Dr. Jane Gilmour: Hello and welcome to Mind the Kids. I'm Dr. Jane Gilmore, honorary consultant clinical psychologist and child development program director at UCL. Professor Umar Toseeb: I'm Umar Toseeb, a professor with a focus on child and adolescent mental health and special educational needs. In each episode of Mind the Kids, we select a topic from the research literature and in conversation with invited authors, sift through the data, dilemmas and debates to leave you with our takeaways for academics and practitioners. Dr. Jane Gilmour: Today we'll be talking about genetic and environmental influences on early literacy. This episode is called Reading Between the Lines. Professor Umar Toseeb: So we talked about parenting a few weeks ago. I think it was last week with Rob Eves. And I think today we're going to talk a bit more specifically about reading and the home literacy environment. So think the fact that we're talking about this again, but in a more specific and targeted at a specific type of outcome or children's development suggests that it is something that's very important to researchers, but also to society as a whole. Dr. Jane Gilmour: Yeah, I think it's really interesting the idea about bringing back Rob's paper, the information we talked about in terms of parenting, but, you know, placing it in this specific context of literacy. you, do you have a book that you remember being read to in your young childhood? You've got favourite, you may not. Professor Umar Toseeb: No, I don't. don't, actually. I wasn't honestly, I wasn't much of a reader at all as a child. Like, I just couldn't get into it. Dr. Jane Gilmour: That's really interesting given where you ended up in your career strategy. Professor Umar Toseeb: I think I was just reading the wrong types of books or the wrong types of books were being read to me. I've just, I think, I don't know, as children, I think we read a lot of fiction or we're to read a lot of fiction. And actually it turns out that fiction is not for me. Popular science is what I'm into. So like now I read a lot, but it's popular science is what I read and nonfiction. So maybe I was just reading the wrong type of book. Dr. Jane Gilmour: I'm interested particularly in parental involvement, which is why this paper is so useful for us and thinking about the effects on literacy. You the way that parents are engaging with the reading materials is so interesting. So many parents will recognise the joy of reading a book together. Now, Umar, that's not a memory you've got, but it's certainly one that I do. So reading together with a young child and a book that maybe you've read many, many times, it doesn't even introduce any new words. But it's important in the development of literacy, it instills a joy of reading together. So parents are emoting these good signals about the idea of reading. And I think we'd like to come back to that later. I'm going to ask German about this as we go through. And just on the joy of reading, I don't know, did you ever read The Gruffalo? Sounds like you may not even remember that one. So Julia Donaldson, who wrote the book in collaboration with the National Literacy Trust, is going to write a third instalment. So the mouse and the Gruffalo are going back into the deep dark wood. This may not be a special one for you, but I know many families love that book. So it's going to be interesting to think about this from lots of perspectives, isn't it?

Professor Umar Toseeb: What's interesting here is like I hear you talking here about your personal experiences and other people's experiences of learning and reading with their parents. But in the research literature too, there is an understanding that the home literacy environment appears to be important. So reading to your child, having books in the home, shared book reading, lots of those things have been investigated against children's outcomes. And I think specifically for reading but also other types of cognitive and social outcomes. I think this is, I mentioned this last week, reading to your child and reading with your child and having shared book reading with your child depends on your child's ability to or willingness to engage with that. But it also depends on lots of other things. So like, you know, if English isn't the first language in the house or in the home, that might affect the amount of reading that might happen and also the amount of time that parents have so you know I think we might see a socioeconomic gradient here where you know if parents are working very long hours they might not have time to read to their child Dr. Jane Gilmour: So I think their previous experiences with reading. So if you are emoting an idea that this is something that you don't have good associations with, that's going to come across. And again, that variability in the reading environment is really wider in that group as compared to the different higher levels of income brackets traditionally, certainly that's what the data is showing. Professor Umar Toseeb: related to that is the idea that if reading is an activity that you want to do with your child at a set time during the day, so like just before bed or an evening or something, if in the modern world that we live in, have different shifts, casual hours, random hours, like you might not be able to set aside that consistent time of day where you can read to your child. So there are lots of reasons why parents might not read to or with their children. But lots of the research on this topic suggests that the relationship between reading to your child and with your child is causally related to their outcomes, so kids who are read to and read with early in life tend to better educational outcomes. But something that we should unpack comes from reading ability or disability can be explained a lot by genetic differences. If we think about twin studies or studies of behaviour genetics, where they've looked at the differences in the population and the levels of reading ability in childhood, a high proportion can be explained by genetic differences. And therein is the interesting part for me. It's like, well, if we're saying that reading to your child and with your child is causally and has an impact on their outcomes. But then we're also saying that lots of the reason why some children are better readers than others or some children read more than others is down to genetic differences. How can those two things be correct and true at the same time? Dr. Jane Gilmour: This is where we need German to help us here, surely the environmental experiences are more potent and that's my reading of the data are more potent in those that have an ability in their reading profile, and so that environmental experience is all the more important. But of course, we're dealing with parents who may have a reading disability themselves, who may not want to pick up a book, who may have had dreadful experiences with literacy material and even if there's books around the house, they may not want to pick those up. And those differences, those differences between parents, mothers and fathers is something else that's described in the paper, which was such an interesting topic. There's some hints about the differences that parents might go towards depending on their child's reading ability and depending on their profiles. It's a really, really interesting paper. I think we need to get an expert eye on this. Shall we invite German in?

