ORIG./ The Bulletin employee in The Bulletin studio in Bend Wednesday morning 10-30-13. Andy Tullis/The Bulletin ORIG./ The Bulletin employee in The Bulletin studio in Bend Wednesday morning 10-30-13. Andy Tullis/The Bulletin

NeighborImpact, the anti-poverty agency, is on a mission. It’s gearing up to hand out some 2,500 books to children in Head Start preschools in Crook and Deschutes counties. No doubt for some of those 3- and 4-year-olds the books, donated by Toys for Tots, will be the first in their homes.

What a gift!

Having books available to young kids at home has some benefits that are readily apparent, I think, and others that may surprise you. In that latter category, consider this:

A 2010 international study done by researchers at the University of Nevada concluded, among other things, that children reared in households with at least 500 books in them got, on average, 3.2 more years of education than did other kids.

That was true even after researchers controlled for the effects of parent education, father’s occupation, gender, nationality (the study included 27 countries), political system and gross national product.

Ready access to books at home, in other words, can make a big difference in children’s lives and for the rest of their lives.

As the researchers put it, “A book-oriented home environment, we argue, endows children with tools that are directly useful in learning at school: vocabulary, information, comprehension skills, imagination, broad horizons of history and geography, familiarity with good writing, understanding of the importance of evidence in argument and many others.”

Other studies have shown that books at home make it easier for kids to learn to read, encourage them to read longer and better and improve their attitudes about learning.

Teachers know or suspect all that, as do librarians. The Deschutes Public Library system works to help parents unfamiliar with such ideas give those advantages to their kids in a variety of ways, not the least of which is a calendar with a month’s worth of reader-building ideas for parents and kids. In addition to the calendars, which are free for parents, the library offers workshops for groups interested in learning more about rearing readers.

I used to think that some families could skip such lessons.

If your childhood was something like mine, books were just part of growing up. Both my parents loved to read and both read aloud to us. I can remember learning to read by sitting on my father’s lap and picking first letters and later words out of headlines. My mother read to us daily, a tradition that continues in my family even now that my children are grown.

But I worry that for some families, particularly those with young parents, the idea of books in the home may somehow seem dated or downright old fashioned in this age of the Internet. Why, after all, have real books on a shelf or stacked beside a chair or on a bedside table when one can look up just about anything online?

Why indeed. In part, books are valuable because they’re not just something one reads or listens to. My kids used to love a small book called “Pat the Bunny,” with its pages of things to feel as the story progressed. Pop-up books offer surprises of their own, and books without such features have textures and even smells that can be found nowhere else, and certainly not on a computer screen.

That doesn’t mean I don’t think parents should use computers with young children, just that I think they should have real books around as well, as many as they can buy or borrow from the library. And, if they’ve never done so, they should give their children and themselves the genuine pleasure that comes from reading stories together, snuggled up on a couch or a rocker or somewhere else comfortable.

NeighborImpact’s book giveaway will give that opportunity to some families who might not otherwise have it. Like the books themselves, the act of sharing them with children is one of life’s gifts that should not be ignored.

— Janet Stevens is deputy editor of The Bulletin. Contact: 541-383-0821, jstevens@bendbulletin.com