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 Rashids. I'm your host. Today we continue our series on how to invest into your children effectively at a very young age.

Today we're going to continue talking about how to make your children smarter. By way of review very quickly, in episode one we talked about the importance of being careful who you choose to mate with, because the person that you choose to mate with is going to fundamentally drive the genetic potential of your children.

In episode two, we talked about the importance of ensuring a good, strong, healthy pregnancy and a successful childbirth. In episode three, we talked about helping your children to develop their bodies. You want to invest into helping your children develop strong bodies. We talked about nutrition, sleep, movement, sunshine, etc.

In episode four of this series, we talked about giving your children words and background knowledge. I explained that if you're going to invest into your children's minds, you begin with physicality, making sure they have good nutrition, no toxins, lots of exercise, etc. And then you need to start to build the mind.

And when we think about making your children smarter, there are two basic components of that. Literacy and numeracy are a useful outline for us to work from. So we started by talking about the importance of giving your children words. And I focused heavily in that episode on the importance of giving your children words at the earliest age.

I explained how if you want your baby to be smart, then you need to expose your baby to lots and lots of meaningful words. And if at all possible, you want that vocabulary that your child is exposed to to be extremely broad. You don't want to just work with the few thousand most common words.

You want your child to be exposed to tens of thousands of uncommon words. And that the more your child hears at an early age, the farther ahead and the easier time your child will have in his academic pursuits. I broke that into the importance of background knowledge and the importance of words, just the sheer quantity of words.

So in today's episode, we're going to continue on that theme. And I'm going to seek to impress upon you that point afresh of how important the number of words are. The number is, excuse me, the number of words is to your child's overall intellectual potential. And then talk to you about how do you actually do that in an effective way?

How? And I'm seeking to make this very practical. How do you do it? How do you actually help your child to be smarter in ways that are going to be measured in cognitive ability, especially with regard to literacy? Remember, if there is a metric that is most important to track when your child is young in terms of his mental development, how smart he can be, that metric is simply the number of words that your child hears on a daily basis.

In a perfect world, from this metric, your child would hear nothing but constant human speech in meaningful context and high quality, high level literature. Now, obviously, there are many other things that are important for your child's development. Sleep is important. You don't want his sleep interrupted by words. Play is important.

You don't want his play interrupted by words. Silence is important to have time to think and to process, etc. Children shouldn't have words going into their heads all the time. But you're trying to maximize, within those other constraints, trying to maximize the number of words that go into your children's minds.

And these words are going to give your child the background knowledge that he needs in order to understand the world in addition to improving his overall academic ability. Let me read a smart quote on this topic. I'm reading here from a book called The Read Aloud Family, and the author of this book is citing an interview that she performed on her podcast, The Read Aloud Revival Podcast with Dr.

Joseph Price. "Dr. Joseph Price, Associate Professor of Economics at Brigham Young University, specializes in the economics of family and education. His research demonstrates that one extra day per week of parent-child read aloud sessions during the first 10 years of a child's life increases standardized test scores by half a standard deviation.

That's as many as 15 to 30 percentile points, a tremendous gain." In a separate note, "In The Read Aloud Handbook, Jim Trulise suggests that the academic benefits alone of reading aloud are so great, if someone invented a pill to deliver those benefits, there would be a line for miles and miles to get it.

Parents would fall over themselves and pay enormous amounts of money to give their kids the benefit of this pill." He cites the 1985 Commission on Reading that I mentioned in Chapter 1. "The single most important activity for building the knowledge required for eventual success in reading is reading aloud to children." Trulise also describes the results of research conducted by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which showed that the more children are read to, the higher their test scores are, sometimes by as much as half a year's schooling.

This was true regardless of a family's income. He goes on to say that reading aloud has proven to be so powerful in increasing a child's academic success that it is more effective than expensive tutoring or even private education. "Parents often ask me if they should play Mozart to their babies or buy them expensive teaching toys or prohibit television or get them started early on a computer," Trulise writes, "but the answer is much simpler.

Read to your children." This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the research and data that explains the power that reading aloud has on a child's academic growth. She goes on to, in another direction, to lay out some of the benefits of reading. The three benefits that she talks about in this book, benefit number one, increased vocabulary and highly sophisticated language patterns, that's benefit number one.

Benefit number two, the ability to make connections, in other words, reading comprehension. And benefit number three is a love for reading. When you start to think about how to make your child smarter, there are different ways in which you can think about that. One is at the basic physical level.

You can say, "How can I make my child physically smarter? How can I increase the number of neural connections in his brain?" Or you can think about it in the more common sense way. "How can I make my child smarter about this subject?" Well, if you want to be smarter, you need to expose yourself to information and wisdom in a meaningful context and then apply and express that.

And that's why most of what we talk about in terms of reading aloud is going to usher in a lifetime of reading. Reading aloud is not something that is opposed to reading. I think that I myself am firmly convinced that reading aloud is a practice that should continue for life, both for children and for adults, because it adds all the benefits of reading and it brings some benefits that aren't otherwise there.

Let me break this down so you understand it and then we'll talk about how to apply it. Reading aloud allows a child to access information and ideas that are beyond his current ability to read with his eyes. And this is something that you can use. This is a technique that you can use to challenge your children's brains when their eyes are not yet ready.

I have the good fortune of having experienced this personally with my own reading journey quite recently, as well as tutoring and helping my children to become skilled readers. I've paid careful attention to this in my journey with reading in foreign languages, and I have learned how difficult it is to consume written content when you are not a skilled and competent reader.

I primarily learn languages by reading. But reading, when you're not a good reader, when you're not a totally skilled reader, is something that takes work. It tires you out. I'm a very accomplished reader in English. For me, reading in English is effortless. Not to say that all materials are effortless.