Professor Umar Toseeb: Let's do it. So we're joined by Dr. German Grande from the Department of Education, University of Oslo, who's going to be telling us why some of these things are happening. So German is the lead author of the paper, Intergenerational Impact of Mothers and Fathers on Children's Word Reading Development, which is published in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry. Welcome, German. Dr. Germán Grande: Thank you for inviting me. And I'm so happy to be here and being given this opportunity to talk about this work that took some years to develop. So I'm happy here to clarify some questions. Professor Umar Toseeb: Yeah, we're very happy to have you. Let's start with your motivation for doing this. What got you into writing this paper? Why did you want to write this paper? Dr. Germán Grande: Well, there's multiple reasons. One of the motivations was, of course, to have a better understanding of how parents can influence their children's reading development, specifically early in life. if you see the paper, it's called Word Reading Skills. I will tell you what we mean with word reading skills, but those are like skills that are developed very early in primary schools. Another motivation is that we know that parents not only provide the environment for their children, but they also provide genes that affect the way they read. So as you guys introduced. So we know that until, I don't know, the past years, it's been clearly spoken about this, need to account for this genetic ⁓ association that we're hinting. So what to do with that? So this paper tries to include that piece of information so we can have a clear understanding of how the environment alone can be associated with children. And probably the last motivation was to be able to include or make a distinction between what mothers do and what fathers do. Because we also think that that's an area of research that has been overseen for a while. Probably there's very good reasons why we focus on mothers and not on fathers, but we thought it was a good chance to study that. Specifically since this has been done in the Norwegian context, which fathers are a little bit more involved in comparison to in other countries, just because the government makes it possible to get involved with your child. Upbringing. that's all those reasons are like part of my motivation to or our motivation to write this paper. Professor Umar Toseeb: And if we think about reading skills and their importance for subsequent outcomes, why are reading skills so important? So we spoke to somebody else who'd done a paper on ⁓ reading intervention or language interventions, I think. was Charles Hulme and he described that in the UK we have a national obsession with reading and quite rightly so. So why should we have an obsession with reading? What do we know about how important reading is for subsequent outcomes? Dr. Germán Grande: I actually listened to Charles and your conversation and I completely agree with him. I think we should be obsessed with reading because reading gives us a foundation to interact with a world. So now it is like we interact with our school curriculum, we interact with our phones, we interact with newspapers, we interact with each other. So reading is embedded in everything we do. And we know that reading is associated to later educational outcomes, better employment prospects, health outcomes. So the list can continue. But yeah, I think that's probably one of the main reasons. Dr. Jane Gilmour: And it's interesting that you're raising the cultural ideas, because obviously your data set was not a UK data set, and there is a different cultural ⁓ and political context in that. But you were able to read across, pardon the pun, ⁓ what was similar and what was different between many Western centric cultures and educational systems, which I think was really interesting. And you talked about the transparency. For example, of the reading material as compared to English, which is notoriously opaque. But I do think that's interesting. That might lead us to sort of think about how political and contextual systems might have an impact too, because they are a different sort of environmental influence, but there are no environmental influence nonetheless. Dr. Germán Grande: Of course, of course. I mean, we can talk a little bit more about the Norwegian context. But I think context, as you said, is one of the key reasons to understand home literacy environment research, because they can give us the, I don't know, like the framework of how to understand. So if we oversee the context, we might be misinterpreting findings that. Can contradict each other, but just because of the context. Professor Umar Toseeb: So we are thinking about the home literacy environment and its relationship to reading. What do you mean by the home literacy environment? What kinds of things are captured in that definition? Dr. Germán Grande: Yes, well, the