by Emily Oster
Other studies that try to carefully match families who spank to those who do not on some characteristics (income, education) similarly find spanking results in worse behavior problems.7 Review articles on this topic similarly find small, but persistent, negative impacts on behavior.8 There is some literature that even argues that spanking is associated with very long-term problems—alcohol abuse, suicide attempts—although it is very hard to argue this convincingly, given the other differences in family background for children who were spanked versus those who were not.9
There is correspondingly no evidence that spanking improves behavior. The same goes for other forms of physical punishment, which show evidence of negative impacts and no evidence of positive impacts.
Kids can be frustrating and, yes, they do need to be punished sometimes. But this punishment should be part of a system of discipline that aims to teach them how to be productive adults. Learning that if you misbehave you’ll lose some privileges or some fun experience is something that will serve you well as an adult. Kids do not need to learn that if you misbehave, a stronger person will hit you.
The Bottom Line
There are a variety of programs that have been shown to improve children’s behavior. These focus on consistent rewards and punishments, and avoiding parental anger.
Examples include 1-2-3 Magic and the Incredible Years, among others.
Spanking has not been shown to improve behavior and, indeed, has been associated with worse behavior in the short term and even through adulthood.
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Education
When Finn was two he started going to preschool near where we live in Providence. It was a great place, with loving teachers and all kinds of fun stuff—a lady who spoke Spanish with puppets, an outdoor play area, “Story Time with Miss Suzanne.” The school had a wonderful curriculum, one that focused on learning to share, interacting with other children, and developing a love of books. What it did not feature were classes in social studies.
Shortly before he turned three, we went on a brief sabbatical to California, where we enrolled him in a different preschool. It was also very nice, and Finn will be happy anywhere where there is a pretend kitchen, so it worked for him. But in contrast to Providence, this school seemed to be making an effort to at least pretend the two-year-olds were enrolled in a classroom for much older children. For example, they adopted an outer-space theme. The end-of-the-day message encouraged us to ask Finn, “Where do rockets go?” (Answer: “Outer space!”)
With a six-month-old, trying to teach them facts about the world—or anything about letters or numbers, for example—will seem obviously fruitless. With a five-year-old, it’s clearly not. At early school age, most kids are able to learn letters, some simple reading, and some math. There remains debate, which I won’t get into here, about whether there is too much learning in kindergarten and whether we should be more like Finland and not teach kids to read until seven. However, if you do want to teach a five-year-old these things, you can often make some progress.
But what about a two- or three-year-old? Are there ways to set them up for academic success at this age? Is this my child’s window of opportunity to learn where rockets go? If they don’t, will they be behind all the children who did learn that?
These questions are really the purview of developmental psychologists, and there are some excellent books on child brain development that will do a much more comprehensive job than I can do here. What’s Going On in There?, for example, is a great primer on how the baby and toddler brain develops. Here I’m going to focus on a limited set of questions.
First, you might have noticed that there is a lot of focus on the benefits of reading to your child. In Rhode Island, for example, the state actually gives you a new book at each well-child visit in an effort to promote reading. Tennessee sends kids a book each month (thanks to an effort spearheaded by Dolly Parton). Why do they do this, and is there any evidence that it works?
Second, beyond just reading to them, should you actively try to teach your child letters or numbers at this age? Can a two- or three-year-old actually learn to read on their own?
Finally, to the extent that your child does go to preschool in this age range, does it matter what kind of preschool it is? We’ve already been over the importance of quality in the chapter on day care, but beyond having loving teachers and a safe environment, should you care about the philosophy of the program, or even whether it has one?
READING TO YOUR CHILD
We can begin with a well-established fact. There is a large body of literature showing that children whose parents read to them as babies and preschoolers have better performance on reading tests later.1 However, one should have significant concerns that this relationship is just a correlation, not a causal link. As we know, there are a host of factors that influence reading readiness. One of those factors is having more resources. If you’re struggling to make ends meet and working two jobs, you may not have time to read to your children. Kids in this situation may also be disadvantaged in other ways.
One good way to learn something more convincing would be a randomized trial. For example, beginning with a sample of people who, perhaps, do not plan to read much to their child, you can encourage half of them to read to their child more. There are only a few small interventions of this type, most of which do not follow children long enough to evaluate impacts on test scores.2
One recent example is a study that used a video information program with parents to encourage “positive parenting”—specifically, reading aloud and playing—when the kids were infants to age three.3 The authors found improvements in behavior among children whose parents watched the video, providing some suggestive evidence of the role of reading in behavior. But the data doesn’t (yet) extend to school age, so we don’t know the long-term effects.
