Bedtime stories: Truth is stranger than fiction

Research findings support that reading bedtime stories won’t make your kids smarter.

NEW YORK: Reading bedtime stories is a positive way to interact with your kids, but it would not influence children’s intelligence later in life, said a research. The findings support the argument that intelligence is passed down from parent to children genetically, not socially.

“The way you parent a child is not going to have a detectable effect on their IQ as long as that parenting is within normal bounds,” said researcher Kevin Beaver, professor at Florida State University in the US. “Previous research that has detected parenting-related behaviours affect intelligence is perhaps incorrect because it has not taken into account genetic transmission,” Beaver pointed out.

The researcher examined a nationally representative sample of youth alongside a sample of adopted children from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. The study analysed parenting behaviours and whether they had an effect on verbal intelligence as measured by the Picture Vocabulary Test.

The IQ tests were administered to middle and high school students, and again when they were between the ages of 18 and 26. “We found there was no association between parenting and the child’s intelligence later in life once we accounted for genetic influences,” Beaver stressed. The study appeared in the journal Intelligence. 

Published in The Express Tribune, November 3^rd, 2014.

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