If I find something, a subject which I'm not skilled in, I need to go slow and carefully parse the words and understand the meaning, of course that's more tiring. But in general, generalized reading is effortless. But when I move into a foreign language, that effortlessness is gone and it's replaced with effort.

So one of the tools that I use is I listen to an audiobook while simultaneously reading the material with my eyes. And that helps me to keep going, to keep pressing forward, because it's easier to listen than it is to read. The same is true with children. It's easier for them to listen than it is for them to read.

So if you have that practice of reading aloud, your four-year-old can listen to something that he would never be able to read, even if he is able to actually parse the words. But yet he gets all of the benefits of reading at a very early age. Reading is a unique and special technology.

A lot of times people contrast reading with things like absorbing content on the screen, a movie or a film or some kind of video production. I don't think that these things should be seen as in opposition to one another. Novels are not better or worse than movies. They are different technologies.

There are things that are so much better learned and expressed through reading than movies. And there are things that are so much better expressed through movies than through reading. And so if we understand the distinctions between these technologies, we'll be able to use them where they are unique and most powerful.

Of the two, generally I think reading is a more impactful technology than a movie for a few basic reasons. First, if you want your child to be smart, you need to stimulate your child's brain. And reading does that because reading requires active participation of the reader in the story.

When you're reading a story and listening to a description, your brain has to build a mental picture of that description. And to follow the story, you have to carefully watch it through and your brain has to rely exclusively on words to form that mental picture. Reading is a much more involved tech—mental—it's much more mentally taxing than watching something on a screen.

When you're watching something on a screen, you are just simply a passive observer. That what you're observing can touch you, it can touch your emotions, it can feed you inspiration, it can touch you with facts, it can help you just to see in a very accurate way. But you're still a passive observer.

You're not as fired up. That's why most of us, if we have a long and tiring week and we just want to take it easy, very rarely are we going to go and pick up a Charles Dickens novel. Rather, we're going to go and say, "Let me goof around and find something on Netflix and find some rom-com that's going to fill up about two hours and allow me to relax." Watching TV, watching movies, is generally a relaxing experience.

Reading can be a relaxing experience, but is often not. And it's because the brain requires more—reading requires more active participation from the brain. Another thing that is—another benefit to reading that I think is really important is the ability to get inside the mind of a character. When an author is writing a story, the author, as the omniscient God, can carefully describe every thought that every protagonist is having.

And that can allow your brain to follow along these grooves along with the character. So, your brain can experience fear, your brain can experience anger, your brain can experience hopefulness or hopelessness in a very, very powerful way simply by going along with the thought patterns of the protagonist. If the author is describing for several paragraphs or, in some cases, several pages what the protagonist is thinking in the story, your brain will automatically be experiencing that just alongside him.

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And it was the most powerful book I read all year. It touched me so incredibly deeply. I was in tears. I sat in my chair sobbing and I'm not, I'm not engaging in hyperbole. I literally sat in my chair sobbing at several points throughout the book. It's a very intensely emotional book.

If you have not read it, I would urge you read it. In whatever translation you want, grab the audiobook, but get the full original unabridged book. What stood out to me so much about the story was that I experienced the breadth of human emotion in reading the story. The book begins on a very hopeful note, and you're filled with joy and appreciation for the good things that are happening in the life of the protagonist.

Then the book turns from hopeful to hopeless, and you experience this sense of despondency and despair. And the protagonist is treated so immorally, so evilly, that you're filled with this hatred for the people who are doing this to him. And there's a point in there which he's utterly hopeless, and I just remember the emotions of the experience.

And I'm not going to go on through all the emotions, but you experience all of these things. You experience anger, you experience revenge, then you experience sympathy and appreciation of what happens when you take revenge on people. And it's something that I've never experienced a movie that could take me through those emotions in such a powerful way.

And so, for children especially, I believe this is really, really important, a really important way for helping our children not only to be intellectually smart, but to be emotionally intelligent as well. Listen to this excerpt, this story that illustrates this. "When Rebecca Gonzalez was elementary school age, her mother, Toni, read aloud Johnny Tremaine by Esther Forbes.

Set in Boston during the events leading up to the Revolutionary War, the book tells the story of a 14-year-old apprentice silversmith. After Johnny's hand is disfigured and disabled, he ends up working as a horse-riding messenger for the Sons of Liberty. As her mother read the book aloud, Rebecca fell fast for Johnny, thoroughly enjoying his adventurous story of loyalty and courage.

The next summer, Rebecca attended vacation Bible school and came home each night to talk incessantly about her new best friend, Billy. Every night she told her mother about the funny things he had said, how smart he was at Bible memory, his cool t-shirt and stylish hair, his award for camper of the day.

Toni wasn't able to meet Billy until the final day of VBS. When Rebecca called Billy over to introduce him to her mother, Toni received a surprise. Billy made his way over to Rebecca and Toni, leaning heavily on his walker. It was only then that Toni realized something. Billy had cerebral palsy.

During all of those conversations about her new best friend, Rebecca had never once mentioned it. That day, Toni noticed that most of Rebecca's vacation Bible school classmates were uncomfortable in Billy's presence. When she asked her daughter about the new friendship, Rebecca credited her fictional friend Johnny Tremaine, who had taught her what it might feel like to be disabled, and therefore different from everyone else.

That's an anecdote from the Read Aloud Family book. The point of the story is, we've all had that. There's an old saying, an old aphorism, it says something like, "Don't judge a man until you've walked a mile in his shoes." But it's hard to go and actually walk a mile in another man's shoes.

The next best thing to that is to read about the mile that he's walking in his shoes and allow your brain to experience the same kinds of experiences that man is having. And so, reading stories fills in not only facts and background knowledge, but emotions and empathy, and it helps with the emotional maturing and emotional intelligence of our children in an extremely powerful way.

