Literacy and Numeracy Skills In Children Can Be Linked To Father’s Engagement

Growing up my dad was very involved in my education, in fact, it got to a stage that I started calling him my English teacher because he was very keen on speaking and writing good English. We understand this is actually what most parents in Nigeria does in their various household.

He (dad) used to make us write essays and letters so he would make sure that we were putting punctuation in the right places and we were spelling the words correctly. Till today, we might still ask him when we are unsure of some words. He would also encouraged us always to read novels because our dad said it would help our vocabulary and mental stimulation.

A huge epidemiological study of early childhood development in every low and middle income countries suggests that targeting parenting practices at home particularly the presence and use of books in the household can be an effective way to improve the early childhood development.

Furthermore, all engaging fathers in this category could add to the improvement. Having like three or more books in an entire household was also linked with sort of child development measure, ‘learning’ the ability to follow instructions to do something independently.

The study covered 77,315 children between the ages of 3 to 5-year-old from 26 low- and middle-income countries.

Children’s literacy-numeracy skills (recognizing letters, numbers and simple words) were linked to three family behaviors: attending an early childhood education program, having three or more books at home, and engaging in stimulating activities with an adult.

19.3% of all fathers had been engaged with the kid in learning some activities in the previous three days. Children whose fathers were more involved scored more highly on average on literacy-numeracy.

The said findings point to the value for early childhood development of home reading programs, targeting not just mothers but fathers and/or other parental figures.

It is never too early to start making your kids read books, it doesn’t always have to be school book just make sure it is engaging their minds in the right way.

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