- Neurological development, educational success, social aptitude, the benefits of early reading are well-known.
- A new study finds that print books offer better communication and bonding opportunities for parents and their toddlers.
- While more Americans read print books than ebooks, they still don't make reading a priority outside of work and school.
Look into any toddler's room. Some are decked out in home-team banners and sports paraphernalia, others in dinosaurs and star charts. What you're seeing is less an extension of that toddler's burgeoning personality, but more an alter to the parent's dreams for that child's future. But if there is one thing every toddler's room needs, it's a bookshelf overstuff with colorful spines, big-eyed characters, and dulcet rhymes.
The benefits of early reading are well-known. Reading assists in neurological development. It transmits a love of learning and promotes early academic success (setting the stage for later academic success). It helps maturate positive psychological traits such creativity, confidence, and empathy.
Tech-savvy parents looking to cutback the clutter and shrink that bookshelf into tablet form may want to reconsider. A study recently published in Pediatrics has found that toddlers interact more with print books than ebooks, and those print books will need somewhere to stay.
Analyzing the art of the read
The study's objective was to see if parents and toddlers interacted differently while reading books in various formats. They gathered 37 parent-toddler pairs and had the parents read stories from the Little Critter series in back-to-back sessions, setting a 5-minute time limit for each.
They used a different format for each session: a print book, a basic ebook, and an enhanced ebook (one that comes with music, sound effects, and animated characters). The researchers recorded the sessions to observe the interactions between parent and toddler. These could include discussing the story, asking questions, collaborative reading, positive directions, and negative directions.
The old, gold standard
The study found that print books made the reading experience more collaborative for toddler and parent. Photo credit: Daria Shevtsova / Pexels
The results suggest that toddlers are most engaged when reading a print book. They employed more book-related verbalizations and collaborated more in the process. This goes for parents, too. The adults engaged in more dialogue, asked more questions, and showed greater signs of bonding and sharing the experience with their child.
"The print book is really the gold standard in eliciting positive interactions between parents and their children," Dr. Tiffany Munzer, the study's first author and a fellow in developmental behavioral pediatrics at the University of Michigan C.S. Mott Children's Hospital, told ABC News. "Parents know their children well and have to make it come alive for their child to create that magic."
Such positive interactions were less frequent with ebooks. However, ebook did show more collaboration in format-specific directions — as in, "You have to swipe it like this" or "No, don't touch that button." In other words, the device itself became an impediment to developing a natural rhythm of learning and relationship.
Perri Klass, a pediatrician who co-wrote the study's accompanying commentary, notes that earlier research has suggested ebook enhancements are disadvantageous for young children. They can diminish story engagement and obstruct text comprehension. This new study suggests that even basic ebooks can be problematic if parents are too busy engaging with the device, not their child.
This realization can be helpful for parents who feel assaulted by new technology promising their child a developmental head start and who lack the funds to experiment with every new gadget emerging in an already crowed market.
"You don't need a lot of bells and whistles to support your child's development," Dr. Suzy Tomopoulos, assistant professor in the department of pediatrics at NYU School of Medicine, told the New York times. "Engaging the child and talking to the child does a wonderful job of supporting early child development."
American reading habits
A parent reader engages elementary school children with Dr. Seuss's The Butter Battle Book. Image Source: Wikimedia Commons
Americans seem to agree with Dr. Munzer that print books truly are the gold standard.
The Pew Research Center has been tracking American reading habits and preferences since 2011. It has found that Americans overwhelmingly prefer print books to other formats. According to its 2018 survey, 67 percent of Americans say they have read a print book in the past year, compared to 26 percent who say they have read an ebook. In total, "three-quarters of Americans (74 percent) have read a book in the past 12 months in any format, a figure that has remained largely unchanged since 2012."
But that number becomes less encouraging when you consider that a quarter of Americans admit to not reading a single book. In any format. For 12 whole months. Yikes. And while three-quarters have read at least one book, the typical American only manages four books a year.
Not surprisingly, we don't read a lot of books because we don't make the time. According to a Bureau of Labor Statistics survey, Americans spent only 17 minutes a day (yes, that's rounded up) in 2017 reading for purposes other than work or school. That number represents an all time low, and is roughly one-tenth the time Americans spend watching television.
And the kids have followed suit. Scholastic's Kids and Family Reading Report suggests that infrequent child readership — that is, children who read less than one day a week — is on the rise. In 2010, 21 percent of children where deemed infrequent readers. In 2018, it was 28 percent. Frequent readership — children who read nearly every day — fell roughly the same amount, from 37 percent to 31.
