the children were 7 months old, researchers visited the homes for one hour a month and continued their visits for two and a half years.

During each visit, the researcher tape-recorded and transcribed by hand any conversations and actions taking place in front of the child. Through 1,300 hours of visits, they accumulated 23 million bytes of information for the project database, categorizing every word (noun, verb, adjective, etc.) uttered in front of the child. The project held some surprises.

Regardless of socioeconomic level, all 42 families said and did the same things with their children. In other words, the basic instincts of good parenting are there for most people, rich or poor. Then the researchers received the data printout and saw the "meaningful differences" among the 42 families. When the daily number of words for each group of children is projected across four years, the 4-year-old child from the professional family will have heard 45 million words, the working class child 26 million, and the welfare child only 13 million.

All three children will show up for kindergarten on the same day, but one will have heard 32 million fewer words. If legislators expect the teacher to get this child caught up, she'll have to speak 10 words a second for 900 hours to reach the 32 million mark by year's end.

Hope they have life support ready for her. Those 42 children would perform differently in class because their word totals created different brains. By the time the study group reached age 3, the professionals' children had 1,100 word vocabularies, to the welfare children's 525. Similarly, their IQs were 117 vs. 79 by the time the study finished.

Brain differences have nothing to do with how much parents love their children. They all love their children and want the best for them, but some parents have a better idea of what needs to be said and done to reach that "best." They know the child needs to hear words repeatedly and meaningful sentences and questions, and they know that plunking a 2-year-old down in front of a television set for 3 hours at a time is more harmful than meaningful.

Sociologists George Farkas and Kurt Barron studied the research on 6,800 children from ages 3 to 12 and found that children from the lower socioeconomic spectrum were far more likely to arrive at school with smaller vocabularies 12-14 months behind, and they seldom made up the loss as they grew older.

The message in this kind of research is unambiguous. It's not the toys in the house that make the difference in the children's lives. It's the words in their heads. The least expensive thing we can give a child outside of a hug turns out to be the most valuable. Words.

You don't need a job, a checking account, or even a high school diploma to talk with a child. If I could select any piece of research that all parents would be exposed to, meaningful differences would be the one, and that's feasible. The authors took their 268-page book and condensed it into a 6-page article for American Educator, the Journal of the American Federation of Teachers, which may be freely reproduced by schools.

There is one inexpensive, common-sense move that parents could make that would impact their children's language skills, and maybe their emotional development as well. Yet it goes largely unpublicized here in the United States. First, consider how badly it would affect a conversation with someone if she wouldn't look at you while you were talking to her.

Most conversations would slow to a crawl. Let's apply that principle of human behavior to children in strollers. Until the 1960s, nearly all strollers were engineered so the child was facing the parent. Now, it's either way, but far more often facing away. Does it make a difference? Researchers found it makes a huge difference in how much conversation takes place between parent and child.

Twice as much when the child faces the parent. It was even more frequent when the child walked with or was carried by the parent. Of course, it's not going to help that much if the child is facing the parent and the parent is on the cell phone all the time.

So, what can you invest in in order to help your children grow? Well, the first actionable thing is we want to invest in words. We want to make sure that our children are spoken to constantly and continually. Conversations filled with love, filled with appreciation, filled with context, because that's how we learn words.

We learn words by context. And you want to make sure that your children, during practically all of their waking hours, are being spoken to. And you want to measure, to the extent possible, the number of words. So, I love this as a beginning place to start. If you have a baby and you have a stroller that causes your baby to look away from you, go buy a new stroller and get one where your baby is facing you.

And then take your baby on a stroller and get used to talking to your baby. And just narrate all of the things that are going on. I find this difficult to do sometimes with a newborn, even though I try. But as soon as your child starts to get to that point where he starts to respond to you and you can tell he is listening--of course, newborns are hearing your voice, but they're not putting things together-- then I try to apply this principle by talking to my children incessantly.

And I use the best vocabulary that I can, and I repeat it consistently. I'm not opposed to baby talk, but I don't use much of it myself. It's never felt natural for me, so I just use my words in all their contexts. But I make up ways to fill in vocabulary.

So, for example, when I'm changing a baby's diaper and I'm touching his body parts, I say, "Look, here's your right foot. I touch the right foot. This is your left foot. This is your left foot." And then as you're putting his feet into his jammy legs--you say, "Right leg, left leg.

Right knee, left knee. Touch him. This is your tummy." And you give him all his body part names, etc. as you go through everything. You explain what you're doing. So you give vocabulary. "I'm changing your diaper. I'm going to wipe your bottom. I'm going to take you out and I'm going to give you to mommy, or we're going to go for a walk, etc." As you're going down a walk, "Hey, look over there.

There's a green house." Or whatever it is that you have. You get the point. The point is, engage with your children and talk to them. Now, the stroller, I think, is a great idea. But for most of us, it's not something that we need to go and buy. Rather, it's something that we need to avoid.

And that is, of course, our phones. Our phones are the most destructive influence in our relationship with our children. And it is affecting all of us. If you go out in any of our modern society, and you go out to eat, etc., you will see what I consider to be one of the greatest, most horrific sights ever, which is children with their faces glued to screens.

A child with his face glued to a screen out at a restaurant is a child who is simultaneously not listening and not speaking to a parent. And that's a child who is losing prime opportunities to acquire background knowledge on the world around, to acquire understanding of how he's going to act as a parent.

