A child that is raised in a house which has at least 80 books will have higher literacy and skill in their later life.
Having a library at home can encourage math skills and inculcate reading habits a lot more efficiently than even college on its own can.
A home that is pro-learning will lead to an individual growing up to become a knowledge seeking individual.
The research is indicative of the fact that being raised in a household with readily available knowledge enhances grown-up skills in the aforementioned areas. These cannot be acquired by singularly relying on parental education, occupational learning, or even your own education.
This enhancement of learning was particularly immense. It was found that individuals studying in high-schools from homes with libraries were just as numerate, technologically apt and literate as their older counterparts from Universities who had access to just a small number of books while growing up.
Quantity is Not the Only Important Factor
The previously mentioned scholarly article is led by a faculty member of Australian National University, Dr. Joanna Sikora. The research states that the adults who hailed from households with 81 to 349 books had the best qualitative improvements over the formative years of their lives. No further improvements were achieved with households with more number of books than the above mentioned range.
Regardless, the constituents of your library differ from where you live in the world. The largest collections in the world were of Scandinavian families: 13% of Swedish residents and 14% of Norwegians had libraries with more than 500 books in their households. On the contrary, only a few countries have lesser than 81 books on an average in their households: Singapore, Turkey, Italy, Chile, and Greece.
The Effect of Non-Paper Books
A justified question to raise would be regarding the influence of the steady growth of the digital media, to be specific, the growth and consumption of e-books. The research paper understates the effect of this rising trend in its conclusions. It states that considering the consumption of print media to be obsolete at this juncture of time is rather premature. The reasoning behind this logic is that currently, large digitized libraries are equivalent to big paper ones. Household library sizes are positively correlated with higher digital literacy. Thereby, the research indicates that for a foreseeable span of time, the interaction of tangible objects of intellectual learning, i.e. books will exert consistent and continued benefits in a growing child.
So why are home libraries helpful?
The research is indicative of two factors which come into play in this scenario. First is the effect of being raised in a pro-learning social atmosphere. The introduction to books during childhood and adolescence is a vital component that instills long term intellectual aptitudes. In addition to that, these abilities not only assist occupational and educational attainment, but also promote the practice of life-long habits that improve numeracy and literacy.
Even The Annual Cost of College Tuition Fees is higher than the Cost of 80 Books
This research discovered that graduates from universities who were raised without having access to a lot of books available to them had approximately average levels of literacy. Hence, it is not unreasonable to draw the conclusion that owning books at home is certainly a very good investment towards the future of a child. The authors maintain that in terms of literacy, adolescence with a good amount of books readily available to read creates excellent scholastic benefit in their adulthood.