home literacy environment is ⁓ a term that has been used in the literature for a while. And I see it, or it's been used as a, like an umbrella term to define all the activities that can be involved or take place at home that can be thought to be costly associated with children's literacy outcomes. Such as, for example, how much parents read to children, how often they engage in, I don't know, reading words, teaching the alphabet, teaching the sound, letter correspondences, or using the language, you know? There's a lot of research about narrative understanding or dialogue between parents and children and how that can boost language proficiency in children, just like being talked to and being forced to like put words on your thoughts and explain how it was, how was nursery or how was preschool, how was the day at elementary school, all those kind of like conversations and interactions go on their home literacy and environment. And you might notice that I mentioned language related activities and reading related activities. And that's because we know that language is the basis for reading. So in a lot of these studies, those two things have been part of the same ⁓ construct, this literacy construct, both language and reading. Dr. Jane Gilmour: And I noticed you, used a measure that asked parents to report their book availability, if you like, or literacy materials. I do remember, I think this is based on the Bradley and Caldwell home inventory, isn't it? It's a sort of observational scale, or least it was originally. And researchers were trotting around various people, various families' houses, looking for magazines and books to, you know, and counting the number of books that a child had to hand. And it's interesting that that home learning environment, as you say, can cover a whole range of things. It's not just the concrete literacy materials that are available. It's also the way that families are engaging with language and words. Professor Umar Toseeb: Before we brought you in to the conversation, we were talking a bit about the apparent contradiction between the role of the home literacy environment and parental input on children's learning outcomes or reading outcomes, ⁓ and then also the role of genetics. Can you just tell us about how those two things might interact? is it actually contradictory or could those two things be working together in some way to influence children's reading development? Dr. Germán Grande: Yeah, I think the second one. The second one might be closer to the truth. It's very hard to know the truth completely because none of these studies that we have talked about, even twin studies, are causal. So we cannot be 100 % sure of what is like the driving mechanism. But I will think that it's a combination of both because we know that from studies that separate. The sources that explain, for example, an association between parents and children. We know that there are genetic elements explaining environmental pertaining to the home, but also non-share environmental, meaning pertaining to the school or the other environments. And all those three elements are able to explain sometimes part of the association, know, the numbers that you see in the... in reported in the articles. But we also know that there is a lot of things that do not explain or remain unexplained. So I think it's a mixture of things. Contradictory, I don't think they are contradictory. For example, in my publication, we see associations that go in two different directions. So we see that in our case, what mothers the activities that mothers are doing with their children are negatively associated with the children's outcome, whereas what we call the resources at home, they're positively. So that could be, and the parents really are also positively. So there are two things that are like going in one direction, where the other one are going in a different. Dr. Jane Gilmour: So what you're saying is the more vulnerable a child's reading would be, the more likely a mum might get involved in reading practice. That's the direction. Dr. Germán Grande: That's correct. And that's in the field of genetics. That's what people usually call an evocative effect. Meaning that when you're genetically influenced to perform in certain ways, so you have like some reading genes that make you read in certain way, you can evoke some interactions with, for example, your parents. If they notice that you need help in reading, they will give it to you. And I think that's how we interpret, at least, that part of our results. ⁓ This is something that can also be context-based because ⁓ as this is done in a Norwegian population, we know that children at this age, meaning grade three of elementary school, they're basically pretty good word readers. So they don't struggle that much because the language is pretty easy to... to learn. So by grade three, they're pretty good and fluent readers. And this is seen in other contexts, such