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The study showed that having more books was correlated with children being more successful, but that doesn't mean that having more books on shelves is actually the cause. It's more likely that the kind of parents that have high quality books have qualities that would make their kids successful, regardless of the books on the shelves.

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This was discussed:

> The implications are clear: Owning books in the home is one of the best things you can do for your children academically. It helps, of course, if parents are reading to their children and reading themselves, not simply buying books by the yard as décor.

> “It is a big question of whether it’s the books themselves or the parental scholarly culture that matters — we’re guessing it’s somewhere in between,” said Mariah Evans, one of the study’s authors and an associate professor of sociology at the University of Nevada, Reno. “The books partly reflect intelligence.”

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