Fill Your Home With Books This New Year

I always knew it was alright to fill my home with books, but now that fact has been confirmed. I recently read in the New York Times that just the presence of books in the home can make children smarter. In  fact,  having physical objects like stacks of CDs, crates of records, shelves of books, and tables of magazines and newspapers are a real boon for children's emotional development.

The most convincing study was published in the sociology journal, Social Forces, in 2014. Researchers measured the impact of the size of home libraries on the reading level of fifteeen-year-old students across 42 nations, controlling for wealth, parents' education and occupations, gender and the country's GNP. They found that after GNP, the quantity of books in one's home was the most important predictor of reading performance. This does not include digital books of any sort - just physical books. The researchers said: "The implications are clear: owning books in your home is one of the best things you can do for your children academically." Just seeing books on the shelves in their home helps children develop an understanding of the world and what the life of the mind includes, according to this study.

The New York Times article goes on to say that parents are models for their children when they see their father poring over the newspaper in the morning or their mother quietly reading a book in the evening. In my home, we get three actual newspapers delivered to our home each morning and we have stacks of books siting everywhere. I always felt slightly guilty about the clutter, but now I will embrace the chaos of reading material in my home for the intelligence it passively imparts. This article said that physical artifacts rather than file names on a device force one to "examine each object slowly." Furthermore, "seeing a parent's dog-earned book is a sign of a mind at work and of the personal significance of that volume."

I hope that in this new year, you will resolve to add to your book and music collection by buying actual books and CDs. It's important to surround yourself with those physical artifacts. The New York Times says so. And so do I. Happy reading in 2016!