Research by the UK’s Institute for Social & Economic Research has revealed that reading to children daily could reduce the number of 3 and 5 year-olds with socio-emotional problems by 20%. Professor Yvonne Kelly studied 15,000 children at ages three and five to see what elements of the home environment help to explain the gap between the development of the poorest children and the richest children. When all the data was analysed, Kelly said: “We found that the strongest projector of childhood development, including their socioemotional development and cognitive skills, was reading to children on a daily basis. It is one of the strongest predictors of these outcomes, even when everything else is taken into consideration. There is something about the strongly transactional element of storytelling that makes it important; adult and child snuggle up close, think about the pictures together and what might happen next. It also provides one-on-one, intimate time between carer and child.”
The main findings from the research were:
• children in the highest income group were 7 times less likely to have clinically-relevant socio-emotional problems at age 3, and the size of this gap increased by age 5;
• in verbal abilities there was a 6 point difference between rich and poor children aged 3 and a 9 point difference aged 5 – a 50% increase;
• home environmental factors e.g. reading to children, family routines and mother’s mental health accounted for about half of the gap.
But the researchers point out that, with the home environment only really accounting for half of the gap, children from poorer backgrounds are still four times more likely to have serious socio-emotional difficulties than children from the highest income group.
John Killourhy, whistle player, flanked by his brother Paddy, fiddle player, of Ballyfaudeen, Liscannor, Co. Clare, tells the story first hand of how the old Irish tradition of house dances died out, or rather was stamped out by the Public Dance Halls Act of 1935. 