as, for example, Finnish studies that have a ⁓ similar language to the Norwegian. It's equally easy to learn Finnish as Norwegian. And we also see that negative association at this grade, meaning that when a child in grade three is really struggling, their parents are more likely to log in and give some help. Because for Norwegians, it might be critical if you're in the third grade and not reading fluently. It might be like a red flag for a parent. So we see that mothers are reacting, responding to that. Dr. Jane Gilmour: How old are the children in grade three? Dr. Germán Grande: Approximately eight year olds. Yeah. So for a Norwegian eight year old not being able to read single words fluently, it might be worse. So you can give that child a little bit more help. So I think both parents and teachers will react to an eighth grader not being as fluent as the rest. Professor Umar Toseeb: I have to say, think that when I first read the paper, I skimmed it and I was like, okay, yeah, this is, can understand what this is about. And then I reread it in detail. And initially when I saw the negative correlation between mother's reading input and child reading outcomes, as in the more, more it seemed, was like, oh, it doesn't make sense. The more the mother's reading to the child, the worse the child's reading ability is. And I was like, what is going on here? And then I had to read it and then reread it and then reflect. And I was like, yeah, that makes sense. I mean, now that we've had the conversation, it makes sense. But if you ask me to design a study and I was with undergraduate students or whatever, that is not the direction of the coefficient that I would predict. I would predict that the more mother or father reads to their child, the better their reading ability would be. So it was really interesting to have to reread that and think, yeah, this makes sense. And I think that it just gives us an indication of what might be underlying some of these correlation coefficients and the relationships and you've talked about the evocative gene environment interplay there. Dr. Germán Grande: Yeah, and I totally agree with you. think when we planned this study, were... I don't think there was something done in Norwegian. So we were mainly basing our hypotheses or the design of a study in international research, mostly English research. So for an English speaker, I mean, you both are English speakers, so you can correct me. I think you will expect a longer time for someone to be able to read proficiently. So probably based on if our children were English speakers, we would probably expect a positive association because by grade three, might be still acquiring fluency in their reading. So maybe in that case, the association will be positive. But in our case or in their context when they're already...kind of fluent is only those that are not being completely fluent that are getting this extra help. Dr. Jane Gilmour: And I'm hypothesizing here, but I wonder if there's a peer effect. So in other words, the sense of capability in reading will be a reaction or a comparison with classmates. So I think no matter where your absolute level of reading might be, I suspect where mums in this instance can sense that their child might not be in the majority in terms of levels of reading, they may step forward. I don't know the data there, but I'm wondering if that might be the effect, a sort of classic. Dr. Germán Grande: Well, I mean, that will be to speculate. But I actually I completely agree with you. I think in some of the mechanisms in in parents being able to report more help or less help could be a combination of, for example, talking to the teachers, because teachers may inform the parents about the level of read-influency in their child in comparison to the group. or to the rest of the class. And that may prompt the parent to, ⁓ OK, maybe I have to do a little bit more or train a little bit more. lot of parents that are very observant and very in tune with their children, but might be other parents that need a reminder. And you have to do a little bit extra with this guy or this girl so you can level up. I think it might be a combination, but we haven't measured the teachers' responses. That would be very, very interesting to have it in the models to see how much of the awareness ⁓ parents have about their children comes from teachers or the schools. Dr. Jane Gilmour: And you raise the idea about these individual differences in your group. Just I should say, German actually, I think when I read your paper, I thought it was such a clearly well-written paper. And if you are new to this area as an early career researcher or somebody that perhaps is outside, ⁓ you know, reading peer-reviewed paper, I would direct you to this because I think it conveys some quite complicated ideas really clearly. Good, straightforward language you know, you're talking about your English not being your first language.

