The catastrophic abstinence from reading among children in Germany

It is perhaps the most catastrophic news in recent years - more worrying than all the election results, warnings about AI and the threats of extinction that mad rulers are making to enemy nations. A third of all children in Germany are never read to. Middle-aged people who are not interested in books and have children pass on their own alienation from reading to their children. With disastrous consequences.

Because there is no doubt that the increasingly poor Pisa results also have something to do with parents' abstinence from reading. The Reading Foundation quotes the expert Jörg F. Maas: "The current PISA results will not improve if we only look at educational institutions. If you want to strengthen children, you have to reach them early - long before they start school. Above all, we need incentives and support for parents to read to their children every day. Reading aloud for 10 minutes a day must be part of normal everyday life, like brushing your teeth every day and parents need to know that."

In conditions that learning researchers call a “rich stimulation environment”, the following applies: by the age of four, children hear 45 million words, while those from less educated backgrounds only hear 15 million or fewer. And basically everything will be decided in these four years. Children who miss out during this time find it more difficult to learn to read later in primary school and are also less able to make use of the many opportunities in all-day schools for educational stimulation outside of class than children with larger vocabularies. Only a few of them ever make up for the deficits that they carry with them from their barren “stimulation environment”.

But it's not just long-term educational goals that speak in favor of reading aloud. In a typical situation, when the children cuddle up to their father or mother on either side, an intimacy arises almost like breastfeeding. Children love it, and the memory of such situations resonates into adulthood. The tattered old fairy tale book that 40-year-olds find somewhere in a junk room in their parents' house triggers feelings like a cuddly toy that has otherwise appeared.

But reading aloud also creates precious moments and memories for parents. I remember few things from my time with my three children as happily as the time spent reading to them. Okay, the infamous Bobo Dormouse, which started when I was a toddler, sometimes drove me crazy with its simplicity.

But Simpel-Bobo also helped prepare the children for the really great reads that came later: Grimm's fairy tales, Astrid Lindgren, the Hedvig novels by Frida Nilsson, "Little Nick". One of our greatest family moments was laughing together at the Nick story “Dad decides for us”, which is about the fact that in reality it is always the mother who decides. My ex-wife, I, and our three children, all of different ages, thought it was weird for very different reasons, which made it even weirder. A decade later, I still remember that brief moment. If you never read aloud, you will never have the chance of such happiness.