Not to pop the balloon, but its rather interesting how unimportant books are for children. (hear me out, it sounds crazy, and I used to believe it).
In the book freakanomics, they analyzed the behaviors of successful people and what they did for their children. Particularly, reading to them each night, going to museums, the theater, opera, and other culturally enriching activities. The stats panned out that it didn't make one drop of difference whatsoever in any of those cases, particularly with reading.
What was the deciding factor was rather astounding: Homes that contained hundreds of books resulted in children that performed better and succeeded more across their lifetimes, even controlling for parental wealth. It appears that the correlation and inference that defines parents that own many books is a greater predictor of outcomes than the parents that read to their kids and pushed cultural experiences on them.
The author's conjecture and one I completely agree with is this hypothesis: Owning piles of books correlates with intellectual curiosity, and whatever lightning in a bottle that creates rubs off on kids, even if they don't open up and read any of the 10,000 volumes on the shelves of the home library.
We spend a ton of time over here discussing world religion, culture, geography, history, and the last 2500 years of politics. We also cook extensively at home and even that view into culture creates a lot of discussion. In our own naive bubble, we assumed what we discuss and do in our own home is common amongst middle class and better intact families, but it isn't.
I'll never forget being on a roadtrip with one of my kids and one of his friends. We were talking about Chernobyl, the HBO movie, RBMK reactors, Ukrainian politics, and all the other interesting points called out in the miniseries. About 20 minutes into a pretty enthusiastic conversation between me and my son, his friend said "my head hurts, I don't want to talk about this stuff anymore". The remaining hour consisted of discussing video games and other drivel. That was my a-ha moment, those kids aren't operating from the same curiosity about the world, even though by irony the other kid was a prolific reader by any measure.
