Conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh is firing back at a British theorist who claims that reading to your own children puts other children at an unfair disadvantage.
In a radio interview, Adam Swift, professor at the University of Warwick in England, said familial bonds are the chief factor that enables one child to succeed over another. And one of the ways parents reinforce familial bonds is by reading to their children.
“Bedtimes stories are more advantage transmitting than elite private schools," Swift said.
Should parents stop doing that in order to make life fairer for other people’s children?
“I don’t think parents … should constantly have in their minds the way they are unfairly advantaging other people’s children, but I think they should have that thought occasionally.”
Swift researches social mobility, and says he became interested in the topic while studying equality. He says parents giving their children every advantage make society more and more unequal.
Swift, at one point, put forth the idea of abolishing the family as a way to level the playing field, but has since walked back that idea.
On his radio show, Limbaugh railed at the suggestion that parents should not read to their children, and that in fact, parents may not be necessary at all. It all smacks of liberalism gone amuck, Linbaugh said.
“The way they (fix inequality) is to always punish the achievers, people who are successful or who are at the upper end of anything,” Limbaugh said. “Good parents must now treat their children like bad parents have to treat their kids so that they don't confer any unfair advantages on their kids.”