In the absence of randomized evidence, researchers have tried to learn about this with other types of data. A published paper in Child Development in 2018 tried to use within-family variation to study this question.4 Their basic insight was that if you have only one child, you read more to them (since you have more time). The longer you wait to have a second child, the more extra reading time the first child gets. Their idea was to compare achievement across first children with varying lengths of time before the second child arrived.
Of course, you should worry that the choice of when to have a second child is not random—this is true—but the authors have a few strategies to try to get around this, notably comparing women who intended to have a child at the same time but differed in when it happened.
The results show large positive impacts of reading on children’s achievement. Children who are read to more as young children achieve greater reading success in school. One concern is that these kids just generally get more attention; this is a possibility, but the effects do not extend to math, so the authors argued that it does seem to be something about reading in particular.
There is also some neat new evidence from brain scans that help us think a bit about the cognitive effects of reading to children. In one example, researchers took nineteen children aged three to five and put them in a functional MRI (fMRI) machine.5 In general, fMRI studies are designed to use the technology to look at which parts of the brain light up (i.e., are activated/in use) when some stimulus is provided.
In this particular study, the kids were put in the fMRI machine and then were read stories. What the researchers found was that children who were read to more at home showed more brain activation in the areas of the brain thought to be responsible for narrative processing and imagery. Basically, it looked like kids who were read to more were processing the story more effectively. How this links to later reading is unclear, and the study was small (fMRI scans are really expensive to run). Nevertheless, it provides some further evidence on the mechanisms that might drive effects.
This all sugg
ests that reading to your child is probably a good idea. This literature goes further and actually provides some guidance on how to read to your child. In particular, researchers have found that the benefits are bigger with more interactive reading.6 Rather than just reading a book, kids benefit from being asked open-ended questions:
“Where do you think the bird’s mother is?”
“Do you think it hurts Pop when the kids hop on him?”
“How do you think the Cat in the Hat is feeling now?”
LEARNING TO READ
Reading to your child is one thing. Asking them questions is definitely something you can do. But should you go further? Should you actually try to teach your preschooler to read? Is it even possible?
Some people would say yes.
There is, for example, the Teach Your Baby to Read system,7 which promises that you can teach your baby to read starting at around three months. You use an expensive system of flash cards and DVDs to accomplish this goal. If you doubt the success, the website suggests, just search YouTube for “baby reading,” and you’ll see that it is possible!
The last chapter made clear that your baby cannot learn from DVDs. It is perhaps not surprising to learn, then, that this system—which relies heavily on video—also cannot teach your child to read. Randomized evaluations using children aged nine to eighteen months show no impact of these media systems on babies’ ability to read.8 The researchers noted that this lack of success is despite parents saying that the system is very successful, suggesting that it is easy to trick yourself into thinking your child can read at a year old.
In conclusion, your baby cannot read.
On the other hand, we know that some children aged four to five can read, and studies that focus on this age group show, for example, that it is possible to actively teach four-year-olds letter sounds and the idea of blending them into words.9 If you are inclined to teach your four-year-old to read, you can probably make some progress. There is a separate question of whether you want to, but that is more a parenting choice than a question for the data.
A two- or three-year-old, though . . . They are not a baby, but they are not a five-year-old. Your just-three-year-old can talk and, sometimes, understand what you are asking him to do. It seems plausible, but not certain, that he could learn to read.
The truth is that there is not much literature on extremely early reading. There are some examples—case reports—of children who learn to read fluently at very young ages—two and a half, early three.10 The children in these reports have prodigy-level reading. They are not just reading “Mat sat” at three—they are reading at a third-grade level. And in most of these cases, it is clear the child more or less just picked up reading on their own. Their parents were not sitting and teaching them to sound out C-A-R.
Children who learn to read like this—and this is also true of kids who learn to read early within the normal range—are more likely to learn with sight words than phonics. They tend to have a larger share of their reading involve recognition rather than sounding out. Interestingly, early readers are not necessarily good spellers.
It should be said that some cases of this prodigious early reading are associated with autism. Hyperlexia (as it is called) is a trait of some high-functioning autistic children; children can read but do not understand.11
What there simply isn’t evidence on is whether you can teach a two- or three-year-old the letter sounds and some early phonics. If you try to engage in the same approach you’d take with a four-year-old, will it work? The data doesn’t have an answer. Anecdotally (I know, I know—no anecdotes), you do see kids this age who know their letter sounds, but rarely ones who read full books on their own. If you want your child to know that S says “Ssssss,” you can probably do that. They’re likely not going to be reading Harry Potter, though.
