Parents Not Reading to Their Children is Part of the Problem

Presently, most young people are tuned into Audio-visual means of information acquisition. Whereas such inputs, especially visual media, permit “parallel” processing, reading is strictly “linear” processing: word by word, sentence by sentence. By the time many readers get to the end of a sentence, they have already lost the starting content of that line of writing.

It is a given that parental involvement is needed, but too many parents — and not just English-as-a-second-language households — do not read regularly either. There is no good example that kids can follow. Schools need to tally the number of books that a parent has read in a month to understand where the root of this problem is!

There was a time when parents regularly read aloud to their very young children at bed time to give them a feel of the wonderful world that can be found between the covers of a book. That time is long past, for the most part. As kids head for their beds, too many parents stay glued to the TV.

— ABHI C. BUCH, Tierrasanta, San Diego