Men's Group

Reading to me, and I suspect to you, was as normal as all that other little boy stuff like throwing a baseball that dads did with you back then. Now we throw kids into school unprepared for the basics and blame the schools when the kids don't catch up fast enough.

I don't want to defend too many of the attitudes back then, but some things just worked after centuries of adaptation. After dinner, when the girls followed Mom into the kitchen to help with cleanup, and maybe then into the sewing room (and the reading room) the boys were hanging out with Dad who wasn't watching the game, but had his work cut out for him teaching them the boy stuff. And reading was large part of it.

We don't seem to do that so much any more, even where there are two parent families, and kids are too often left to their own devices, which means they do the things they like, not what develops them.

Could the Asian kids' noticeable superiority at math have something to do with exposure to math at home in the early years?