Instruction, both positive and negative, meaning hearing stories of inspiring virtuous characters and people who have failed, etc. And just being in context. And the child is losing opportunities to speak. The child is absorbed in a drug, is being drugged. And that extends also. And why does the child do that?

Well, because that's the example that we set as parents. We have our eyes glued to the screen, and that's the example we set. And so our children are following our example. And it is utterly destructive. It is destroying children's capacities to learn because, as we'll talk about in a moment, they're cut off from the most important words.

I don't care how educational the app is. An app is never going to give your child the necessary background knowledge to make words make sense. And it's not going to give your child adult words. So what if your child can spell "cat"? It's far more important that your child has the context for who cats are and what cats are in all of their different senses and meanings, rather than being able to simply spell "cat." Permit me another literary divergence to give you a story that I hope will burn this into your head.

And here is the point. Your child does not need simple facts, which is what apps seek to give your child. Your child needs experience. I want to read an excerpt from a world-class book by Professor Anthony Esalen called "Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child." As I begin, I hope it's immediately evident by the title itself, but I just do want to emphasize that this is satire.

So what you should understand is that this entire book is written in the voice of somebody who is saying the exact opposite of what you and I actually want. So just be clear on that. Reading from a chapter called "Why Truth is Your Enemy and the Benefits of the Vague," or "Gradgrind Without the Facts." Now, what I want is facts.

Teach these boys and girls nothing but facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon facts. Nothing else will ever be of any service to them. This is the principle on which I bring up my own children, and this is the principle on which I bring up these children.

Stick to facts, sir. The Opening of Hard Times by Charles Dickens. Those are the words of the schoolmaster Thomas Gradgrind, whose philosophy of education is meant to reflect the smog-ridden industrial desert of Coke Town, where his enlightened school is located. If what you want is industrial production, cheap and plentiful, and if human beings are to be cogs and gears in the industrial machine, then of course you will want to stick to flat, unimaginative facts.

A cog should not go soft, musing about the clouds and the sky. A gear should never wonder what it would feel like to turn backwards. It's easy for us to laugh at the naivete of Mr. Gradgrind. We ingrates who have inherited all the benefits of the revolutionary system that he represents.

We forget that what was called empiricism in education, sticking to facts, sir, and avoiding the training of the moral imagination in virtues that can't be isolated in a glass dish or oxidized in a Bunsen burner, was locked in a mighty struggle with the older tradition of the liberal arts, introducing students to the best that has been thought, done, and written in the world, and sometimes, quite by accident, indulging dangerous flights of fancy, with every book like Aladdin's carpet ready to whisk us away.

The popular form of such an education was what young David Copperfield had, locked up in his room by his cold-hearted stepfather. My father had left a small collection of books in a little room upstairs to which I had access, for it adjoined my own, and which nobody else in our house ever troubled.

From that blessed little room, Roderick Random, Peregrine Pickle, Humphrey Klinker, Tom Jones, the vicar of Wakefield, Don Quixote, Jill Bloss, and Robinson Crusoe came out, a glorious host to keep me company. They kept alive my fancy and my hope of something beyond that place and time. I pick up McGuffey's Fourth Eclectic Reader, 1837, and find to our shame that along with precise rules of grammar and elocution, students are expected to expand what was once quaintly called "their souls," contemplating, for example, the meaning of those places where their forefathers fought to secure their liberty.

"No American," writes Daniel Webster, "can pass by the fields of Bunker Hill, Monmouth, or Camden, as if they were ordinary spots on the earth's surface. Whoever visits them feels the sentiment of love of country kindling anew, as if the spirit that belonged to the transactions which have rendered these places distinguished still hovered around, with power to move and excite all who in future time may approach them." The same short selection ushers on stage in a single sentence the beauties of Homer, Milton, Cicero, Raphael, and Michelangelo.

It is, alas, no isolated lapse into imagination. Students elsewhere in the book are transported to the Himalayas, the ruins of Babylon, Westminster Abbey, the volcano of Etna, the gates of Hell, and more dreadful even than those, the whirlwind out of which God spoke to Job, commanding him to consider the glory of the creation about him.

"Hast thou given the horse strength? Hast thou clothed his neck with thunder?" That one image would be sufficient to quicken a dying imagination. Undoing months of hard and programmatic labor. So we ought to be grateful to the old grad grinds, without whom the first stage of modern education, with its demotion of a sense of beauty to an irrational and private feeling, would have been impossible.

In C.S. Lewis's Voyage of the Dawn Treader, a boy named Eustace Clarence Scrub, brought up in a modern gradgrindian school, bumbles into a cave with treasure in it and makes the terrible mistake of putting a golden bracelet on his arm. "He did this," says Lewis, "because in his school all the boys and girls ever read about were factories and electrical output and population density and such like." "Eustace didn't read the right sort of books," says Lewis, "so he never did know what to do in case of dragons and other sorts of eminently practical things like that." This, of course, is the same C.S.

Lewis who, in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, has four children enter into another universe by stepping into a clothes dresser, when, as everybody should know, a wardrobe is for hanging clothes in, and that is that. So, if we want to kill the imagination, and we do want to do that, the gradgrind method of sticking to the facts is not a bad way to begin.

Consider what it would be like to have row upon row of students seated at their geography lesson while the rain drips down the gutter from outside the windows, hear their voices in unison, droning on without inspiration or joy. The Arkansas River is 1,469 miles long. It is the sixth longest river in the United States.

Its source is in Colorado. It empties into the Mississippi River. It flows through Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Arkansas. It is irrigated for farms. The Rio Grande River is 1,885 miles long. It is the third longest river, and so on, until death, or the bell, whichever comes first. But there are problems with the gradgrind method.