Whatever that is, is a significant skill. But I wondered if you thought we talked about different language groups, would there be a difference in a different socioeconomic or educational level for parents? Would you suspect there would be different findings? Dr. Germán Grande: What I will suspect it, of course. Of course, I think knowing from other research that ⁓ parents with higher education are more likely to engage with books, read books themselves, be better readers. Of course, if you're not a good reader, despite how much you like reading, you're going to struggle reading for someone. So yeah, I think if that ⁓ part of... the home is graded down to, I don't know, to, you can call it socioeconomical status or educational level. So if we change that part, I think that the results could change. But luckily, we also see that even in studies of the home literacy environment that had had other type of populations, we see that parents' engagement with activities, regardless of how many books they have, it's still something that matters. we still see an association. So what they do is still explains children's ⁓ outcomes. So that part give us hope of continue encouraging parents to engage with their children to the best of their abilities. Professor Umar Toseeb: And one of the innovative parts of your paper was that you controlled for parents' reading ability. And you did that in part because you hypothesized that the child's environment is created by the child themselves based on their genetic propensities, but also the parent and their parents' genetic propensities. Here you control for the parents genetic propensities by controlling for their reading ability. So then it's like, what are these effects looking like after you've controlled for parents ability themselves? think it's one of the things that we're working on at the moment. And I hope nobody steals this idea because like we're literally doing the analysis right now. Yesterday we had this conversation. one of the ways that, so we're also looking at early social emotional functioning, but also in middle childhood in adolescence. And we have child and both parents genetic data. So then what we're looking at is the genetic material that's passed from both parents to the child, and that makes up the child's genetic material. But then also the genetic data that is not passed from each parent, with the 50 % that's not passed from each parent, what is the impact of that? non transmitted 50 % on the child's outcomes because then that gives us a direct measure, I think, of the environment that the parents create at home. And honestly, before we did it, I was like, it's not going to make a difference because the effects will be so small. But actually, what we seem to be finding is that the non transmitted genetic material, so the environment that the parents create independent of the child's genetic material, ⁓ predicts more variance in early childhood than the child's genetic makeup itself. And then that becomes less prominent ⁓ throughout development. So in middle childhood, the parent is less important and then in adolescence, it's even less important. So I suppose my question based on all of that is, would these effects be different if you were looking at a different developmental stage? So you looked at grade three, I think you said, so like seven, eight year olds. What would this look like if you were looking at three to four year olds? Or what would this look like if you were looking at 12, 13 year olds? Dr. Germán Grande: That's a very, very good question. A little bit difficult question, but I think part of my answer will be that it will differ from the outcome that you are focusing on. In this case, word reading is the perfect example for a trait that doesn't change that much over time. So that's what we call like longitudinal invariance is mentioned in the paper. So it means that it's a skill that pretty much takes its form early in life and continues like that. And we see that the genetics behind that are also pretty stable across time. So for reading in the way that we did it, it's pretty stable. think if we change this to for example mathematics which is something we're working on I don't know, the results might change. It could increase sometimes. One of my co-authors has a preprint now in which they have ⁓ analyzed nationwide data on reading mathematics and English. And they see a pretty, pretty solid and increasing ⁓ association between parents and children. For example, in mathematics and reading. So in some school outcomes or the most, I don't want to say the most important, but probably the most used ones, like reading and writing, those ones, I think it might be even increasing over time. For in your example, you're probably talking about behavioral measures probably there the whole story might be different. And you might be the best one to give us an answer about that. So yeah, I think the answer is yes, is going to look different. Professor Umar Toseeb: Yeah. Okay. So, and I think also one of the things I was thinking about when I was reading this was like you focused on the home learning environment. And through that, you, I think the case that you're making is that children who struggle with reading the, ⁓ you can help them and parents can help them. And, you know, the resources are in the home, et cetera, et cetera, might be ⁓ important for developing children's development at reading. But can that be applied to environments outside the home. So could we have a positive, ⁓ I don't know, a school environment ⁓ that's focused on reading resources? I mean, imagine it is anyway, but like, does this provide evidence that reading instruction, rich reading, reading resource, rich environments and outside of the home learning environment can also impact in a meaningful way for children's reading development?

