How Much Time Does a Child Need to Create a Reading Habit?
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It all starts with a story that happened more than 70 years ago...
Maxwell Maltz was a plastic surgeon in the 1950s when he began to notice a strange pattern among his patients… When Dr. Maltz performed an operation, like a nose job, for example, he found that it took the patient about 21 days to get used to seeing his new face. Similarly, when a patient had an arm or leg amputated, Maxwell Maltz noted that the patient felt a phantom limb for approximately 21 days before adjusting to the new situation.
These experiences led Maltz to think about his own period of adaptation to changes and new behaviors, noting that it also took around 21 days to acquire a new habit. Maltz wrote of these experiences, saying, "These and many other commonly observed phenomena tend to show that a minimum of about 21 days is required for an old mental image to dissolve and a new one to solidify."
In 1960, Maltz published that quote and his other thoughts on behavior change in a book called Psycho-Cybernetics. The book became a box office success, selling over 30 million copies.
And that's when the trouble started...
In the decades that followed, Maltz's work influenced nearly every major "self-help" practitioner, from Zig Ziglar to Brian Tracy to Tony Robbins. And as more people recited the story of Maltz, as in the "Telephone Game", where the participants whisper a phrase to each other until they reach the last one completely distorted; people began to forget that he said "a minimum of about 21 days" and replaced it with "It takes 21 days to form a new habit."
And that's how society began to spread the false myth that it takes 21 days to form a new habit (or 30 days or some other magic number). It is remarkable how often these terms are cited as statistical facts. Dangerous lesson: If enough people say something enough times, everyone else starts to believe it.
It makes sense why the “21 days” myth would spread. It's easy to understand. The time frame is short enough to be inspiring, but long enough to be believable. And who wouldn't like the idea of changing their life in just three weeks? Can you imagine acquiring the habit of going to the gym in just that time?
But the problem is that Maxwell Maltz was simply observing what was going on around him and was not making a statement of fact. Also, he made sure to say that this was the minimum time needed to adjust to a new change.
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And a scientific study came to answer the question of how long it really takes to develop a habit...
To answer the question of how long it really takes to develop a new habit from a scientific point of view, we can turn to the study by Phillippa Lally. This lady is a health psychology researcher at University College London. In a study published in the European Journal of Social Psychology, Lally and her research team set out to find out how long it actually takes to form a habit.
The study examined the habits of 96 people over a 12-week period. Each person chose a new habit for the 12 weeks and reported each day whether or not they did the behavior and how automatically the behavior manifested.
Some people chose simple habits like “drink a bottle of water with lunch”. Others chose more difficult tasks such as "running for 15 minutes before dinner." At the end of 12 weeks, the researchers analyzed the data to determine how long it took each person to go from starting a new behavior to doing it automatically.
And the answer was…
On average, it takes over 2 months before a new behavior becomes automatic, 66 days to be exact . And the time it takes for a new habit to form can vary greatly depending on the behavior, the person, and the circumstances. In Lally's study, it took people between 18 and 254 days to form a new habit.
In other words, if you want to set your expectations appropriately, the truth is that it will probably take you two to eight months to build a new behavior into your life, not 21 days.
Interestingly, the researchers also found that "missing an opportunity to perform the behavior did not materially affect the process of habit formation." In other words, it doesn't matter if you mess up once in a while. Developing better habits is not an all-or-nothing process.
And the positive reading that we can make of all this is…
Let's talk about three reasons why this research is really inspiring:
First of all , there is no reason to criticize yourself if you try something for a few weeks and it doesn't become a habit. It's supposed to take you longer than that! There's no need to beat yourself up if you can't adopt a behavior in exactly 21 days.
Second , you don't have to be perfect. Making a mistake once or twice has no measurable impact on your long-term habits. That's why you need to treat failure like a scientist, give yourself permission to make mistakes, and develop strategies to quickly get back on track.
And third , adopting longer timeframes can help us realize that habits are a process and not an event. You have to embrace the process. You have to commit to the system.
Understanding this early on makes it easier to manage expectations and commit to making small, incremental improvements, rather than pushing yourself to think you have to do it all at once.
And what about the reading habit in children, which was the title of this post?
Well, the conclusion we wanted to reach is that we must be patient with our little ones. Do not give up on the effort and enjoy the process. Read, read and read. This, with patience, will lead our little ones to create the very important habit of reading. At Navabharath school, we dose reading through a novel format: letters that the child receives. These letters include stories in which our little one is the protagonist in the first person. And, in addition, the reading of each letter leads him to look for a hidden clue in his own house. Do you dare to try it?
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