Crawling equals gooder readers.

Every so often a study comes out by some pediatrician about how babies who crawl before walking grow up to be better readers. This is the story of when that study came out when I was a kid.

When I was young my mom heard about a correlation between crawling and reading. Trying to be the best mom she could, and she was, she decided that her kids would be better readers if we crawled more. So one summer my mom began making us crawl for 10 to 15 minutes a day. Every day, she would set a timer and we would crawl, hoping to become better readers. In principle this sounded good. The flaw was that the study was for babies who crawled before they walked, not for six year old kids. Yes, I was six.

So you can imagine, my siblings and I (there were six of us at the time ranging in age from 10 down to a newborn, who may have actually benefited from this) all home on summer break, crawling around the kitchen floor hoping to get better at reading.

Its not that my family is illiterate, reading just never caught on for us. On my brother's myspace page, under interests it used to read "Books: People still read those?"

I am wondering if we would be better readers if instead of crawling, we had spent that time READING.