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Don't lose out on your chance to get a Maverick X3. Visit Del Amo Motorsports in Redondo Beach and get yours. Offer in soon. See dealer for details. Now, dear listener, please pay careful attention to this next section and think about educational apps and their benefits as I read this section.

A horse is a horse, of course, of course. Early in the novel Hard Times, Mr. Gradgrind, in his arrogance, makes the mistake of taking into his school a girl named Sissy. Gradgrind insists upon calling her Cecilia, whose father wants her to get a better education than he can give her himself.

The father works as a horse breaker for a traveling circus, and so Sissy has lived all her life among tightrope walkers, magicians, fire eaters, lady acrobats, elephants, midgets, and such like. Hardly a promising upbringing. For the trouble with Sissy, other than that she has a keenly developed sense of good and evil and a lively imagination, is that she actually does know some facts.

And that proves to be a dangerous thing. "Give me," says Gradgrind for the benefit of Sissy and the whole class, "your definition of a horse." Sissy, alarmed, can say nothing. "Girl number 20, unable to define a horse," said Mr. Gradgrind for the general behoof of all the little pitchers.

"Girl number 20, possessed of no facts in relation to one of the commonest of animals. Some boy's definition of a horse? Bitzer, yours!" Whereupon Bitzer, a pale and gloomy boy, with the habit of knuckling his forehead when he is not speaking, the pride of the Gradgrind system, replies, "Quadruped, greminivorous, 40 teeth, namely 24 grinders, four eye teeth and 12 incisors, sheds coat in the spring, in marshy countries sheds hoofs too.

Hoofs hard but requiring to be shod with iron, age known by marks in mouth. Thus and much more, Bitzer." "Now, girl number 20," said Mr. Gradgrind, "you know what a horse is." The irony is that Sissy knows more about horses than anybody in the classroom, certainly more than Bitzer, who is merely repeating phrases poured into him like concrete into a form.

She has ridden upon horses, seen them give birth, combed them and curried them, and watched as her father sabbed their sores or rubbed them with liniment. She knows them in a way that only life with them reveals. At the end of the novel, indeed, Mr. Gradgrind's spoiled son, Tom, will be spirited away from the clutches of the law, riding a horse provided for him by the circus people and disguised as a clown.

Then there will be no patter about the horse being greminivorous and shedding its coat in the spring. And yet, Bitzer is in possession of some facts about horses. He knows that they have 12 incisors. What's an incisor? Why should a horse have those if he eats only grass? Will he eat anything besides grass?

Anything that an incisor might help him bite and crush? For instance, how does a horse eat a carrot or an apple? Bitzer knows that horses shed their winter coats. How do they do that? Do the coats come off in patches? Do the horses rub up against rough trees or rocks to peel them away?

What does the new coat look like? Bitzer knows that you can tell how old a horse is by looking in its mouth. What would you be looking for there? Do the teeth grow long? Do they change color? Do the gums turn dark? Can you learn the age of other animals in the same way?

The judicious reader will see the problem. A fact, by itself, does not seem to rouse the imagination. It merely is. It sits there like a rock. Yet, its apparent impenetrability is a challenge to the mind. The Arkansas River is 1,469 miles long. How wide is it when it reaches the Mississippi?

Can you sail a boat upriver? How far can you go? Is it a clear and fast river or sluggish and muddy? If water from the river is used for farming, does that mean that it has been dammed up here and there? If it has been, are there big man-made lakes along its course?

Can you swim in those lakes? Now, of course, it is better that the student learn facts about the Arkansas River than wander about the streams of Mount Helicon, where the muses of Greek mythology danced and sang. It is better that they should learn that Mount McKinley is the highest peak in North America than that they should trudge along with Frodo to Mount Doom in the heart of Mordor.

It is better that they should learn that there are twelve tones in the Western musical scale than that they should listen to a wood thrush singing from the thickets, trilling out his ethereal notes that have no name. But it would be better still if they had never heard of the Arkansas River or Mount McKinley or the twelve-tone scale.

Such heights of ignorance could never be attained in Mr. Gradgrind's time, for the simple reason that in the middle of an industrial revolution, you actually have to know some things to get some jobs done, and those jobs were often complicated, requiring a great deal of ingenuity. Suppose for you a tree is nothing but a source for lumber.

That's fine. You're well on your way. But in Gradgrind's day, you would then have to know about sawmills, and that would require, in turn, a pretty precise knowledge of water power and how to use wheels, belts, and gears to turn the rotary motion of a wheel into just the right back-and-forth motion of the saw, complete with couplers to disengage the mechanism from the source of power.

In other words, a sawmill, while not the forest of Arden, is in its own right a fascinating place. A great deal of that fascination can be found in William Stout's "The Boy's Book of Mechanical Models" (1917), now available in reprint, and doubly dangerous to the young mind, in that it encourages both the direct experience of mechanical forces and the spirit of irresponsible play.

Thus, Stout describes seeing a "wonderful electric writing telegraph" at the St. Louis World's Fair. Here, a man sat at a desk with a pencil and wrote and drew pictures, while above him, on another piece of paper in a separate machine, a pencil guided itself in the same manner and drew the same lines.

It was very interesting, especially when one thought of writing from one city to another, as can be done with this machine. So Stout, while yet a boy (such was the state of unsupervised youth in his day), went home to devise a way to copy the machine in miniature. His scheme takes into account all kinds of facts.