I think this is why it's important that we expose our children to a broad range of literature. I want my children to know what it's like to be bullied and to bully. Not in reality, but vicariously through stories. I want my children to understand what it's like to be in different cultures, to be in different parts of the world, to understand the optimism that a man born in one life position feels, and the despair and pessimism that a boy born in another life position can feel and experience.

And reading is the best way to fully engage the brain in these events. Back to reading aloud. Your youngest children are not going to be able to access the stories if they have to wait until they are physically capable of reading them with their eyes. But you can invest for years into their experiences by reading aloud to them.

And they are always going to be able to access stories at a higher level if they're listening to those stories. You and I, as adults, can listen to material that is much harder than what we can read comfortably. And that's always the case. Again, I've proved it with foreign languages again and again, and I see it with my children again and again.

So, reading aloud is your cornerstone. How do you do it? First thing you need to read aloud successfully to your children is you need books. You need access to books. And that starts with knowing which books to read. Here, since you're listening to me speak in English, I want to encourage you that assuming you're reading to your children in English, that you have an embarrassment of riches.

I have searched the world, and I continue to search the world, for high-quality lists of children's literature in other languages. And I am amazed at the difference between English and other languages in terms of book lists. I can, off the top of my head, give you half a dozen book lists, all of which are excellent lists that you can use to choose your children's literature from.

Let me go ahead and do that. First, if you have not read the Read Aloud Handbook by Jim Trelise, immediately get a copy of it. In the back of that book is a bibliography, a list of books that will be suitable and appropriate for you to read with your children.

I today read two excerpts from the book called The Read Aloud Family. Look up The Read Aloud Family. In the back of that book are a couple of book lists. I like the book Honey for a Child's Heart, which is a book dedicated to book lists and filled with, again, high-quality book recommendations.

There's another book I have called Books That Build Character. In this particular book is a book that is full of book lists, telling you books that talk about virtue and character development. Online you can find all kinds of reading lists. One of my favorites that I think is really powerful is the reading list for the free online homeschool curriculum put out at Ambleside Online, amblesideonline.org.

If you go to the Ambleside Online curriculum page, for each year they have 12 years of curriculum prepared, which although not a perfect fit for first grade, second grade, third grade, because the grade level is somewhat meaningless, you can be a little bit ahead or a little bit behind and still be in the process of gaining an excellent education.

It's a useful corollary to the American system of 12 school years. And for each year, they have a list of what are called free reads. And this is a wonderful list of books that you can read from, have your children read, and many of them are excellent read aloud recommendations.

The Institute for Excellence in Writing publishes a great list of books. They have one that's called Books for Boys and Other People Who Would Rather Build Fortsall Than Read a Book or something like that. It's a great list of novels for active boys who want strong books with lots of action in them.

Mensa publishes a book list. There are just so many book lists out there. Basically, what I'm encouraging is go find a book list and use those titles and start pulling from them. So, the first thing you need to get is books. And it starts with a book list, a list that you can pull titles from.

Then you need access to those books. Here, the question would be, should I get them from the library or should I own the books? In general, I think obviously the library is a really great resource. Unfortunately, I'm much more cautious these days about the library than I was when I was younger.

When I was a boy, I would go to the library with my mom once a week or so, and I would usually check out 50 books. I would take a big bag and I would check out 50 books, and then a week later bring them back and turn them in and go again.

There's nothing better than a library for allowing a child access to a broad range of books. And remember, not all books are designed to be read from cover to cover. And in fact, this is one of the great advantages of the technology of books. Unlike the technology of audio, unlike the technology of video, the technology of books allows a book to be skimmed with profit.

So, if you want to gain an overview of a subject, skimming a book and kind of dipping your toe in here and there is an important skill, and it's a perfectly valid form of reading that individuals should develop. If you can only consume a book from front to back, you are not a skilled reader.

A skilled reader can consume a book in many different ways. And so, having access to a broad range of books is really, really important and useful. This also helps if you have access to huge numbers of books from the library, this also helps your children to develop background knowledge.

I can distinctly point back and I can identify things in my own knowledge base that came from my broad skim reading of library books. When I was a boy, I learned how to fly a helicopter. I learned how to do organic gardening. I learned all about ultralights. I learned all these different subjects.

Now, I say learned, of course, in a tongue-in-cheek way, I read about them. And while I don't, I certainly don't pretend that that knowledge is as good as real experiential knowledge, that broad knowledge base has given me many, many advantages in life. And it came from 50 books a week, basically week in, week out for many, many years.

Unfortunately, I've lost faith, I've lost confidence in many of the local library systems. The last time I took my children into a library, the library was, they had pornography in the children's section. And it was really quite disturbing to see that. And so, most libraries, as a way of getting around that, most libraries will allow you to use their hold and reserve system.

And what we have done is started to move to that hold and reserve system. Instead of taking our children, just letting them browse the shelves and pick their own books, we put the books on hold and then just go and pick them up. So, if you're dealing with a government library or something like that, then be careful in our current age as far as the things that your children will be exposed to.

There is also an increasing movement towards what are called living libraries. The term living library is probably an offshoot of the term living book. And that term is hard to define. Here, a simplistic definition I would give is just simply a very high quality, very engaging, very carefully selected book.

And if you have access in your area to a living library, sign up, pay the membership fee, and it'll be worth every cent. Just an amazing resource. When I browse one of our local living libraries book selections, I'm amazed at the high quality of those selections and how wonderful it is to have a dedicated librarian who is committed to choosing the highest quality books.

So, check around in your area, see if you have a living library. These are usually independent. They're not affiliated with any large-scale organization or government entity. They're not necessarily intended to be a non-profit, but I think at least all the ones that I have seen wind up being non-profit organizations.

There is a membership fee where you sign up, pay a membership fee, but the librarians usually have such a passion for quality literature that they wind up spending all of their would-be profits on more books for their library. So, they're non-for-profit endeavors, but they're just a wonderful resource. You also need access to the books and you need time to read them.

