Perhaps and a bug of our healthing age, but i think this attitude often fails to promote a sense of independence in kids. Not only do they not know how to walk down the street by themselves but theyre also pretty much incapable of entertaining themselves without a device in hand. So for reasons both selfish, patients need a break, and selfless, we know this is an important life skill for. The, i think the Current Situation is pretty untenable. Our kid have trouble with any kind of unstructured activity but reading for pleasure is perhaps the activity that i think has suffered the most. According to a recent analysis of the American Time use study, the share of americans who read for pleasure has actually fallen by more than 30 since 2004. So if there is a way to reverse this trend, i think it will have to start with our children, and i can think of no one who can help us better to learn how to share the joy of reading with children than pamela. Before rising to her current position she was the Childrens Book editor at the New York Times, she has three children herself. And she is also the author of six books and the host of the book review podcast. After pamela talks about he research and book well have a conversation and then well open it up to questions from the audience. So with that ill turn it over to pamela. Thank you. Thanks so much. Thank you for having me. I will start by telling a story that kind of runs against my instincts and temper little. A kind of boastful story about my kids and im more of the type that generally relates something terrible and embarrassing that my kid he have done but im telling it for a reason. This is something that happened my last time in d. C. , i came down for the National Book festival over labor day weekend, to help launch this book, how to raise a reader, and took the train down with my three kids and my husband, and we were on the train, and we get seated separately. So they were kind of scattered around but we were passing things to, the snacks and whatnot. It was clear they were mine but as i gets to up lead the train and was gathering mill family there was an older couple behind me and the man stopped me and said, excuse me, are those your children . Usually that kind of fills me we fear. Oh, no. What have they done i said, yes. A little bit tentatively. He said, i just have to say that i am so heartened to see that they were all reading their whole way down here and they were reading actual books. So i kind of thought, okay. Then his wife chimed in and said, i was just reading the most interesting article in the New York Times about this very subject. And she pointed to a piece that when you have a book coming out you write a piece to launch it and this is my piece for the oped section of the time called no gold star for reading. About not rewarding reading, that reading is a reward and that in fact to reward read is counterproductive. And so i couldnt resist. It was my kind of dish have marshal mccloughan right here moment and i said i actually wrote that piece, so it is in fact true, my kids are all readers. Theyre now 10, 13 and 14. But the reason i tell that story is not especially to show off but because i wanted to relay what i think naomi alluded to which is that people are really panicked about kids reading. Theyre freaked out. And i think the reason why people are so afraid of kids reading is because not only the value of books but what it signifies for themselves and for our culture and for society. For themselves, for kids themselves issue think that it is unquestioned at this point that reading is important. Theres a lot of research around it. We know that reading is important to cognitive development. We know that it is tied to academic success. We also have research enough that shows that reading improves executive function, that its closely tied to a childs social and emotional development, and my personal opinion is that is also just makes us better human beings, and so now people are very eager to have their kids become readers. This really wasnt the case, i want to say in the 70s and 80s when i was coming of age. No one trotted out their okayed and said shes such a reader you think but the word book worm, its not a massive commit. People were nor cleaned to show a gymnast or violin player. But now people really do want their kids to be readers. There are reading contests and efforts on the local level to get kids to read, and yet as naomi suggested, the research isnt necessarily that strongly supporting the fact its succeeded. So, i will talk about how i came to write this book and then some of the findings. So, this book started off as a Digital Guide for the New York Times when i was demoted as my kids see it from chirps book editor to editor of the book review in 2013 and hired a new Childrens Book editor, maria rules rousseau, i was asked to create a guide for the website. We had done guides on things like how to meditate, a guide that is rate self times even though i have not tried to meditate and they said what kind of guide can we do for reading and books, and to me this was the obvious answer. How to raise a reader. Its something i always wented to do some something in my position as Childrens Books editor and a parent of have to kids i knew that many parents wanted to. Do so marie and i get together, created a Digital Guide, and it went online, and it went viral as they say, and the questions and comments from parents flowed in and one of the most common was, lou toy turn the into a book. You think a guide about how to rates a read sheer be a back and thats we did was to expand on the research that we had done and the advice we had, and the recommendations for books. So we had for kids. So we turned it into a book in short order. When i was a Childrens Book editor and even ongoing in this job now, i got a lot of questions from parents and a lot of what we wanted to do in the book was to address those questions. The questions can be very basic, a lot of times parents just come to me and say, my kid is into puppies but not sad stories and he likes graphic novels and doesnt like losts of texts and hates photographs. What should he read so very specific questions to suggests and then the bigger exsend shall questions like what die dive my kid doesnt like to read or when should my kid start reading or my child residents Kindergarten Teacher says hi child is two levels hip where he is supposed to be and i dont know what to do about. I then once kid learn to read, they worry about what if my child isnt choosing to read, not read enough, says that reading is boring, what if she only wants to read graphic novels, what if if since she got instagram she doesnt want to do nigglings. So, what we perceived in these questions was that there are a lot of myths out there around reading, about what makes a reader, what ah, yes, ill move to the side shortly. But ill talk about some of those myths. And ill do it with a visual aid. Fir myth. Nothing is as important to raising a reader as reading aloud to your child. This is the thing that Everybody Knows that they are supposed to do, and in fact it is true, you should read aloud to your child and there are a lot of ways in which you sort of dos and donts around how to read aloud to a