First, there is what I'd call the "grammar" of the teleautograph, the structure that directs its motions to the desired goal. Then, there are the parts themselves, and knowing by experience what sorts of work they can do. Then, there's the material for the parts, wood, rubber, and metal. Of course, Stout's machine is far too complicated an apparatus for our current schools, I'm proud to say, let alone for a boy rummaging about his basement with spare wood and a toolbox.

But Stout assumes that his readers will grasp the principles involved without much trouble. "You can see from this how," he says, "if you swing the pencil sideways so as to move this lever about its pivot, S, that the pencil at the other end will slide sideways back and forth in exactly the same way as you move the first pencil.

That's just one motion. A linked mechanism transmits the up and down motion, and the whole machine, therefore, will transmit any kind of motion of the pencil at all." "Well," says my reader, nervously looking over his shoulder as his son transforms a ruler, a spool, and an ice cube into Lord Winter's catapult, "that may be the case for mechanical or physical facts, but surely it is safe to drum young heads with historical trivia as dry as dust.

If their minds are going to be as flat as Oklahoma, they should be as dry and dusty as Oklahoma too." True enough, and many an imagination has been flattened by such an approach. Yet beware, historical facts can be dangerous too. Webster could not have touched the imaginations of his audience, after all, if they had not known what Bunker Hill and Camden were.

Let's take a few examples. What could be duller, you say, than to memorize the dates of the various presidents of the United States? Not much. So the student properly instructed may learn that Franklin Pierce was president from 1853 to 1857. If the facts stopped there, that would be fine.

But they might not stop there. He might learn that Pierce was an unpopular president, another fact, and this one more mysterious. He might read somewhere that Pierce's son died just before his father took office. He might hear that a great author named Nathaniel Hawthorne was a close friend of Pierce.

And all at once a picture of a tragic man emerges in the mist, one who might have done well had times been better. If the student then remembers that the Civil War began in 1861, and that Pierce was a Democrat while Lincoln was a Whig and then a Republican, the mystery deepens and questions begin to stir in the sleepy mind.

What was it like to have been that man, watching the war that he did not prevent, with the Union armies commanded by his political enemy? Or consider this piece of apparently harmless trivia. The Normans conquered Sicily in the 11th century. Ah, who cares about that? Nobody. So long as you have not made the mistake of introducing your student to geographical facts to boot.

For if he knows where Normandy and Sicily are on the globe, he may ask the obvious question. How did the Normans get down there? Did they go overland or did they sail? And that might lead him to investigate the construction of their boats, or who was in control of Sicily before they arrived.

He might eventually find out that Viking raiders and traders had long been in contact with Constantinople, and that the Byzantine rulers there requested the help of the now Christian Normans in ousting their enemies, the Muslim Arabs from Sicily. How did Vikings end up in Byzantium? It appears they trekked overland to the River Don in Russia, and then sailed down it to the Black Sea in Constantinople.

It would be better if the student could not tell Sicily from Saskatchewan, and knew only that Vikings were very bad people with funny hats who sailed a lot. Old history textbooks used to be full of battle plans. People had the quaint notion that the outcomes of battles like Salamis, Lepanto, and Waterloo changed the course of history.

One argument for getting rid of those plans was that they were dull. Actually, they were dull to the teachers, many of whom didn't care a rap about the structure of battles, but they could be dynamite for the young. Once, when my family and I were visiting Gettysburg, I got into a conversation with a teenager at the top of an observation tower.

He was a tourist, too, but he told me he came back to Gettysburg quite a lot, and showed me Little Round Top and described for me what happened there. He reminded me of a couple of homeschooled boys I knew, who also got their hands on battle plans, poured over them, committed them to memory, and turned the basement into a battlefield.

They drew out the woods and hills and rivers in chalk, marked the battalions with counters, and then played a game of strategy with declared decisions and dice, reenacting the battle not as it actually happened, but as it might have happened. When they'd made a move or two on the sprawling "board" of the basement floor, they would then go outside to play it out with their arms and legs and voices.

And all this was going on while the mother of one of the boys looked the other way. I relay this all to you in order to ask, "Of what use to us now are facts? Surely, in the case of the homeschooled boys, we have seen facts run amok. The grad grinds in the days of Dickens saw the black smoke belching out of the stacks in Leeds and Manchester, and it gladdened their hearts.

The thought of molten pig iron fairly made them giddy. Had Father Christmas dumped their stockings full of coal, they would have treasured the lumps like diamonds. But we now have a service economy, which mainly entails the transfer of money from one person to another for nothing of any inherent use.

We also have a welfare state, which is a perpetual motion machine, producing the dependency which it purports to alleviate. Now, a man with a wrench who knows facts about pipes and fittings simply won't do. We need a few such men, no doubt, but we don't want to encourage it.

We want instead helplessness, narcissism, shallowness, and ignorance, and we want them in the guise of education. Drudgery will do, but drudgery to no practical end. We want grad grind without the facts." Hope you enjoyed that excerpt. Again, that is from Anthony Esalen's book called "Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child." Excellent reading if you're very interested in destroying the imagination of your child.

He gives ten excellent ways to do that, and as you know, I believe in learning from the very best. Obviously, that passage could be thought of in connection with many different aspects of our modern society. But the reason I wanted to share it with you is it's important that you see how these things matter holistically, and that something as compelling as an educational app can't hope to do anything more than convey some simple, brute facts, which, while perhaps they could be a catalyst in encouraging someone to go farther, when compared to the life experience, the background experience of what could be being gained by your child, it's a dreadfully dull vision.