Dr. Germán Grande: Definitely. And I think that's a very important thing to remark because when we read literature, for example, my paper, you will see that, oh, parents explain so, so much variance or, I don't know, 60 % of the variance, 80 % of the variance. It sounds a lot like that thing that you're studying actually is able to explain the whole story. But in most of the papers, there is... a lot that is not explained. In our study, there's a lot of the variation in children's word reading that is not explained by anything we have in our model. And I think in that case, the school environment might be a very important factor that we don't have in any of our questions. that I think might be part of the rest of the story is in schools, how good their providing or in stimulating development in both socially or in academic skills. Dr. Jane Gilmour: I think it's a very, there's so much to ask you about and I think we could go on looking at this because I do think that that idea of where do school experiences come in and what's a child's experience in school despite that the difference in adult child ratio, there's a lot we could come to but perhaps I'm just got an eye on the time. I wonder if we need to invite you back another time to explore some of these ideas in further depth. Because I'm interested to hear more about this. for me is to say on behalf of Umar and myself, ⁓ thank you, Hermann, for such a brilliant discussion, raising all sorts of ideas about context, as well as individual and group differences, all sorts of really interesting ideas about emerging literacy. We are so grateful for your time and we look forward to hearing more from your publication group. Dr. Germán Grande: Thank you so much. Thank you for the invitation and I'll be happy to be back whenever you invite me. Professor Umar Toseeb: That was really good. I really enjoyed that conversation with German and I think it's really nice to be thinking about this piece of research in relation to the work that I'm doing in other spaces because I'm like, this is, this is what he found. I wonder what that's going to mean for me, my research. So yeah. And it's also, I think, very interesting and topical for parents out there who are thinking about what can I do to help my child's development. you know, this is not the whole picture. This is not the only thing that parents can do. And I think German did a good job of explaining that there will be lots of other things that impact upon the extent to which a child can read well compared to other people their age and their reading development that's outside of parenting and parent input. Dr. Jane Gilmour: I did love Umar thought that analysis was really interesting. you're 100 % of your genes creating that environment that you're talking about. I think that's really innovative. But we did, we've talked a lot about the importance of books and simulating ⁓ toys and so on around the child. Here I wanted to focus on the shared reading, parental attitudes and enjoyment of reading, because I think this is the practitioner issue. Parental beliefs and attitudes independently predict their child reading attainment, and we know that. So obviously when they are more positive, they will augment the effect. And so we could perhaps postulate that in shared reading experiences, there's lots of non-specific effects. That's why I was poking around and asking you, Umar what is your shared experience of reading? Because that environment might predict greater engagement for the child, as long as it's fact-based for you. Because in the early years, the most powerful role model for young children is the parents. They're absolute rock stars. And so they are uniquely placed to model the value of reading. Now, teachers could arguably do this too, but I think there's something specific about parents think also about that reading together is a one-to-one interaction and it might be the only time you get your mummy or dad to yourself. There's physical closeness, shared enjoyment, shared attention. So these are all add-ons that I think that are unique to the parent-child relationship, which are likely to contribute to the home learning effect. So I think the school-home comparisons will be really interesting in that. The other thing, and we didn't have time to get onto this, and I hope that we will get German back to talk about it a bit more, was the digital world. Because in theory, internet offers endless and free literacy opportunities, which could offer parents living in economic adversity or those that have got reading disability most. You were talking earlier about families that are living in difficult circumstances that perhaps don't have time. We have different shifts and so on. But the internet is always there and it's got lots to offer. But, you we know, for example, that turning on subtitles when you're watching TV or video has an established effect of vocabulary learning, whether you intend to learn it or not. And there's loads of age appropriate read along picture book videos on the net. I found a really good site called Reading Is. But the big but, and this is the big but, which is what I was talking about the joy of reading earlier is that digital literacy can't be a solitary experience. I'm not suggesting plonking a child in front of the reading materials if you're not a confident reader because it's the sharing, the commenting on pictures and so on that will increase the importance for young children because these non-effects that I was talking about earlier are so important.

Professor Umar Toseeb: And I think that touches upon something that I wanted to say, which was around when we are measuring reading, like parents reading with and to their child, and also the literacy resources at home. Is the measure just a proxy for the wider environment in which that child is growing up in? in like, we're a man and we measure reading. It's like, do you read to your child? How often do you read to your child? Do you do shared book reading? But that's tapping into a broader what's going on in the home. Reading is just how we're measuring it. So I imagine some of these findings and some of these effects are specific to the act of reading to and with your child. But some of these effects are just indicative of what else is going on in the home at the time. Dr. Jane Gilmour: Yeah, I think that's right. It's about are you engendering and supporting curiosity about the world? Perhaps that might be the sort of generic term, but that, you know, we might have good readers and curious learners, and that's ultimately what we would like to support. But the sense of control and influence on that is something that's variable in lots of parental communities, particularly where there's economic adversity. There's a wide variability about the belief that what you do and what you see in terms of literacy particularly has an impact. We didn't get on to speaking about all the amazing initiatives that are available in terms of getting books to families who may not always have access to literacy materials. there's some fast food restaurants have giveaways and book start packages as well. But there's also school interventions and you might be interested in looking at that if you're not come across them already. So I think Gillian West as the so-called NELI the Nuffield Early Language Intervention Programme, which is an excellent evidence base. And