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Cover of The Importance of Being Little

How long does it take to read The Importance of Being Little?

Erika Christakis

The Importance of Being Little by Erika Christakis takes about 6 hours 54 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.

About 6 hours 54 minutes

A weekend read

First published 2016. 376 pages, about 103,400 words.

14 days at 30 minutes a day

Estimate based on 275 words per page.

At other speeds

Slow, 150 words a minute 11 hours 29 minutes
Average, 250 words a minute 6 hours 54 minutes
Fast, 400 words a minute 4 hours 19 minutes

The page count is the median across 1 edition, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.

About the book

""Teach your children well. It's easier to sing than do. Erika Christakis wants to foment a revolution in early childhood education, and with this deeply insightful, scientifically grounded, and utterly original book, she may just get her way." --Dan Gilbert, author of Stumbling on Happiness A bold challenge to the conventional wisdom about early childhood, with a pragmatic program to encourage parents and teachers to rethink how and where young children learn best by taking the child's eye view of the learning environment To a four-year-old watching bulldozers at a construction site or chasing butterflies in flight, the world is awash with promise. Little children come into the world hardwired to learn in virtually any setting and about any matter. Yet in today's preschool and kindergarten classrooms, learning has been reduced to scripted lessons and suspect metrics that too often undervalue a child's intelligence while overtaxing the child's growing brain. These mismatched expectations wreak havoc on the family: parents fear that if they choose the "wrong" program, their child won't get into the "right" college. But Yale early childhood expert Erika Christakis says our fears are wildly misplaced. Our anxiety about preparing and safeguarding our children's future seems to have reached a fever pitch at a time when, ironically, science gives us more certainty than ever before that young children are exceptionally strong thinkers. In her pathbreaking book, Christakis explains what it's like to be a young child in America today, in a world designed by and for adults, where we have confused schooling with learning. She offers real-life solutions to real-life issues, with nuance and direction that takes us far beyond the usual prescriptions for fewer tests, more play. She looks at children's use of language, their artistic expressions, the way their imaginations grow, and how they build deep emotional bonds to stretch the boundaries of their small worlds. Rather than…

Subjects: Preschool Education, Parent participation, Education, preschool, Education, parent participation

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