If parents really want to teach their children to love reading and read well, print books are a great start. But taking the time to read to them and showing them your own love of reading are just as necessary.
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Ash deposits of some of North America's largest volcanic eruptions.
The end of the world as we know it
Panoramic view of Yellowstone National Park
Image: Heinrich Berann for the National Park Service – public domain
Of the many freak ways to shuffle off this mortal coil – lightning strikes, shark bites, falling pianos – here's one you can safely scratch off your worry list: an outbreak of the Yellowstone supervolcano.
As the map below shows, previous eruptions at Yellowstone were so massive that the ash fall covered most of what is now the western United States. A similar event today would not only claim countless lives directly, but also create enough subsidiary disruption to kill off global civilisation as we know it. A relatively recent eruption of the Toba supervolcano in Indonesia may have come close to killing off the human species (see further below).
However, just because a scenario is grim does not mean that it is likely (insert topical political joke here). In this case, the doom mongers claiming an eruption is 'overdue' are wrong. Yellowstone is not a library book or an oil change. Just because the previous mega-eruption happened long ago doesn't mean the next one is imminent.
Ash beds of North America
Ash beds deposited by major volcanic eruptions in North America.
Image: USGS – public domain
This map shows the location of the Yellowstone plateau and the ash beds deposited by its three most recent major outbreaks, plus two other eruptions – one similarly massive, the other the most recent one in North America.
Huckleberry Ridge
The Huckleberry Ridge eruption occurred 2.1 million years ago. It ejected 2,450 km3 (588 cubic miles) of material, making it the largest known eruption in Yellowstone's history and in fact the largest eruption in North America in the past few million years.
This is the oldest of the three most recent caldera-forming eruptions of the Yellowstone hotspot. It created the Island Park Caldera, which lies partially in Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming and westward into Idaho. Ash from this eruption covered an area from southern California to North Dakota, and southern Idaho to northern Texas.
Mesa Falls
About 1.3 million years ago, the Mesa Falls eruption ejected 280 km3 (67 cubic miles) of material and created the Henry's Fork Caldera, located in Idaho, west of Yellowstone.
It was the smallest of the three major Yellowstone eruptions, both in terms of material ejected and area covered: 'only' most of present-day Wyoming, Colorado, Kansas and Nebraska, and about half of South Dakota.
Lava Creek
The Lava Creek eruption was the most recent major eruption of Yellowstone: about 640,000 years ago. It was the second-largest eruption in North America in the past few million years, creating the Yellowstone Caldera.
It ejected only about 1,000 km3 (240 cubic miles) of material, i.e. less than half of the Huckleberry Ridge eruption. However, its debris is spread out over a significantly wider area: basically, Huckleberry Ridge plus larger slices of both Canada and Mexico, plus most of Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Missouri.
Long Valley
This eruption occurred about 760,000 years ago. It was centered on southern California, where it created the Long Valley Caldera, and spewed out 580 km3 (139 cubic miles) of material. This makes it North America's third-largest eruption of the past few million years.
The material ejected by this eruption is known as the Bishop ash bed, and covers the central and western parts of the Lava Creek ash bed.
Mount St Helens
The eruption of Mount St Helens in 1980 was the deadliest and most destructive volcanic event in U.S. history: it created a mile-wide crater, killed 57 people and created economic damage in the neighborhood of $1 billion.
Yet by Yellowstone standards, it was tiny: Mount St Helens only ejected 0.25 km3 (0.06 cubic miles) of material, most of the ash settling in a relatively narrow band across Washington State and Idaho. By comparison, the Lava Creek eruption left a large swathe of North America in up to two metres of debris.
The difference between quakes and faults
The volume of dense rock equivalent (DRE) ejected by the Huckleberry Ridge event dwarfs all other North American eruptions. It is itself overshadowed by the DRE ejected at the most recent eruption at Toba (present-day Indonesia). This was one of the largest known eruptions ever and a relatively recent one: only 75,000 years ago. It is thought to have caused a global volcanic winter which lasted up to a decade and may be responsible for the bottleneck in human evolution: around that time, the total human population suddenly and drastically plummeted to between 1,000 and 10,000 breeding pairs.
Image: USGS – public domain
So, what are the chances of something that massive happening anytime soon? The aforementioned mongers of doom often claim that major eruptions occur at intervals of 600,000 years and point out that the last one was 640,000 years ago. Except that (a) the first interval was about 200,000 years longer, (b) two intervals is not a lot to base a prediction on, and (c) those intervals don't really mean anything anyway. Not in the case of volcanic eruptions, at least.