Just consider Sissy and her knowledge of horses. She knew horses, and the facts that she could or could not articulate were completely irrelevant because they were swept away by her knowledge of horses. Now, come to the modern age, for months and months, AI, artificial intelligence, has been the topic du jour, where we talk every single day about how AI is going to sweep things away.

Do you think that your child, having some mere facts brute-forced into their brain by an app, is in some way going to help your child succeed in a world of ubiquitous AI? There's no chance, friend. So, speak to your children. Help your children to acquire words by conversation and by engaging with them.

Turn your baby around so you can talk to him. Put your phone away so you can talk to him. Get rid of his phone so you can talk to him and talk to him. Now, what's even better than conversation? Now for a limited time at Del Amo Motorsports. Get financing as low as 1.99% for 36 months on Select 2023 Can-Am Maverick X3.

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Offer in soon. See dealer for details. How can we engage the mind and the imagination? Back to the Read Aloud Handbook by Jim Trulise. Most conversation is plain and simple, whether it's between two adults or with children. It consists of the 5,000 words we use all the time, called the basic lexicon.

Indeed, 83% of the words in normal conversation with a child come from the most commonly used thousand words, and it doesn't change much as the child ages. Then there are another 5,000 words we use in conversation less often. Together, these 10,000 words are called the common lexicon. Beyond that 10,000 mark are the rare words, and these play a critical role in reading as we grow older.

The eventual strength of our vocabulary is determined not by the 10,000 common words, but by how many rare words we understand. If we don't use these rare words very often in conversation, where do we find them? And here I want to orally describe to you a chart that is printed on the page.

This chart is titled "Number of Rare Words Met Per Thousand." And remember the definition of a rare word, right? It's a word that's not in the basic lexicon of those 10,000 words that we commonly use. So first we have "listening." Adults speaking to child at six months, 9.3 rare words met per thousand.

An adult speaking to a child at three years old, 9.0 rare words per thousand. An adult speaking to child at 10 years old, 11.7 rare words per thousand. An adult speaking to an adult, 7.3 rare words per thousand. Primetime TV programs, 22.7 rare words per thousand. Now here in the chart we pivot from listening activities to reading activities.

Reading a children's book, 30.9 rare words met per thousand. Reading an adult book, 52.7 rare words met per thousand. Comic book, 53.5 number of rare words met per thousand. A popular magazine, 65.7. Newspaper, 68.3. And a scientific paper, 128 rare words met per thousand. The preceding chart shows the printed text contains the most rare words.

Whereas an adult uses only 9 rare words per thousand when talking with a three-year-old, there are three times as many in a children's book and more than seven times as many in a newspaper. As you can see from the chart, oral communication, including a TV script, is decidedly inferior to print for building vocabulary.

As shown by the data for printed material, the number of rare words increases significantly. This poses serious problems for at-risk children who hear fewer words and encounter print less often at home. Such children face a gigantic word gap that impedes reading progress throughout school. And that gap can't possibly be breached in 120 hours of summer school or through morphonics instruction.

So let's review now where we're going. We want to build the minds of our children. We know that we need to give them words and background knowledge. Those words and that background knowledge need to come to them in the most concentrated form that we're capable of giving to them.

Yes, we want to talk with them in conversation, but normally in day-to-day conversation we only use a basic subset of words. So we need to give them more words and those words are not abundant in anything except the printed written text. And so what that means is we need to read to our young children and then encourage our reading children to read, because that's where they're going to acquire those words.

Now here is where your investments can pay off massively. If you will dedicate yourself to finding the world's best books with the best words, and then you dedicate yourself to reading those books to your children, and you dedicate yourself to encouraging them to read them to themselves or have them read, which we'll talk about in a moment, through audiobooks, you can give your children the background knowledge and words so intensely that their vocabulary going into school can be light years ahead of their peers.

And I want to give you an actual example. I'm going to take a moment to read to you an example that I just noticed this week while I was reading to my children. I read to my children a lot. I personally aim for reading aloud to my family two hours a day.

That's my goal. I reach it most days, sometimes more, sometimes days I don't get it done, but I aim for reading to my children two hours a day. And to be clear, it's not two hours at one time. It's sprinkled throughout the day. But I track it and I exceed that goal most days.

And in addition, I try to read to my children the best books. And when you read really wonderful children's literature, and you see the vocabulary that's used and the mental pictures and whatnot that are made, and then you go and compare it to all of the other alternatives, you can't come away thinking that anything is superior.

But I fear that most of us are not exposed to good quality children's literature because we don't go out and look at it. So I want to take a moment and I want to read about five pages from the book that I was reading to my children this week.

The book is called Gone Away Lake by an author named Elizabeth Enright. It's this wonderful story about some young children who on their summer vacation discover an abandoned town and meet some people who are living in this ghost town. those people are introducing them to uh to the possibility of using one of these abandoned houses as a clubhouse that's the basic plot of the book and for children this concept is completely engaging so if you've not been exposed to high quality children's literature take just a few minutes and listen to me read this and see how this activates you and then pay attention to the words that are being used and then again for for context i'm reading this to a nine-year-old a seven-year-old a five-year-old and a three-year-old now the three-year-old is not super into it he listens but he's not super engaged it's a little bit past his ability but the rest of them love it.

Belmir. Clouds had covered the sky during the course of Mr. Payton's story and now as they came out they saw that the color of the day had changed from green and yellow to a cool gray. The reeds tipping their tops had a velvety bluish look. "Won't rain yet," Mr.