Those amounts of reading should be large. It should be significant. So, I mentioned in the previous episode, my personal target is two hours a day. A number of years ago, I read a great book called Teaching the Trivium by Harvey and Lori Bluedorn, and they said this is this should be the goal, two hours a day.

I like it when people give me a goal, and so I set that as my goal, and I do pretty well. I probably hit that five days a week, four to five days a week. Not every day, but I hit it four to five days a week. Then my wife also reads to the children, and so I don't track her hours, but it varies sometimes a lot, sometimes less.

But it's important that you note that with children, you can't do it all at once, nor would you want to. It's exhausting and tiring to do a good job reading for an hour straight, and children don't have the attention span to engage with books for that long of a period.

What you do is you intersperse your child's day with little chunks of reading here and there. I read sometimes a book before breakfast with a couple of children, and now that my children's age ranges vary quite a lot, I want to make time for the picture books with the younger ones and make time for special books with the older ones.

I read at the breakfast table, I read at the lunch table, I read at the dinner table, sometimes before dinner, many times after dinner, etc. But if you put in chunks of 15-20 minutes here and there, pretty soon you can get to an hour, hour and a half, two hours or more per day.

And then that works really well with the children's attention span. The other thing I do is I try to be thoughtful in terms of when and how I read certain books. So picture books that really engage the interest of my littlest children, I of course read those on the couch where we can snuggle up and they'll be totally focused.

Longer chapter books that I think are really wonderful and powerful books, but that aren't going to engage my younger children. If I want them to be listening, because again I want them to grow their attention span and their ability to pay attention, but they're going to need something to do with their hands, so often I'll do those at meal times.

Their hands are busy, their mouths are full, they don't get too wiggly, and it helps to stretch them out. And even just listening to an audiobook or listening to a book being read to you, that is a skill that helps your child to develop attention span, develop the ability to sit still, to focus, etc.

I don't want to go too deeply into more tips here. I would urge you again read aloud a handbook and read aloud family, two good resources, but don't expect your children to be totally still. Many times make a snack, give them food, read to them at times when their hands are busy.

I'll go and when I go through an episode of my day and show you how I try to put all the stuff into a normal day, all these techniques and tips that I'm talking about, I'll go in detail through it, but I build little traditions. And so, you know, at 10 30 in the morning we have a protein shake.

Well, that's the time that we read this book, and then at noon we read the other book, etc. And so, you're just building up your children's stamina over time and doing it in a soft way, but with a goal of stretching them out to a very long attention span, so they can start moving and developing not only the intellectual ability, not only the words, not only the linguistic skills, but also things like being able to do long, huge amounts of deep work in the future, which will help them.

I see it as a valid investment into my youngest of children that I'm helping prepare their brains to focus intently on difficult work for long periods of time in the future. And I want to engage with the subject of audiobooks, because I believe audiobooks are a magic tool that we have today that has not been nearly as accessible as even 10 or 20 years ago, and yet can really supercharge our results.

And we owe this tool primarily to the existence of Audible and other audiobook platforms. People reading books aloud has been around forever, and in fact, oral traditions were far more common. If you went back a couple thousand years, you would find that it was very common to have a reader.

All of the Hebrew and New Testament scriptures were designed to be read aloud. There would be one scroll or one letter that made the rounds and then a reader to read it. It's a tradition of people reading aloud. So, in many ways, you would say that the technology of each person having an individual book and reading that book is fairly new.

But it wasn't as…audiobooks were not as accessible in the past as they are today. And I think that we need to pay attention to how good this has gotten. I did not grow up listening to a lot of audiobooks. We had a few treasured cassette series that we listened to again and again, but the prices were high, and we listened to those same books again and again and again, usually on family car trips.

Then CDs came out, and that made the technology better, and then libraries started to acquire audiobook series and CDs. But over the last decade, we've of course enjoyed the digital revolution, where most of us now listen to audio that's linked to our digital device rather than a CD or an audio cassette.

And libraries have also supported that. And so, now you can borrow from your local library audiobooks. 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. Considering the Mavericks taking home trophies everywhere, from King of the Hammers to Uncle Ned's Backcountry Rally, you're not going to find a better deal on front row seats to a championship winner.

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Years ago, in the histories of Radical Personal Finance, I did a podcast dedicated to all the different options. At the time, I was using several different audiobook platforms. These days, I've pretty much just standardized on Audible as being one of the best solutions out there. Today, you can get an Audible membership that basically brings almost any title to a maximum cost of $11, which means that if you sign up for a plan of two or three books per month, for $20 or $30, you can gain access to 30 to 60 to possibly more, shorter books, 15 to 50 hours of audio per month that's available to you of the highest quality audio.

And the audiobook selection is huge and is growing. Audiobooks are really valuable to helping you enhance the intellectual abilities of your children because they take most of the benefits of reading aloud and they add those benefits beyond what you yourself as a parent are able to provide to your children.

I don't think that audiobooks are better than you reading aloud to your children, which is why I intentionally focus on my doing the reading aloud to my children, because there are a whole host of other relationship benefits associated with that. I'm building an emotional connection with my children when I read aloud to them.

They're snuggling on my lap, or they're snuggled up next to me, or they're hearing my voices, my rendition. I can stop, I can explain things, we can talk about the subject matter of the book if it's controversial, etc. And then also, by having these things together, it becomes part of our family culture.

One of the great benefits of reading books together with your children is they become useful skills or useful tools for you to talk about life, but to do it in an impersonal way. So, let's say that you want to talk with your teenage son about women, or your teenage daughter about relationships.

It can be difficult to do that, especially if you want to point out something in a, let's say you notice someone in your friend group, or someone at your church, or someone in your company who just has this certain behavior that is totally inappropriate. You don't want to tell your son or daughter, "Listen, child, you see that person over there and what they're doing?

