Read to Your Baby, Say Doctors — But Which Books?

Read to Your Baby, Say Doctors — But Which Books?

Time: 6.24.2014 by Lily Rothman

When her son was very small, Dr. Pamela High noticed something funny: she would come home and find the babysitter in the rocking chair with the boy, reading out loud from whatever book she happened to be working on herself at that moment. As her son got older and began to respond more to the words themselves, the babysitter switched to reading children’s books — but the image made an impression on his mother.

Now her son is grown up and High is the lead author of a new policy paper released by the American Academy of Pediatrics that recommends pediatricians advise parents to read aloud to young children “beginning in infancy,” to encourage word learning, literacy and positive family relationships. The report notes that reading to children is correlated with family income level — and, as the New York Times reports, Scholastic is donating 500,000 books to the literacy advocacy group Reach Out and Read, which works with pediatricians to get books to low-income families — but even in families that make 400% of the poverty threshold only 60% of children are read to daily.

But what exactly should they be reading? If your one-day-old baby doesn’t understand the words, does it even matter?

“I don’t think that there’s a huge amount of information on that,” High tells TIME, noting that her own experience with the sitter reading to her son is just an anecdote, not research. “The research is primarily about reading children’s books.”  READ MORE !

Literacy Promotion: An Essential Component of Primary Care Pediatric Practice

From the American Academy of Pediatrics

Policy Statement

Council on Early Childhood