A recent article in the online Greater Good Magazine explores how reading for pleasure may help to counteract the adverse effects on brain development in children associated with living in poverty.

The article notes that, whilst early childhood is a critical period for brain development, unfortunately studies have indicated that brain development can be hampered by poverty. Poverty has been associated as a factor in lower educational achievement, differences in brain structure, poorer cognition, behavioural problems and mental health symptoms.

Greater Good Magazine has recently conducted a study, published in Psychological Medicine, indicating that “one low-cost activity may at least counteract some of the negative effects of poverty on the brain: reading for pleasure”.

The article notes that many contributing factors will interact in why poverty is linked to negative brain impacts. Conditions such as poor nutrition, stress on the family caused by financial problems, a lack of safe spaces and good facilities in which to play and exercise, limited access to computers and other educational support systems, are some of the factors in play.

The study analyzed the data from the Adolescent Brain and Cognitive Development (ABCD) project, a U.S. national cohort study with more than 10,000 participants across different ethnicities and varying socioeconomic status, including measures of young adolescents ages 9 to 13 and how many years they had spent reading for pleasure during their early childhood and data on their cognitive health, mental health, and brain health.

The data showed that about half of the adolescents had started reading early in childhood, whereas the others, approximately half, had never read in early childhood, or had begun reading later on. The analysis found that “reading for pleasure in early childhood was linked with better scores on comprehensive cognition assessments and better educational attainment in young adolescence. It was also associated with fewer mental health problems and less time spent on electronic devices.”

It was interesting to the researchers to find that reading in early childhood can be beneficial regardless of socioeconomic stats and regardless of the children’s initial intelligence level, based on how many years of education the children’s parents had (a common measure of intelligence in very young children, as IQ is partially heritable). The findings also showed that “children who read for pleasure had larger cortical surface areas in several brain regions that are significantly related to cognition and mental health (including the frontal areas)” regardless of socioeconomic status.

The article argues that these findings have important implications for parents, educators and policymakers in facilitating reading for pleasure in young children, supporting studies that have shown that language learning, including through reading and discussing books, is a key factor in healthy brain development, as well as a critical building block for other forms of cognition, including executive functions (such as memory, planning and self-control) and social intelligence. They conclude, “While reading for pleasure is unlikely, on its own, to fully address the challenging effects of poverty on the brain, it provides a simple method for improving children’s development and attainment.”