Payton said, glancing at the sky. "Will tonight though. 11, 12 o'clock. We'll get a good steady soaking. Good for the garden, good for the frogs." "My brother has a remarkable talent for foretelling weather," Mrs. Cheever said. "I've hardly ever known him wrong." "The swamp taught me," Mr. Payton conceded.

"Live alone as we do, not bothered by the characters of people. And soon, if you're attentive, you begin to know the character of the weather. Or characters, it has many." They walked the path in single file. "Now that house," Mr. Payton pointed his cane. "That house, the Delaney's, might be a good one but there's a bull snake makes his home under the front steps and I believe there are rats in the basement." "No thank you," said Portia.

"The castle castle has fallen to trash of course and the one beyond is unsound. Roof's gone. Same with the big house but the Tucker Towns. Now that one maybe? Let's go see." The grass in the dooryard of Belmere was high as their waists. The old house loomed above them shabby and fancy.

"It doesn't look friendly," thought Portia. The front door glued by years of damp and disuse stuck fast in its frame. They got in by way of a window from which the lower sash was gone. The room they entered was large and dark. The floor was littered with fallen plaster and a crop of toadstools glimmered there.

Portia gave a loud scream pointing at the wall before them but then she saw that what she had believed to be a group of approaching strangers, ghosts perhaps, was really only the reflection of themselves. A great mirror was set against the wall. "I thought it was people, not just us," she explained apologetically.

"I mean they, we, look so shadowy and queer." "I was startled myself," confessed Mrs. Cheever, "and I knew that mirror was there. It's Mrs. Ravenel's old mirror. She was the mother-in-law. She contributed it to the furnishing of Belmere. The damp has damaged it now, of course. See how blotched it is and the frames turned black." Looking into the mirror was like looking into a pond mottled with duckweed.

Portia liked the way her face appeared in it. Softened, dimmed, mysterious, she thought. "Now up there on the ceiling where you see the broken fixtures was a very fine gas chandelier," said Mr. Peyton, waving his cane aloft. "Wonder what happened to that." "Plunderers, no doubt," said his sister. "Plunderers got a lot out of Tarago in their day." Growing used to the dim light, the children's eyes saw now where the paper had fallen from the walls.

Names and dates were scribbled and scratched and initials were carved in the smooth mahogany of the stair rail. "That's what they used to do," said Mrs. Cheever with satisfaction. "They don't come here anymore now that my brother and I have settled in. Perhaps they fancy I'm a witch." She straightened her bell-shaped hat rather proudly.

"It flatters many that folks should think her dangerous," said Mr. Peyton, laughing comfortably. "She's about as dangerous as a dove. Now these stairs, Portia, Julian, watch out for these. If you select this house, I advise you to mend the treads. Julian, I'll give you the tools. Hold on to the railing, Minnie." "I'm perfectly able, Pin," replied his sister without holding on to anything but her skirt to avoid tripping on it.

"And I wish you wouldn't call me Minnie. Min is tolerable, but Minnie, that's the trouble with the name Minnehaha." "I know exactly how you feel," agreed Portia warmly. "Everybody calls me Porsche." "Well, I never shall." "No, indeed, I shall not," declared Mrs. Cheever. In the upstairs hall, Mr. Peyton, advising caution, walked ahead, every now and then stamping his booted foot on the floor.

"Sound, seems perfectly sound," he observed. "Roof's still intact, but it's best to be careful. Haven't been up here since 1942." The rooms that opened off the hall were bleak and empty. Clay wasp's nests were stuck to the moldings. No furniture remained, but a broken washstand or two and an iron bedstead.

Plaster had fallen everywhere. There was a solid smell of damp. "That was Tark's room," Mr. Peyton observed, glancing at a doorway. "By Jove, how well I remember it. Maps all over the wall. And on his ceiling, he'd painted the constellations in their summer order. You can still see some of the blue and gold.

He had a time painting it. Lay on his back on a plank laid across two ladders. That's how Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel," says he. "But the amount of paint he got on himself, in his hair, in his eyebrows. And I've swallowed plenty too," says he. "For I work with my mouth open when I'm concentrating." Lucky thing it didn't poison him, though no doubt he had an azure colored elementary tracked for a long time afterwards.

"I remember those blue eyebrows," said Mrs. Cheever as they continued along the hall. "A terrible sight. Now this room at the very end was Baby Bell's," she tried to open the door. "Oh dear, the miserable thing is stuck. Pen see if you," Mr. Peyton and Julian shoved their shoulders against the door, which instantly burst open, hurling them inward.

Mrs. Cheever and Portia followed. "This one's lovely," exclaimed Portia. And it was. A light, spacious room with three windows and a fireplace. Facing south and having been shut up for a long time, the room was drier than the others and no wasps had lodged there, though there were signs on the hearth that swifts had nested in the chimney.

Without thinking, Portia walked to a closed closet door and turned the knob. That door, like the other, opened unwillingly, resisting strongly at first and then flying forward to bang her on the forehead. "Ouch!" said Portia. "And then why look what's up there on the shelf, Mrs. Cheever. Why look at those!" I'll stop, but I hope it drives the point home that if you will find and read world-class literature to your children, they will be utterly engrossed in the story, which gives them a tremendous amount of background knowledge on life, as well as an absolutely massive vocabulary.

Think of all the words that I just read that are not in the common vocabulary, and we learn words by hearing them in meaningful context repeatedly. And so, if you will read to your children, you can put them so far ahead of their peers in terms of vocabulary, and that will fundamentally alter their academic career as well as, very possibly, their life career.