Earthquakes can be 'overdue' because the stress on fault lines is built up consistently over long periods, which means quakes can be predicted with a relative degree of accuracy. But this is not how volcanoes behave. They do not accumulate magma at constant rates. And the subterranean pressure that causes the magma to erupt does not follow a schedule.
What's more, previous super-eruptions do not necessarily imply future ones. Scientists are not convinced that there ever will be another big eruption at Yellowstone. Smaller eruptions, however, are much likelier. Since the Lava Creek eruption, there have been about 30 smaller outbreaks at Yellowstone, the last lava flow being about 70,000 years ago.
As for the immediate future (give or take a century): the magma chamber beneath Yellowstone is only 5 percent to 15 percent molten. Most scientists agree that is as un-alarming as it sounds. And that its statistically more relevant to worry about death by lightning, shark, or piano.
Strange Maps #1041
Got a strange map? Let me know at strangemaps@gmail.com.
Stoicism can help overcome anxiety
Are you a worrier? Do you imagine nightmare scenarios and then get worked up and anxious about them? Does your mind get caught in a horrible spiral of catastrophizing over even the smallest of things? Worrying, particularly imagining the worst case scenario, seems to be a natural part of being human and comes easily to a lot of us. It's awful, perhaps even dangerous, when we do it.
But, there might just be an ancient wisdom that can help. It involves reframing this attitude for the better, and it comes from Stoicism. It's called "premeditation," and it could be the most useful trick we can learn.
Practical Stoicism
Broadly speaking, Stoicism is the philosophy of choosing your judgments. Stoics believe that there is nothing about the universe that can be called good or bad, valuable or valueless, in itself. It's we who add these values to things. As Shakespeare's Hamlet says, "There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so." Our minds color the things we encounter as being "good" or "bad," and given that we control our minds, we therefore have control over all of our negative feelings.
Put another way, Stoicism maintains that there's a gap between our experience of an event and our judgment of it. For instance, if someone calls you a smelly goat, you have an opportunity, however small and hard it might be, to pause and ask yourself, "How will I judge this?" What's more, you can even ask, "How will I respond?" We have power over which thoughts we entertain and the final say on our actions. Today, Stoicism has influenced and finds modern expression in the hugely effective "cognitive behavioral therapy."
One of the principal fathers of ancient Stoicism was the Roman statesmen, Seneca, who argued that the unexpected and unforeseen blows of life are the hardest to take control over. The shock of a misfortune can strip away the power we have to choose our reaction. For instance, being burglarized feels so horrible because we had felt so safe at home. A stomach ache, out of the blue, is harder than a stitch thirty minutes into a run. A sudden bang makes us jump, but a firework makes us smile. Fell swoops hurt more than known hardships.
What could possibly go wrong?
So, how can we resolve this? Seneca suggests a Stoic technique called "premeditatio malorum" or "premeditation." At the start of every day, we ought to take time to indulge our anxious and catastrophizing mind. We should "rehearse in the mind: exile, torture, war, shipwreck." We should meditate on the worst things that could happen: your partner will leave you, your boss will fire you, your house will burn down. Maybe, even, you'll die.
This might sound depressing, but the important thing is that we do not stop there.
Stoicism has influenced and finds modern expression in the hugely effective "cognitive behavioral therapy."
The Stoic also rehearses how they will react to these things as they come up. For instance, another Stoic (and Roman Emperor) Marcus Aurelius asks us to imagine all the mean, rude, selfish, and boorish people we'll come across today. Then, in our heads, we script how we'll respond when we meet them. We can shrug off their meanness, smile at their rudeness, and refuse to be "implicated in what is degrading." Thus prepared, we take control again of our reactions and behavior.
The Stoics cast themselves into the darkest and most desperate of conditions but then realize that they can and will endure. With premeditation, the Stoic is prepared and has the mental vigor necessary to take the blow on the chin and say, "Yep, l can deal with this."
Catastrophizing as a method of mental inoculation
Seneca wrote: "In times of peace, the soldier carries out maneuvers." This is also true of premeditation, which acts as the war room or training ground. The agonizing cut of the unexpected is blunted by preparedness. We can prepare the mind for whatever trials may come, in just the same way we can prepare the body for some endurance activity. The world can throw nothing as bad as that which our minds have already imagined.
Stoicism teaches us to embrace our worrying mind but to embrace it as a kind of inoculation. With a frown over breakfast, try to spend five minutes of your day deliberately catastrophizing. Get your anti-anxiety battle plan ready and then face the world.
Jonny Thomson teaches philosophy in Oxford. He runs a popular Instagram account called Mini Philosophy (@philosophyminis). His first book is Mini Philosophy: A Small Book of Big Ideas.
