060: What do children learn from reading books?

We’ve done a couple of episodes on reading by now; episode 3 (which seems so long ago!) asked whether you might have missed the boat on teaching your toddler to read.  Of course, we know that you’ve only missed the boat on that if you think that sitting your child in front of a video so they can recite the words they see without really understanding them counts as “reading.” Much more recently in episode 48 we talked with Dr. Laura Froyen about the benefits of shared reading with your child and how to do that according to best practices from the research literature. Those of you who subscribe to my newsletter will recall that I’ve been working on an episode on storytelling for months now.  Part of the reason it’s taking so long is that books on storytelling technique say to use original stories wherever possible because the language in them is so much richer, but if you’ve ever read something like an original fairytale you know they can be pretty gory, and even the most harmless ones actually contain some pretty adult themes if you read between the lines. So I wanted to know: what do children really learn from stories?  How do they figure out that we want them to learn morals from stories but not that animal characters walk on two legs and wear clothes?  How do they generalize that knowledge to the real world?  And are there specific types of books that promote learning? Join me in a conversation with Dr. Deena Weisberg of The University of Pennsylvania as she helps us to help our children learn through reading!   Other shows mentioned in this episode 003: Did you miss the boat on teaching your child how to read? 010: Becoming Brilliant 048: The benefits of shared reading   References Cheung, C.S., Monroy, J.A., & Delany, D.E. (2017). Learning-related values in young children’s storybooks: An investigation in the United States, China, and Mexico. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology 48(4), 532-541. Ganea, P.A., Ma, L., & DeLoache, J.S. (2011). Young children’s learning and transfer of biological information from picture books to real animals. Child Development 82(5), 1421-1433. Heath, S.B. (1982). What no bedtime story means: Narrative skills at home and school. Language in Society 11(1), 49-76. Hopkins, E.J., & Weisberg, D.S. (2017). The youngest readers’ dilemma: A review of children’s learning from fictional sources. Developmental Review 43, 48-70. Ostrov, J.M., Gentile, D.A., & Mullins, A.D. (2013). Evaluating the effect of educational media exposure on aggression in early childhood. Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology 34, 38-44. Read, K., Macauley, M., & Furay, E. (2014). The Seuss boost: Rhyme helps children retain words from shared storybook reading. First Language 34(4), 354-371.   Read Full Transcript   Transcript Jen:   [00:38] Hi, this is Jen. Before we start on today’s episode, I just wanted to take a minute to let you know that as part of my research for this episode on what children learn through reading fictional books, I ended up looking at a lot of different kinds of books for children aged roughly between toddlerhood and elementary school, and I compiled them into a list of more than 100 books that you can use to support your children’s learning on a host of subjects related to math, science, empathy, being persistent in the face of failure, multicultural issues, and many other topics as well. If you already subscribed to the show and my website, then you actually already got the list with your newsletter from last week. Unfortunately, subscribing through itunes or other platforms doesn’t count because I don’t get any information from them on how to reach you, so if you don’t already subscribe or if you’re subscribed through another platform, then head on over to YourParentingMojo.com forward slash reading books and sign up on that page and then the report will be emailed right to you. Thanks again for listening and enjoy the interview with Dr Deena Weisberg. Jen:   [01:38] Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. We’ve done a couple episodes on reading by now. Episode three, which seems so long ago, was one where we asked whether you might have missed the boat on teaching your toddler to read. Of course, we know you’ve only missed the boat on that if you think that sitting your child in front of a video so they can recite the words they see without really understanding them counts as reading much more recently in episode 48, we talked with Dr Laura Frye and about the benefits of shared reading with your child and how to do that according to best practices from the research literature I’ve mentioned to those of you who subscribe to my newsletter that I had been working on an episode related to storytelling for a while as in telling stories without books and also making up stories, but I realized I needed a bridge from where we’ve been to where we want to go. Jen:    [02:23] I wanted to know more about what children learn from the stories we read to them, and boy, do we have someone who can help us with that today. We’re here with Dr. Deena Weisberg, a senior fellow in the Department of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. Dr Weisberg earned her PhD in Psychology from Yale University and in her postdoc work at Rutgers University and also at Temple with Dr Roberta Golinkoff, with whom we spoke in episode 10 on her book becoming brilliant when I started researching what children learn from reading, I found an absolutely epic paper that Dr Weisberg co-authored with five pages of references in tiny text that describes and how children learn from reading fiction, so I knew we’d found the right person to speak with us. She’s also the parent of a five year old and an 18 month old, and has gamely agreed to talk with us today even though her nanny called in sick, so she’s in the thick of this parenting thing with us as well. Welcome Dr Weisberg. Dr. Weisberg:   [03:15] Thank you so much, Jen. It’s really a pleasure to be here and talk with you this afternoon. Jen: [03:19] So it wasn’t until I started reading your paper that I realized what a really weird and strange thing it is that we ask of children. We read fiction to them and particularly fiction with some kind of message that we want them to internalize. And in your paper, you give the example of, I hope I’m saying this correctly, the Berenstain Bears visit to the dentist, which we assume is designed to help young children understand and get comfortable with what happens when they go to the dentist, but somehow we don’t want the children to retain the ideas that were bears wear clothes, live in houses, and speak like people. So how do children sort out these ideas when we read these stories or do they fully sort them out? Dr. Weisberg: [03:57] It’s a really interesting set of questions. And the first thing I want to point out is that it’s not just children that have this problem. So one of the things that fascinates me about this area of research is that this is something that we all do from very little children way on up to us grown people have the same problem. It’s called the reader’s dilemma is what you just described. It’s the idea of how do you sort out which parts of a fictional story need to remain nearly fictional within that fictional world in which parts of the story can fruitfully be applied to the real world. So I just want to start by pointing out that that’s not a problem that goes away. So it is a problem that we get…well in some cases we get better at solving. There’s some very famous cases and people making these sorts of confusions right up through adulthood that I enjoy talking about. Dr. Weisberg: [04:44] But in terms of children, there are really two main ways that children learn how to sort through this readers dilemma. One is that they use their existing...