Pediatrics Group Wants Parents to Read to Their Children Every Day

Pediatrics Group Wants Parents to Read to Their Children Every Day

USNWR-Health Day: 6.24.2014

All pediatricians should encourage parents to read out loud to their children every day, beginning in infancy, to promote literacy and strengthen family ties.

That clarion call comes in a new policy statement issued Tuesday by the American Academy of Pediatrics' Council on Early Childhood.

The aim of the recommendation is to help parents "immunize their children against illiteracy," said statement author Dr. Pamela High, director of developmental and behavioral pediatrics at Hasbro Children's Hospital in Providence, R.I., and a professor at Brown University.

In fact, literacy promotion should be part of residency training for any medical student entering pediatrics, the policy statement added.

"This is the first time the AAP has called out literacy promotion as being an essential component of primary care pediatric practice," High said. "Fewer than half of children are being read to every day by their families, and that number hasn't really changed since 2003. It's a public health message to parents of all income groups, that this early shared reading is both fun and rewarding."

The stakes are high. Every year, more than one of every three American children start kindergarten without the language skills they need to learn to read, a disadvantage from which it is hard to recover, High noted.

Reading proficiency by the third grade turns out to be the most important predictor of whether children will graduate high school and be successful in their careers, she said. About two-thirds of children in the United States and about 80 percent of those below the poverty threshold fail to develop reading proficiency by the end of the third grade.  READ MORE !

Literacy Promotion: An Essential Component of Primary Care Pediatric Practice

From the American Academy of Pediatrics

Policy Statement

Council on Early Childhood