It’s axiomatic that reading to young children is A Good Thing. But how do we determine how often parents do this? One technique is to simply ask them. Here are the results of a few studies that did this:
- A Pew Research Center study suggests that “half of all parents with children under 12 (50%) say they read to their child every day and an additional 26% do so a few times a week.”
- A series of National Household Education Surveys Program surveys indicate that between 80 and 85 percent of 3-5 year olds were read to at least three times in the past week. The total number of “reading sessions” per week was 6.82, with an average duration of 15.72 minutes.
- A ReadAloud/YouGov survey reports the percentages of parents who read to their children every day: 51% (for 0-2 year olds) and 41% (for 3-5 year olds).
There’s one problem with each of these surveys. They all ask variations of the same question, “how often do you read to your child?”. Given that everyone knows you’re supposed to read to young children, this is basically asking “are you a good parent?” (just one more thing for parents to feel guilty about). It’s easy to see that questions like this might not get the most accurate answer. It’s like when your dental hygienist asks you how often you floss – you might give an aspirational answer, instead of the truth. These types of surveys test your “normative behavior” – how well you meet societal expectations. Studies indicate that survey questions like this are interpreted by the respondents to be about their identity. Internally, the question is transformed from “what I do” to “who I am”, and the appropriate answer is given. Socially-desirable activities are exaggerated, often by 100%.
The American Time Use Study avoids this problem. It doesn’t ask people leading questions like “did you read to your kids?”. Instead, it uses a careful, conversational technique to extract the full set of activities done the previous day (these are live phone interviews; the respondent is informed days in advance which day the survey will cover). A summary of the technique:
For the time-use diary, the interviewer uses conversational interviewing rather than asking scripted questions. This is a flexible interviewing technique designed to allow the respondent to report on his or her activities comfortably and accurately. This technique also allows interviewers to use methods to guide respondents through memory lapses, to probe in a non-leading way for the level of detail required to code activities, and to redirect respondents who are providing unnecessary information….The interviewers are trained to ensure respondents report activities (and activity durations) actually done on the previous (diary) day, not activities done on a “usual” day.
The ATUS makes an effort to gather all of the activities someone performed, without asking leading questions.
(Side note: the ATUS study participants are not tracked over time. They are surveyed for a random day, and not surveyed again that year. Other random participants are surveyed on other random days).
So, what does the ATUS say about reading to children? There’s a specific activity “Reading to/with household children”. For parents of children age 1 to 5, 16.1% report doing this activity on a given day. Does that mean the children are only being read to 16% of the time? Not precisely. In a two-parent household, if the parents “divided up” the child-reading activity so that one parent does it one day and the other does it the next, you can double that rate. So it could be as high as 32%. Since the ATUS doesn’t survey households, just individuals, we can’t be sure what the real number is. But we can say that it lies somewhere between 16 and 32 percent.
How does this compare to the surveys I listed earlier?
- The Pew study said 50% read every day, 26% read a “few days a week”, and 10% read once a week. For estimate’s sake, I’ll say that “a few days a week” means “3”. Doing the math, the study says that kids are read to 4.4 days out of 7, or 62% of the time.
- The NHESP survey says children were read to 6.82 times per week. This includes when there are multiple reading sessions per day, so the actual number of days per week is lower. A rough estimation lowers the number to 5.5 days per week, or 79%.
- The ReadAloud survey says 41% of 3-5 year olds are read to every day. It doesn’t have percentages for other frequencies, but if I assume they are similar to the Pew study, the frequency comes out to 56%.
Summarizing, when you ask parents how often they read to their kids, the answers range from 56% to 79% of days, with an average of 66%. But according to the ATUS surveys, which avoid the leading questions of the other surveys, children are being read to no more than 32 percent of days. Looks like parents are roughly doubling their answers.
There’s one more check we can do: calculate the total reading-to-child time per week. The NHESP reports both the number of reading sessions (6.82 per week) and their average length (15.72 minutes). Multiple these together and you get 107 minutes of reading per week. The ATUS survey also reports the average time of reading sessions (29.11 minutes). Adjusting the number of reading session for the frequency of two-parent vs. single-parent households, we end up with 67 minutes of reading per week. 67 (ATUS) vs. 107 (self-reported) means that parents are overstating reality by 60%.
The moral of this story is: be careful of surveys that ask people to self-report specific activities, when said activities are socially desirable (or, socially undesirable).