An experience I had a number of years ago is so etched on my brain that I want to share it with you in this context, because it matters. A few years ago, I had a friend of mine that I grew up with, and this friend was not from my same kind of background and upbringing.

He was adopted when he was a baby, adopted into a loving and wonderful home. His mother died of cancer when he was only a few years old, though, so he never knew his mother. So, he was raised by a single father. This father was a loving and devoted father, but he was a very simple man.

The father worked as a – owned a landscaping – a lawn maintenance company, and he worked to give his children everything that he could. And he gave his son everything that he could. All of the necessary boxes for a successful childhood were checked. Now, he was raised by a single father.

His father never – his widow or father never remarried. So, he was raised by a single father. He missed the influence of a mother in his life. But again, the father was loving and wonderful. He was close to – the boy's grandmother was involved in his life, etc. The boy went to private schools, went to various private schools.

He wasn't great academically, but he was adequate, graduated from high school. All during his lifetime – sorry, during his teenage years, he worked in his father's company and in the lawn maintenance business. And he worked hard, earned money, etc. It was a good family business. Again, good productive relationship.

And then after graduating from high school, he continued to work in his father's company. His father later sold the company, and he continued to work for the guy who had purchased the landscaping company. Then this young man – young man at that time, 23-ish years old – he got into an accident that was his fault.

Car accident. He was fine, but he was sued by the lady who he got an accident with, and his license was affected because of the at-fault accident. And so, his boss's insurance rates were going to increase massively. And so, his boss at the company fired him because he wasn't willing to pay the higher insurance rates due to his now marred driving record.

And this is where I came in. I had known the boy his entire lifetime. We had been closer at times, farther away at times, etc. But we came in, and I got involved, and I was doing a little bit of career coaching. Now, this young man had done a great job of saving money.

At the time, he was in his early 20s. He had something like $30,000 saved, which was remarkable. And basically, he didn't do a lot with his life. He basically just saved money. He stayed at home. He played around on the computer, played computer games, etc. Went to work, came home, went and played basketball with some friends here and there, but didn't do a lot.

So, here I was doing career coaching. And what was shocking to me was when I started probing about ideas he had for things he wanted to do, he had basically no ideas in his life. He couldn't come up with anything that was interesting to him. He had no idea what to do.

The most creative idea that he had for his life and for his career was basically to go and get a job at a store working as a cash register. Now, he was a hardworking, perfectly competent guy, high school diploma, etc. And what was lacking in his life was imagination.

He was lacking the understanding that things could be different. And as I sought to coach him a little bit, I quickly came to understand that he had no imagination about what he could do because he had no life experience that showed him what other options other people had gone on.

And I came to realize that because he was not a reader, because he had not been exposed vicariously to the experiences of others, he didn't have a sense of the world and the realities of the world. By all accounts, he was a normal member of society, but his screen-oriented personal life and his limited personal experience confined him to a world that was extraordinarily small and rather dreary.

And this influenced not only his choices, but his level of confidence in the world, his level of confidence in life. At 23 years old, he was a perfectly attractive guy. He went to the gym a lot. He had big muscles, was in great shape, etc. Very sociable, etc. He had no problem with social skills, perfectly normal guy.

He had no ambition to marry, didn't really see the point, didn't know why he would want to marry. He didn't really have an ambition to go anywhere, do anything, just kind of live in life. And so I did my best to coach him and give him some ideas. I strongly urged him to go travel, and this is why I'm getting to.

What was shocking to me was how little confidence he had in his ability to travel. I told him, I said, "Listen, you got 30 grand in the bank, you're 23 years old, you don't have a dime of debt, you got all the world in front of you. Buy yourself a pickup truck," or he already had an SUV.

I was like, "Toss a mattress in the back of your pickup truck. Go hit the road, right? Just go drive, drive for a few weeks, go camp out, stay in some national parks, visit people, go to coffee shops, go to bars. If you see someone hiring a job, just work your way in a big square around the country, live cheap and pick up a job, work here for a few months, go there for a few months, basically get some life experience." I felt like that would be helpful for him.

I wasn't going to turn him into a literary creature, nor would that even be advisable. Get some life experience and get access to some things that are available to you, right? Go and work on a shrimp boat in Louisiana, go and work on a logging crew in Maine, go do something interesting with your life.

So as I'm talking with him, and over the course of weeks, I'm urging him to do it, he started moving in that direction. What he was scared of was the most insane things to me. He's like, "What happens if my car breaks down while I'm on my trip?" Newish car, very little chance of breaking down.

I said, "You call a tow truck." "Well, what if a tow truck can't come?" "Then you put out your finger, like your thumb, you walk. You're 23 years old, you're in the prime of your physical youth, etc." But he couldn't do it. Now, my goal is not to be hard on my friend, we've all been in this experience, but I don't want my 23-year-old son to be in the situation that my friend was at 23 years old.

And I don't want your son to be there either. The idea that you couldn't have any ideas about your future is unacceptable. Even if you choose, even if you say, not everyone needs to go and sail the world constantly. I'm not saying that we should all live unorthodox lifestyles, but you should have the imagination to know various lifestyles that you could enjoy, things that could be good for you.

And it's perfectly reasonable for you to make a choice and say, "I'm working this fairly mundane job because it gives me these certain things that I want." Again, that's fine, I'm not arguing with that. But make that choice intentionally, knowing that there are other things that you could do and that you've chosen to do those things.