How horrific. Don't ever do that." That's a wrong way to, that brings people down. It's a wrong thing to do, generally speaking. But if you read a book together, and you read Pride and Prejudice, and you get all this intrigue about all these relationships, etc., you now have an opportunity to say, "Well, what do you think about this protagonist's actions?

Or what do you think they should have done?" etc. And so, having a book that's in common, and books that have positive examples, and books that have negative examples, gives you a really great springboard for discussing important and serious topics with your children, but doing it in a way where you're not harming other people, you're not talking down about other people, or gossiping about other real people.

It's one of the reasons books are so important. So, reading aloud is important, but audiobooks provide all those benefits of intellectual growth, and they fill in around the edges. Remember, the basic metric that we want to count is the number of words heard by the child. That number of words, we don't want 24 hours a day of words, but we do want the number of words to be high.

But I get tired. I get tired as a reader. I get tired of certain things. That's where audiobooks come in. Audiobooks allow us to listen to stories in the car. And for some families, there may be five hours a week, ten hours a week of great audio. By the way, I think the car is often best reserved for conversation, but what I have noticed with my young children, though I believe that conversation is really valuable, my young children aren't so great at it yet.

And car rides often become loud and quite unpleasant if there's not some activity. So, listening to a family audiobook in the car together is a wonderful way of exposing your children to high quality, to all these benefits, a great story together, and it's a great way of making use of the dead time.

And back to the concept of children being capable of far higher reading levels. One of the techniques I use with audiobooks is I use the car as a place where they're a captive audience. Let me take a slight detour for a moment into a topic of how reading can be used to make you smarter in the long run.

There is a model of education that is often called the classical model. And this idea of classical model of education, it's hard to pin down, hard to define accurately, and there are different definitions depending on who you're talking to and in what context you're using it. But a component of the classical model generally involves some relation to what is called the trivium.

The trivium is an allusion back to the classic Greek and Roman conception of the three basic areas of knowledge, which they called grammar, logic, and rhetoric. And in the neoclassical model, these ideas of grammar, logic, and rhetoric are often applied on an age perspective, right? You start in the beginning with grammar stage of learning, logic stage, rhetoric, etc.

I look at these as a natural encapsulation of how you learn about something. And one of the important things we want to teach our children is how to learn. And so we want to, if you're going to go into a new subject, the first thing you'd learn is you learn the basic grammar of the subject, all of the basic words, their meanings, the basic arguments, etc.

You learn all the basics of the subject. Then you go on in your learning and you start to think about the arguments inherent in those subjects. And then later you express your own perspectives or your opinions using rhetoric related to the arguments of those subjects. So let me give you a financial example.

If you were brand new to personal finance, you would begin by learning the grammar. And let's say I use terms like tax brackets or tax rates or tax itself or income tax or employment tax. These are all words that need a definition. And once you understand what those are, right?

What is a tax? What is an income tax? What is employment tax? What are tax brackets? What are tax rates? What is a wage base, etc.? That's all part of the grammar stage. Then in the logic stage, you can start to deal with the arguments of a position, right?

People will argue that taxes in the United States are going to go up because the government is running a deficit. People can argue that taxes are going to go down because the government wants to stimulate the economy, etc. And then eventually you can opine yourself on whether somebody should participate in a traditional 401k or a Roth 401k based upon their idea of tax brackets, tax rates, wage base, etc.

and how those things are likely to be applied to you as an individual taxpayer. If you want to help your children to be very smart, I think one of the best things you can do is expose them to the grammar or the basics, especially the basic definitions of the most important subjects at a very young age.

The younger the better. But we want to do this in a very thoughtful way. So I use audiobooks as a way of accomplishing this. And as an example, I quoted several episodes ago, I quoted extensively from the book Deep Nutrition. I believe that nutrition is a fundamental topic that all successful human beings need to understand in order to fuel their body.

And so I want my children to study at a very deep level nutrition. And so the way that I do that is I have the audiobook version of Deep Nutrition, and when we're in the car, about a couple times a week, I'll play about 10 minutes of it. And the children don't have the capacity.

Remember, I've got a nine-year-old, seven-year-old, five-year-old, three-year-old, and newborn. The children don't have the capacity to listen to two hours of it and gain anything meaningful from it. But they do have the capacity to listen to 10 minutes of it. And the terms, all of the terms of that book start to make them think about nutrition and starts to give them a context for conversations.

So then when I guide their nutritional choices, and I say we're going to choose this because this is where the protein value is, this is where the protein is, or this is where the nutritional value is, etc., then there's a context for that. And I know that in the future, as they go forward over the years and they read five more books on nutrition or follow whatever the developments are in their own life, they'll have the ability to understand those topics.

Or other things, human relationships, right? We, as a family, I've read it to them before, but now we're doing the audiobook version of How to Win Friends and Influence People. I believe this is a fundamental book that really all people should probably read once a year. And so I just play a chapter in the car when they can't really do anything else and they kind of have to listen.

It's one of those things that doesn't, I have read it at the breakfast table, but it's not as interesting as a great story. And so I play it in the car and now we have a context. So rule number one, don't criticize, condemn, or complain about other people. And it gives me, it gives us a common family framework to where I can teach them about human relationships.

Because I believe that one of the basic skills that successful people need, all successful people need, is they need to understand how to handle people, how to deal with people. And so we have a resource that we can then use. Now these are of course adult level books, but children can take them in small doses.

And I use audiobooks as a convenient way to meter out those doses and I put them in strategically. Now it doesn't have to just be non-fiction. I believe that fiction should be the cornerstone for really for most people, but especially for children. I don't know that fiction should be a cornerstone for an adult, but it should definitely be something an adult to read.

But fiction is really, really important for children. But we can use audiobooks to access fiction that is beyond what we ourselves might want to read. So in our family right now, we are nearing the end of book two of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. And we are listening, and have been, it's been a year that we've been working our way through The Hobbit and book one and book two, and we're not done with book two yet, and we'll move on to book three.