TYPES OF PRESCHOOL
At some point, around the age of two or three, you may start thinking of childcare as closer to “school.” If your child is home with a parent or nanny, this is an age at which people often explore part-time “preschool” options, designed (in general) to increase socialization, and possibly to start teaching school-type skills. If your child is in day care, their older classrooms will often be a more structured form of school.
Let’s ask the first question: Is it a good idea to put your child in preschool?
We can look for some evidence on this by thinking back to the chapter on day care. The evidence I discussed there showed that more time in day care after eighteen months or so was associated with better language and literacy development at slightly later ages. This is about the best evidence we have that preschool might be a good idea.
There is also evidence from small and much older randomized trials suggesting that programs like Head Start improve school readiness. But these tend to focus on enrollment at older ages—say, four—and on especially disadvantaged populations.
Putting this together, it again probably depends on the other options for your child during the day, but I’d say the weight of the evidence is that some preschool environment around age two or three will, on average, improve the ease with which they transition to school.
Having decided you want to try some preschool, the question is then, which one? Again, we can hark back to the day care chapter. Day care and preschool at this age are distinguishable largely by the length of time: people tend to think of “preschool” as a half-day activity and “day care” as an all-day activity. Still, if you look at many day-care programs at this age, they tend to have a more preschool-like morning session and then a nap-and-play afternoon session.
This means that many of the “quality” measures we discussed in the day care section apply here, too—is the area safe, do the adults seem engaged, etc.
When we start to talk about preschools, people do begin to ask questions like, Is it important that the teachers be trained in early childhood development? Or, going further, does it matter where they trained? We simply do not have reasonable evidence on this. Preschool teachers vary in quality—you can see this in any preschool you go to—but the data simply is not sufficient to tell us to look for something like quality of teacher training.
A related question is whether you should favor one preschool “philosophy” over others. The three philosophies you will most commonly encounter in your preschool exploration are Montessori, Reggio Emilia, and Waldorf.
Montessori education focuses on a particular classroom structure and a set of materials. There is an emphasis—even in young children—on the development of fine motor skills. These schools generally refer to children’s play as “works.” Young children are typically exposed to letters and numbers and writing them in sand, counting blocks, and so on.
Reggio Emilia–inspired schools put more emphasis on play, with typically little formal letter or number exposure at preschool ages. (One Reggio Emilia–style preschool I visited told me they explicitly do not spend any time on letters for the three- and four-year-old class, and wouldn’t even display letter cards around the room. This seemed a little extreme.)
The Waldorf schools have a heavy outdoor component and, similar to Reggio Emilia, are largely play-based. The Waldorf principles focus on learning through play and art, and tend to also have some domestic-activity component (cooking, baking, gardening).
All three methods have a structured day, so kids know what to expect when. They all acknowledge that young kids benefit from being able to explore in a safe environment and to self-direct, to some extent, in what they do.
I cannot do justice here to the full philosophy in each. Many books have been written on these methods, and implementation varies significantly across individual schools. Montessori is most consistent—if you visit a bunch of Montessori classrooms, as I did on a whirlwind cross-country job search when Penelope was three, you’ll find some strong similarities in the materials they use and the structure of the day. Howe
ver, there are still wide differences, probably having mostly to do with the inclinations and skills of the staff. You’ll find many schools describing themselves as “Reggio Emilia–inspired,” which could mean strongly inspired or loosely inspired or just a teeny bit inspired.
And, of course, not all preschools will have one of these particular philosophies. A lot of preschools may pull lessons from one or the other of these groups, but do not strictly adhere to all their approaches. And many preschools also have a religious connection or affiliation, which will affect their curriculum.
Is one of these better than the others? There are clearly quality differences across preschools, but this isn’t the same as saying that one philosophy dominates.
Unfortunately, there is again really not much evidence on this—especially not of the type that would be relevant to people who are already thinking carefully about the optimal preschool philosophy. To the extent that there is any evidence at all, it’s mostly on Montessori education, since this is a popular and established approach.
There are some studies showing the children in Montessori preschools perform better on reading and math tests compared to a control group in non-Montessori options.12 But many of the papers on this are very old, and it’s not clear that early learning of reading and math skills are the main goals of preschool education.
Indeed, the non-Montessori approaches often emphasize the importance of play and argue that early literacy is not an important outcome. Proponents of this argument will often point to Finland, where (famously) most children attend a state-run kindergarten that does not attempt to teach reading fluency. Kids learn to read starting in first grade (although, realistically, some of them do read before that). These proponents will also commonly note that Finland performs very well on international standardized tests—much better than the US—and argue that this means we may put too much emphasis on the value of early literacy.
