A woman in a green sari sits with a child in a sunlit room at home.

Is My Child Missing Out Because We Don't Live in a Big City?

Reading Habits·October 19, 2026·3 min read·0–3 yrs3–5 yrs6–8 yrs9–12 yrs

You scroll through some other parent's photo of a weekend at a big-city bookstore — the beanbags, the shelves that go up to the ceiling, the author event — and you're nowhere near any of that. There's no proper children's bookshop in your town, and the nearest big one is a two-hour drive. It's a specific, quiet worry: is my child simply getting less than a child in Bangalore or Mumbai, through no fault of either of us?

It's worth separating the real part of that worry from the part that isn't backed by much.

The core finding

Evans, Kelley, Sikora & Treiman (2010, Research in Social Stratification and Mobility) tracked literacy outcomes across 27 nations and found that the number of books in a child's home — not the size of the nearest bookstore, not the city the family lived in — was one of the strongest predictors of how far that child's education went. A home with even a modest shelf of books, consistently added to, mattered more than proximity to an impressive store most families visit a few times a year anyway.

The bigger picture

What a big-city bookstore actually offers isn't magic; it's choice and exposure, delivered in one place. Both of those can arrive by other routes — a school or community library, books passed between cousins and neighbours, a rotating set of titles that comes to your door instead of you going to find them. The thing that's genuinely harder in a smaller town is stumbling on variety by accident, the way you might browsing a big store's shelves. That part is a real, specific gap. But it's a narrower gap than "my child is missing out," and it's one that's fixable without a two-hour drive.

Where it's genuinely uncertain

No study we're aware of directly compares reading outcomes between India's metro cities and its smaller towns specifically — the Evans et al. research is international and general, not an India-tier-by-tier study, so treat the comparison as a reasonable inference rather than a direct finding. It's also true, just from how bookselling works, that smaller towns generally have fewer dedicated children's bookstores and library branches than metros do. That part isn't in dispute; what's in dispute is whether it translates into a real difference in a specific child's reading, once books are actually reaching the house.

What this means this week

Count what's already on the shelf at home, even if it's twelve books, not two hundred. That number mattering more than store size is the actual finding here.
Ask your child's school librarian (most have one, even in smaller towns) what's available to borrow — it's an underused resource precisely because it's not as visible as a bookstore.
If you're ordering online anyway, aim for a rotating set rather than the same five titles reread for months — variety, not volume, is the piece that's genuinely harder to get without a big store nearby.
Let go of the comparison to the bookstore photo. It's one afternoon's experience, not a measure of how your child's reading is actually going.

Sources

Evans, M. D. R., Kelley, J., Sikora, J., & Treiman, D. J. (2010). Family scholarly culture and educational success: Books and schooling in 27 nations. Research in Social Stratification and Mobility, 28(2), 171–197.