But we've been, we're working through the Andy Serkis recording that is available of The Lord of the Rings. This book is an exquisitely excellent example of fantasy fiction. Very involved and intricate plot dynamics, high-level vocabulary, beautiful English construction, exceedingly poetic, full of interesting plot lines and, you know, betrayal and success and despair and hope and courage, etc.

And then when you add in Andy Serkis's performance, which just takes it over the top, he's the most gifted voice actor I have ever heard. Incredible. Incredible. I think that listening to The Lord of the Rings, with his production at least, is superior to reading it, because it fills in so much beauty to it.

And the children love it. But they only love it, like, they can't love it three hours at a time work. But 30 minutes here, 45 minutes there, etc. It's wonderful. Reading your way through The Lord of the Rings is a mammoth undertaking as a parent, but listening your way through Lord of the Rings is a much less mammoth undertaking.

And it can be, it'll take you a year to two years probably if you do it, but it's wonderful. And I noticed that the language, so again, pretty high level, right? Definitely high school level language in terms of normal Lexile scores, etc. But my children all enjoy it. The five-year-old definitely enjoys it.

And his hearing of rich amount of words. So, audiobooks are a way to achieve this. Use audiobooks as a tool in your household. And if you'll carefully choose your audiobook selections, and then allow your children to engage with those, in many ways, it'll give you a superior option versus other forms of just vegging out.

So, remember that the basic concept of success in life has to do with opportunity cost. And in every decision, there is an opportunity cost. There's something that is not being done because you've chosen to take the action or make the decision of the thing that you're doing at this moment.

Reading or listening to audiobooks is not always the best decision. If you tell me to have the choice between a child playing outside several hours per day versus a child not playing outside several hours per day and listening to audiobooks, I'm going to say, "No, we need to play outside." But if you have the choice of listening to an audiobook versus consuming a mindless cartoon, the audiobook is a superior option.

And so, audiobooks also allow you as a parent a tool to give your children a very high quality option for those times when they need entertainment. So, screens in movies and videos are very useful. Apps, certain apps can be very useful. But too much of a good thing can turn it into a bad thing.

And those technologies have certain traps. I want to encourage you that many of the times when you are looking for an electronic babysitter for your child, if you'll choose an audiobook, it'll fill something in in a powerful way. And then you can do multiple things. So, for example, sometimes when the children are wild and crazy and I need them calmed down, etc.

But maybe I'm busy, my wife's busy, etc. A common tool would be to say, "Let's go to a screen." But I think a superior option in many of those cases is everybody come to the kitchen table, we're going to listen to an audiobook, and we're going to draw pictures.

And so, you have a moment, say, let's have 30 minutes, listen to a high quality audiobook, you're getting words, all the benefits of words, of unique language, really high level language that's often not involved in screens or apps, etc. And you're also saying, "Let's practice artistic ability." So, everyone has colored pencils, here's a book on how to draw, practice drawing the shapes, and let's work on artistic ability.

And by the way, this also has the benefit of helping strengthen the child's muscles to make writing a less onerous and difficult task, etc., which will help your child's skills in schooling. So, use audiobooks as part of the portfolio. They shouldn't replace reading aloud, but they should be a really valuable tool that gives you a more passive experience, but is a superior to many other options.

By the way, I frequently hate on screens and apps and devices. I want to be consistent and say, "These are really valuable and wonderful tools, but they can do so much more." So, we use them, I use them, but I want to use them very intentionally, not mindlessly. And by the way, screens and apps and such have benefits in a different application.

I'm not going to talk about multilingualism in this episode. I think I'll do it in the next episode. But screens can, all the downsides of screens, all the downsides of movies can actually become positive things when you move into the world of multilingualism. So, there's a little teaser for the next discussion on that topic.

For this entire episode, I have been talking with you about reading, but I've been talking about reading with your ears, not with your eyes. This is a fundamental step to build fluency that will lead to reading with your eyes. If you want to make your child smarter and help your child to develop his mind, his brain to the highest potential level, you want your child to be a committed and highly skilled reader with his eyes.

In the same way that the number of words that your child hears will drive his academic success, I think the basic metric that you're trying to track and maximize in the development of a child's mind is the number of pages read, or the number of words read, either way.

A child who has a very high page count of reading is a child that is going to be considered and be obviously very, very smart, very learned, very educated, regardless of that child's interaction with the school system. A child who reads a huge amount will fly through formalized schooling with very little difficulty.

That was my experience. I never struggled in school, ever, primarily because I was a reader. A child who reads a lot can bypass the formalized school system and succeed without a problem in almost any field, because the basic skill of education or self-education is reading. I don't want to give you a long, drawn-out disquisition on why this is so.

I just want to state it as a blunt fact. It is so. And while many incredible technologies can be applied to enhance learning, reading is the fundamental skill. So how do you teach your child to read and to read well? At its core, I believe the magic tool is reading aloud.

You want your child to associate books with pleasure, and well-chosen books read to the child extensively over time make that link. There are other things that you can do. You want your child to see you reading, modeling the behavior. You want to make sure that your home is full of books.

There is good research that…actually, let me go ahead and mention it. It's important in the context of talking about how to invest in your children. Earlier, I mentioned libraries, but a big way to invest in your children is to have books in the home. Right now, my home library has a total of 2,518 titles in it.

Right here in our home library. 2,518. I have purchased every one of those books. It has not been cheap, and I have thousands of more books that I will be purchasing in the coming years. The reason I make this investment is books purchased for your child are some of the cheapest possible money that you could ever spend to help your child do well.

Let's talk about the money for a moment. No, let's deal with…excuse me. Let me go through the numbers for a moment. Reading here from the Read Aloud Handbook by Jim Trelise. Did you ever notice the similarity between reading scores and rodeo scores? For the sake of discussion, let's say the nation's leaders suddenly decided that rodeo was the most important subject in our school's curriculum.

