What is the relationship between literacy and reading discipline?

This is "The Tale of Two Childhoods"

For Child A, it was the best of times:

Every night, he sat on his parent's lap and learned that . . .

Goodnight Moon teaches the names of familiar items, thanks to a mother rabbit.

Mother Goose teaches the poetry of sound awareness through alliteration, assonance, rhyme, and repetition.

Winnie the Pooh has sound relationships between words, like, "funny", "bunny", and "honey".

Curious George presents figurative language when George flies into the sky with balloons and finds that the, " . . . houses looked like toy houses and the people like dolls."

Frog and Toad teaches that empathy means friends help each other out.

George and Martha show that a good friend understands feelings.

"Once upon a time" is a clue to a genre with dragons, castles, and royalty.

These equations apply:

The more he is spoken to < understanding of oral language
The more he is read to < understanding of all language around & the more developed his vocabulary

By the time he is 18 months, his visual, attention, and conceptual systems have developed to where he knows that things have names.

Between 2-5 years old, he is learning an average of 2-4 new words every day.

By the time he is 3 1/2, he has experienced the reciprocal relationship between emotional development and reading. Marcel Proust has said that taking on someone else's perspective lies at the heart of communication through written language, which is now developing for Child A.

He draws a picture of himself playing soccer and labels it "YN".

When he is 5, he will have a 10,000-word repertoire. Best of all, he has associated the act of reading with a sense of being loved. According to Wolf (2007), he has spent 5 years " . . . developing highly complex cognitive, linguistic, perceptual, social, and affective abilities which flourish best in rich environmental interactions". Gee would agree that he is learning to perceive words analytically in the most effortless way. Child A is now ready for the reading discipline.

Now it's time for the second story:

It was the worst of times for Child B

He lives in poverty . . . word poverty. There are no books in his home. He has missed being talked to, read to, and listened to; all the important aspects of early language development. According to a study by Risley and Hart, when he enters Kindergarten he has heard 32 million less words than Child A. He will be in the lower quartile for vocabulary development and will remain behind. By 6th grade, he and Child A will be separated by 3 grade-levels in reading.

An impassioned plea:

Instead of a war zone for Child B, we can make his preschool years rich with language development by something as simple as educating parents about "dinner talk" and providing free developmentally-appropriate books for him before he enters Kindergarten. My 13-yr-old nephew is rounding up as many books as he can for children on the Navajo reservation just outside of Chinle, Arizona and parts of northwestern New Mexico. His dream is to provide every home with books. If you want to help him, please let me know. Leveling the playing field isn't really that hard.