that involves families, but it's certainly school based. So teaching assistants will be learning the sorts of techniques that we were discussing in German's paper. So access to books is part one, but increasing parental involvement and positive engagement is the part two, I think. Professor Umar Toseeb: And I think one of the things that ⁓ we didn't get around to talking to German about, I've had these conversations with other people before is, so to what extent is resource actually important in that, can some of these activities be done in low resource settings? like low resource might mean different things to different people, but you know, within the UK, that might mean people who are not as affluent and do not have the household income that others do. But low resource might also mean, you know, in some countries where just there are fewer financial resources. What does this mean? And I think, yeah, so I'd be interested to know how much of this can be done in the absence of money. Dr. Jane Gilmour: Well, I think that's what comes back, know, the internet, you know, in theory that it produces. So for example, that website I talked about reading is it's a video where you can get access to a whole library of books is free and you can sit and look at the reading being kind of high. So each word is highlight in a way that you might point to a word if you're a parent. It's got a great pace. It's got lots of voices. It's got a sort of definitely got a sort of really diverse feel. And so In theory, you don't need any money to do that, but you do need to know that it matters to sit alongside to do that. And that's really talking about messaging. So in theory, don't think resource is the issue. I think it's about the messaging almost that's the issue and finding the confidence to do that. Because most, even in communities that have few resources, Most people have access to the internet now, most. I think that's true to say I don't want the percentage across the world is but I think it's pretty high. Professor Umar Toseeb: what extent, and I'm asking you but like maybe because partly I'm not sure either, to what how do we to what extent do parents who also struggle to read, because you know if we think about the genetic transmission of this, parents who struggle to read have children who struggle to read and you know part of her man's work was about figuring out what part of that is the environment and what part of that is genetics but you know it In any case, parents who struggle to read might not feel confident enough to sit with their child and read with them because they also struggle. What do we do in that situation? Dr. Jane Gilmour: Well, I think that's where we say, look, you know, we look at this piece of content, let's say, that reads the book along. We look at the book. We look at the video together and someone is reading the words and they're highlighting the words as we go along. So your job as a parent is to sit and enjoy it together. Pause it and say, look at that picture. Wonderful. Wow. That little mouse has got a funny little face. Look at the prickles on the Gruffalo though. You know, those sorts of those comments are about saying you and I together are enjoying this piece of literacy material. I care about reading and I care about you reading. And those non-specific effects need to be messaged to parents who may not feel comfortable reading in the first instance. parents, by and large, do the best that they can if they know that it's the right thing to do. So in other words, you don't need to do any reading at all with some of these resources, but you do need to be alongside and message how important and useful and joyful the literacy is because that environment experience will be important, I think. Professor Umar Toseeb: And then one final thing ⁓ before we wrap up is, so if we've got families where English isn't their first language, we might have a situation where the language of instruction in schools is English ⁓ and in society is English, but parents are not fluent in English. But whatever their first language is, they are fluent in that. So I would argue that there's something fundamental about reading, irrespective of which language it's in, that develops cognitive skills and promotes certain mechanisms. And also you described the experience of reading with your child and the social skills that are developed through that. I would hypothesize that the language in which you're reading, like if it's English, English is a language in England but actually if your home language is Spanish, for example, even reading in Spanish with your child, I imagine would probably have similar cognitive benefits, but I don't want to say that it definitely will, but the hypothesis I would hypothesize that you're still developing similar cognitive and social skills. Dr. Jane Gilmour: Yeah, and I think that's a fair, I mean, I don't know the data, but I think what we know is that those non-specific aspects about telegraphing the importance of learning will be important and they will percolate through no matter where that might be. So I do think we need to explore these non-specific associations, the shared joy and that value, high value modeling. There is no better time. You are a rock star to your child when you have young kids. But our challenge here is to get the message to parents that are most likely to have negative experiences of reading for genetic or environmental reasons that they potentially have a unique role to play in their child's literacy outcomes. Professor Umar Toseeb: Yeah, I think my takeaway for academics is that, and German's paper is a good example of this, is we can understand, we can use genetics or genetic confounding or control for genetics to understand pathways to children's outcomes. But that's not to say that the environment isn't important. The environment is important and that's what we're, and that's what German's paper is showing here. It's just that what are the mechanisms and pathways through which genetics and genetic effects and genetic propensities work and a lot of the time it is the environment. Dr. Jane Gilmour: Producer Matt has encouraged me to tell you that our recent podcast with Professor Harriet Over, Should We Be Worried About The Manosphere, is ACAMH's most popular podcast ever. We're delighted to hear that over 10,000 people have watched or consumed this content. So please go and have a look at it, subscribe and leave a review. Professor Umar Toseeb: Finally, join us again next week when we'll be talking about social anxiety and paranoid beliefs with Dr. Jessica Kingston at Royal Holloway University.