This is not as far-fetched as you might think. If the price of gas keeps rising, some people are going to be looking very differently at horses. There would suddenly be new courses created around horsemanship, saddles and equipment would have to be ordered, riding coaches credentialed, and mandatory riding and roping instruction begun in rodeo lab classes.

All of this would culminate in mandatory grade-level rodeos, including exit rodeos for the high school seniors, to ensure that no rider was left behind and everyone would be racing to the top corral. And sure as the sun sinks in the west, in this scenario, there would be states that excelled and those that failed.

In fact, to show this idea isn't all that wacky, set your browser for the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association and look at any of their standings. You'll find the high scorers all come from states like Utah, Texas, Nebraska, Oregon, and Colorado, rich with ranches, horses, and cattle. Already we could easily predict which states would be on the "failing schools" list for rodeo, places that have the fewest horses, like New Jersey, Illinois, Delaware, and Maine.

It's tough to get good at rodeo if you're missing a horse, right? The same role played by horses in the rodeo world is played by print in the reading world. Like Texas or Oregon with rodeo, there are places in America where they annually have the highest reading scores. And in the same country, under the same government, there are homes, schools, and communities that scarcely have seen a new book in decades, and newspapers seldom hit their doorstep.

It's difficult to get good at reading if you're short of print. Government programs like No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top ensure that children who are behind in reading are entitled to after-school tutoring and extra help with phonics. Nice! But giving phonics lessons to kids who don't have any print in their lives is like giving oars to people who don't have a boat.

You don't get very far. And now here we go into some charts. So here is the verbal results of a couple of charts. Number of books in the home of those who have a high interest in books, 80.6. Number of books in the home who those children who report having a low interest in books, 31.7 books.

Also have a chart of books in the home and average science scores in grade 12. Reported number of books at the home, more than 100 books in the home, average science score 161. 26 to 100 books in the home, average science score 147. 11 to 25 books in the home, average science score 132.

Zero to 10 books in the home, average science score 122. So if you want your child to read books, you need to spend money and fill your home with books. Fill your home not just with any books, but fill your home with the best books. Carefully chosen, carefully curated, but the best books.

And what you will find is if you're doing these things, if you're reading to your child and if you have filled your home with books, your children will naturally read books. It'll happen. By the way, you'll notice I haven't yet said if you teach them to read or focus on phonics or something like that.

That stuff's important. But I have, I obviously have a baby, no let me say it, I have three non-reading children who all love books because I have a home filled with books and we read books constantly. And so I will routinely say to my children, we have a library in a home, I'll say, you know, it's five o'clock or 5.20, we're getting ready for dinner, have them get their baths, et cetera, go to the library and read.

And all of my children, with baby accepted, will go to the library and sit and pleasurably read books for 30 minutes with no problem, including the non-readers, because books are a source of pleasure. And they know that. And of course, they will spend most of their time reading books with beautiful pictures and repeating the stories themselves, books that we've read many times.

Sometimes they'll basically recite the book, sometimes they read the books to each other, et cetera. But you need to have a home filled with books if you want your children to be readers. If you'll fill your home with books and then create and make easy access to those books, your children will be able to follow their interests among those books.

If you choose a broad variety, they can enjoy all of the different things that are available to them. You want your children to do well in school? Buy books. Let me give you the math that I think about. Let's say that you buy a $50 book, a fairly expensive book.

If you're in the United States and you can order your books on Amazon, most of your books are going to be $10 to $20, in some cases $4. But let's say you buy a $50 book. I buy many $50 books, partly because I do foreign language books, partly because I buy expensive books, et cetera, but I buy a lot of $50 books.

A $50 book will have at minimum five hours of consumption if it's read. In many cases, it's much, much higher. But let's go with five hours to make easy math and make my point exceedingly conservative. Here's how I think about it. Let's say that I go and I buy a $50 book.

I ordered it in from overseas, again, foreign language, out of print, something I'm doing to get a high quality book. And I have my first child who reads the book. $10 an hour is my cost for that child to read the book. But that $10 per hour is gaining me access to a world-class teacher or tutor on that subject.

That $10 book is gaining me access to someone who's passionate about a subject. The best teachers in the world are available to me for $10 an hour. By the way, notice, this is a $50 book. In many cases, it's a $10 book. Right now, my eldest child is reading a biography of Marie Curie written by her daughter, Eve Curie.

It's an intense book, but he's right there shoulder to shoulder with Pierre and Marie Curie in their laboratory. Or a story, right? You're riding across the ocean with a... I mean, I don't mean to go on. A book gains access to the world's best teacher, somebody who's invested thousands of hours into experience and learning, etc., and is articulating those into five hours.

It's incredibly compact. $10 an hour is an exceedingly cheap price to pay. It's even cheaper if it's $15 for the book and it's $2 an hour. You will never get a better deal for your child's tutoring than a book. Then, of course, bring that on to multiple children. I have five children.

All five children will read the book. So now my per hour consumption cost drops to $2 an hour, spread out across. And by the way, many books, they'll put in 30 hours' width, 50 hours' width. The hours just grow and grow. When I was a child, I used to love reading encyclopedias.

And so I bought a lot of encyclopedias. Dorling Kindersley at DK is a publisher that produces these incredible encyclopedias. Fill your home with encyclopedias. Your children will read them if they're readers. And so you're getting the best access to scientific information, historical information, all the stuff. And your children will go again and again and read those again and again and again, following their interests.

So you're not going to get something better that you can spend your money on that will improve your children's outcomes, academics, test scores, etc. than books. Get good lists, buy good books, always buy your children the best books that you can afford. Fill your home with them and then give them ample time to read them.

Why am I so passionate about the idea of investing in your children when they're young? It's because there's a whole bunch of parents that start to freak out when their 9th grader gets bad test scores. And they'll go out and they'll spend $30 an hour, $40 an hour, or more to try to bring in a tutor.

