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SALT LAKE CITY -- If you want your children to be smart, look around your house. The more books you have, the more likely they are to go to school longer.
Children with as few as 25 books in the family household completed on average two more years of schooling than children raised in homes without any books. -Research in Social Stratification and Mobility
A child growing up in a house with even just 25 books will get, on average, two more years of schooling than a child with no books. Five hundred books or more is equivalent to having university-educated parents.
The King's English bookstore manager Margaret Brennan Neville asks, "Do you have a couple of cool picture or large coffee books that look at a different place or a different idea? Do you have books that you are reading? Do you have the newspaper? And then, the big leap, do you have books that the child will want to pick up and look at?"
She says it's great to go to the library, but book ownership is key, too. "How powerful is it that a child owns their own books too and can write their own names in them?"
Another study found that giving kids 12 of their own books at the beginning of the summer vacation was as effective as summer school in preventing the summer slide.
E-mail: mrichards@ksl.com