But you don't want to be in a situation where you're 23 years old, money, time, physical health, etc. And you don't have the courage and confidence to even go explore the world looking for something else that you could do. This young man had all the basics, high school diploma, could read, could do math, etc.

Gone to a private school, good school, right? But he didn't have... I'm lacking the words. You need to give your children experience in life. It's better for your children to work six different jobs during their middle school and high school years than one job. It's interesting. As I reflected on this, I realized how different his life course was than my life course.

I've actually, although I want my children to have the opportunity to work in our family businesses, I'm concerned about them exclusively being involved in the family businesses because it's bad for experience. Children need to go and they need to work for different employers, they need to be exposed to all kinds of different kinds of co-workers, they need to be exposed to different cultures, different backgrounds, different customs, and that experience needs to be both firsthand and through other resources.

Secondhand through literature, through movies, through stories of other people, etc. We need to expose our children to these things. How can I give my kids word if I don't have them? This is a question I've heard from parents who have learning disabilities or for whom English is a second language.

While there are few easy answers in parenting, this one is easier than most. There is a public agency that comes to the rescue in such instances. In fact, it's been doing this job for more than a century. What the agency does is take all the nouns, verbs, and adjectives a person would ever need and bundle them into little packages for anyone to borrow free.

It asks only that you bring the packages back in a few weeks. I'm referring to the American Free Public Library, the people's university, and for those who can't read the words, they are now available on audio cassette and CD. Forty years ago you had to be blind to get a recorded book in America.

Now anyone can. What do you do? How do you invest into your children? Expose your children to an immense amount of background knowledge and an immense amount of words. Do it based upon reading to them constantly and continually at every age, not just at young age, but all the ages.

Do it by encouraging them to read constantly and continually at every age and to read a diet of great diversity of sources and do it by exposing them to audiobooks, really wonderful audiobooks. I use all of these things and I think that if you do them you'll see the amount of difference that can be made.

Let's do a quick math calculation here. Do you remember the number that was used as far as from the Kansas University study of how many words the wealthy people would expose the total words a child would have heard by age four? The number in the highest group was 45 million words.

The four-year-old child from the professional family will have heard 45 million words prior to the age of four. When I read, I read at a rate of 8,000 words per hour. I read 8,000 words per hour and I read two hours per day. Basically, every single day, 365 days per year.

That's an average. That means that every year I read to my children about 5,840,000 words. Over the course of four years, that comes out to 23,360,000 words. So, I know that I myself am putting in, again, about 6 million words per year just from reading aloud. That's ignoring conversation, etc.

Total for that four-year-old is 23.3 million words. In addition to that, we do as a family a huge amount of audiobook listening. I would estimate it varies on the child, but somewhere between one to three hours a day of audiobook listening. When I go through our daily schedule, I'll explain how I do that.

Let's just call it two hours a day. Two hours a day, again, over four years, I know for sure that I'm getting another 23.3 million words into my child. So, right there, I'm at 46 million words with stuff that I track. My wife also reads to the children quite a lot.

I don't track the amount of time that she reads to them, but she also reads to them quite a lot. And, of course, we converse constantly, non-stop, etc. And so, if the average professional child gets 45 million words prior to entering kindergarten, I think that pretty reliably that I can get 60 million words into my children prior to the age at which they enter into kindergarten.

And then, because of the resources that we consume, those words that we present are much…there are many more of the less common words than the most common words. I have a lot more to say on this subject, but I can hear that my children have awakened from their naps in the other room, and I am needed for my fatherly duties.

So, I'm going to close this podcast episode here and come back with you with more. I want to talk about…certainly about reading. I want to talk about fiction versus non-fiction and the dreadful importance of lots and lots of fiction. I want to talk about multilingualism and reading in different languages, because that is another thing.

Now, I'll explain in detail the impact that I think multilingualism can have on your children's brains, and I'll do it from the perspective…remember, three years ago, we as a family were a monolingual family. At this point in time, we are now reading and homeschooling in six languages. I'll explain that process to you, because I believe it is tremendously important, and it's very important even what those languages are and how they impact your skill and knowledge in the English language, etc.

And then, we'll move on to numeracy, we'll talk about music and musicality, etc. When it comes to investing into your child's mind and brain and enhancing the cognitive ability of your child, there are many things you can do. Most of them are very simple and very inexpensive. And if you want to make the one investment into your child's cognitive ability that will pay off in spades, just read to your children and surround them with books that they can read to themselves.

Read to them, surround them with books that they can read, surround them with audiobooks of them being read to. And that, more than any other metric or piece of advice that I can find, will secure their academic future in an incredible way. And by the way, you don't need to do this for 12 years.

You should, but you don't need to. You need basically four years of this. If you can send your kindergartner, if you have a young child and you send your kindergartner off into the local government school for kindergarten, but you send your child in, being exposed to, having been exposed to 60 or 70 or 80 million words by being with mom, with dad constantly conversing, talking, etc., reading hours and hours of books, reading audiobooks, having diverse experiences, etc., academically, as far as I'm concerned, you can pretty well dust your hands and be done.

And your child will never be in the struggling component of the class ever again. But if you don't do that, if you don't get those first four, five, six years right by filling your child's mind with words and stories and etc., then you may spend tens of thousands of dollars on tutors and never make up the results, because you're just running behind the whole time.

So, I think this is an adequate place for me to close today's podcast. I have more to say on the subject, but I'll be back with you very soon. Thank you for listening.