And that tutor has dozens and dozens and dozens and dozens and dozens of hours to put in to try to make up for where the child is behind. There should be no need for it. You should be able to hand your child a book and say, "This book has the information you need for what you're struggling with." But if your child is not a reader, that's going to fail.

So put in the investment when your children are young and make sure that they become skilled, fluent, competent readers who love to read and who read very widely. And you will never have a need to pay for a tutor. You'll have a child who is at the top of his class in academics.

You'll have a child who you never need to pay for a tutor because you did the hard work in the early years. If you want to develop your child's brain, your child needs words. Those words should be heard and those words should be read. And the child who has huge portions of his life dedicated to listening to the best words, the most beautifully presented words, the most advanced and appropriate words, and who reads those for years and years and years, will have the most highly developed mind among his peers.

But what's more important than that, will have established the foundation for what he needs to go on and be impactful as an adult. Consider how you can use these very simple techniques to help your children have more words. Technique one, reading aloud. Get a book list, get books. Read to your child, set a target of two hours a day.

Remember that as with most things, the numbers that are used by people are laughable. I read this, I saved this infographic a number of years ago, came across, and here it is by Scholastic. And here's what the infographic or the little chart says. Here's the impact of reading 20 minutes per day.

It says, "A student who reads one minute per day will be exposed to 8,000 words per year and is more likely to score in the 10th percentile on standardized tests. A student who reads five minutes per day will be exposed to 282,000 words per year and is more likely to score in the 50th percentile on standardized tests.

A student who reads 20 minutes per day will be exposed to 1.8 million words per year and is more likely to score in the 90th percentile on standardized tests." So reading 20 minutes per day puts your child with a high likelihood of being in the 90th percentile. Reading 20 minutes per day, friend, is laughable, or to use the literary term, risible, right?

It's risible. It's utterly, it's absurd. If reading 20 minutes per day makes it likely that your child will be in the 90th percentile of academic outcomes, what does reading two hours a day do? What does reading five hours a day do? What does reading six or eight hours a day do?

There's an element where we need to be careful about age appropriateness, but I think for most school-age children, say, third grade and on, the norm should be about five to eight hours a day of total reading divided up, as I have described it, with reading aloud, audiobooks, and then personalized reading.

If you do two hours a day of reading aloud plus one to two hours a day of personal audiobook listening, let's just call it two hours a day for easy math, plus about four to five hours a day of focused academics, let's call it eight hours a day, that's actually not that much in terms of children having lots of time to play, lots of time to move, etc.

Lots of times to do all kinds of other stuff. In some cases there'll be free reading on top of that, but let's just assume an average reading speed of 8,000 words per hour, about the rate of normal verbal spoken, right? Of course, a child who's a skilled reader will be reading far faster than that when reading silently, but assume 8,000 words per hour times eight hours per day is 64,000 words per day of reading.

That seems pretty normal to me. Probably to most homeschoolers I know, I would say that's pretty normal, right? Four hours of academics. Maybe we should dial it back because at least an hour or two of that academics is going to be math, which isn't reading words. So let's just cut it back to 48,000 words per day, okay?

48,000 words per day and let's say that that happens 300 days per year, that's 14.4 million words. Compare that to the scholastic chart of a child reading 1.8 million words and you can quickly see the difference. Reading 10 to 20 million words a year is probably a pretty average year for, I think, most average children who are given the freedom, the books, the encouragement, the example.

Children have people read to them, all these preconditions, but this seems pretty normal to me. I want to add one more technique if you're working to help your child be a skilled reader. Don't, or be quick to use the benefit of your child listening to an audiobook of the exact book that he's reading so he can hear someone read it to him while he's reading with his eyes.

This is a technique that I figured out as being exceedingly useful in foreign language acquisition and my seven-year-old, my seven-year-old daughter was having some trouble learning to read. There was a time where my wife and I were focusing a lot, say, "Okay, is she dyslexic? What's going on here?" Etc.

And since then we've made a lot of progress, but we were really focusing on, she was slower to read, what was going on, what was happening. And we made good progress, just continued to work with her, and again, people develop at their own stage. She still flips a lot of stuff.

I don't know if she's dyslexic or not. I don't think she is, but it's not severe like some parents struggle with. But one of the techniques that I've watched that was so powerful was this technique of listening to books while having them read to you. And this is a skill that you can help your child to do much larger amounts of reading, but to be helped along.

Again, I've experienced this myself and realized how helpful it is. I've been talking to my wife a lot. I was like, "We should use this more just in our own language," and we do use it a lot now. If a child is struggling with a difficult book that is advanced, add in an audiobook and have the child listen to the audiobook while reading with his eyes.

And that will help the child to become a skillful reader. My experience has been this. There's a stage at which reading is a lot of work, and you just want to make it simple with lots and lots of easy reading stacked up, lots of easy reading. Then reading becomes doable, but it's still a lot of work.

Audiobooks help the child to pass over that hurdle, listening while reading. And then there comes a stage where the reading is so effortless that the audiobooks annoy the student because they're too slow. So at that point, dump the audiobooks and just allow the book to shine itself. If you want to develop your children's minds to their highest potential capacity, you want your children to be smart.

There is no substitute for there being very strong readers. Your best possible investment is to make sure that your children are good readers and love to read. The way you do that, read to them a lot. Aim for two hours a day, add audiobooks whenever possible of the highest quality books.

Let them see you reading. Help them with a phonics instruction program, appropriate. Help them with lots and lots of readers, lots and lots of practice, and then make sure they have lots of books surrounding them and lots of time to read those books. And if you do that, you will never need to pay for college.

You will never need to pay for expensive tutors. A few thousand dollars spent early in the child's life will save you hundreds of thousands of dollars later in life. Thank you for listening. Be back with you very soon.