child. Another thing statistic that is just as powerful as reading aloud to your child is the number of books in your home. This is really important. Its not necessarily immediately obvious, but its not tied to income or education level. So this isnt just something that people who have a lot of money and therefore lots of books in their home have an advantage. This i something that anyone can do because as will our know, used books are incontracted by easy to acquire online and can go to the library. What is interesting is that when you have books in your home, youre saying something about your family, about your family culture, which is that reading is prized. And its also very hard and im sure anyone here who has children knows that one of the most annoying things to hear from a child is, im bored. Its really hard to be poured if there are constantly books around you. And books not only in the library in the home but books for each child if they dont have their own room, become shelf in a shared room. Kid like to collect, like to own things. They should have a place for their own books they manage on their own but books should also be throughout the house. Books should be in the parlor, where television is, the excite. Should be in the kitchen where cookbooks can be and other book about food, in the bathroom where everyones to a lot of leading if theyre not on the ipad. Obviously. The former is better then latter. So its really important to keep books in the home to show that beaks are something that matters to you and to give kids the opportunity to read. If you dont own the books and you go to the library and take out 20 or 30 books a week, maimed sure you have constant rotating cast of books and the other thing to remember is kids dont always know what they want to read. Theyre still developing book that arent subject they might not be familiar with to always allow them to opportunity to turn to a book. Another myth. This earlier a child learns to read the better reader he will with for life april. Myth thats easy to believe because all paints thinks in term of developmental milestones. I its natural to think the earlier the die something the better theyll be but the analogy is shoe laces if a child leaderships to tie her shoe laces at the age of 4 its not going to make her a better shoe lace tire at the age of 202 and the same thing guess for reading. The age your child learns to read is not related to future reading or cognitive ability. This is something that many countries in europe know very well. Germany, scandinavian countries dont begin teach to go reading until age seven or eight because the research sorts it. Kids brains arent necessarily all able to da the kind of complicate decoding that reading requires. And that moreover if you do start to teach reading at a very early age, threat or for our five when a children isnt ready they become frustrate, become annoyed, they have negative feelings soed with raving and think is is something im not good at. And it leads to a lot of many years of anxiety and frustration that dont correlate well with a child that says this is something i want to do with my free time. So, there is zero correlation. I can say even just from personal experience with three kid, the one who is reading the latest is the most ambitious and voracious reader of the three. Theres another myth. Reading the same book over and over means your child is stuck i. Cant tell you the number officer parents who first it was harry potter the guilty thing, my kid will not stop reading harry potter. She doesnt want to read anything our now. Enough its dog man. The terrific graphic novels. If have reeye sures, theyre a lot oft got to reading over and over and theres a rope that kids do it, and it changes for every age but its true for adults. With babies and toddlers they benefit from you reading the books over and over again. They learn to recognize the words. Word recognition is a big part of reading. They learn to enemy rise the text. If your child has memorized board books goeses to always having books around when you good out and you runner rans you talk in board books into your bag so when you end in the moment that happens to all parents where your kid bored and waiting around, whether its on the line to the Grocery Store or aft a doctors office, rather than do the easy thing and pull out a phone and hand it to your child you take a board book and even if youre occupied, if they me. Rised that book they can read it to themselves and then again, that builds confidence and a feeling that i am a reader from the very early age. And then older children benefit emotionally and cognitively from rereading books fork kidses and i say this from personal experience, having been a bookish child myself, when you read the characters become your friends. Theyre your social life. These are people youre familiar with. The worlds they live in whether theyre realistic or fantastickiccal, places your want to be. Theyre comfort zone s, places for fantasy and also for a feeling of belonging. And so its good for kids to reread and i think as any adult knows when you reread a back as an document you get Something Different from it each time. Of are you reread a book at 40 you actually have experienced some of that yourself. Parenthood and loss and the passing of generations. You might not have appreciated when you were 25, and you get more out of it. If you think but a child who is developing at every moment, what they read six months from now if they reread something the raved it in a different way. Get more out of that story, see knew things in it because they are not only getting to know it better and are in a different place themselves so its really good for kids to reread and not worry that theyre stuck. Tooting my. Parents should work with their children starting in preschool to teach them how to read and help them progress year by year. This feels like an obvious. Of course because we hear parent vomiter and support or childs education and all of that is true. But school is where children learn to read. Home is where children learn to love to read and that is a very different job for parents. If you think about trying to get your kids to do something, to get to the maybe janiks to learn how to do something, thats very different from getting your child want to do something to choose to do something to enjoy something. And so if youre child is struggling, to learn how to read in school, the last thing that he is going want to do is have the experience replicated at home. If he is feeling bad about the fact he is in group x and everyone else in his class is in group n and then youre forcing him to go through those leveled read evidence at home that again is sort of its continuing what might be a negative experience. So, while he is struggling to learn how to read at school, trust your teacher to do that job, and if you have doubts, you, always consult your reading specialist. What your josh as parent to do is offset if thats a negative experience, make sure that back are something that are pleasurable that its pleasure, not pressure in your home, when you with your child at night, rather than have him read and struggle through the bob books or early leveled readers, trying to pronounce and sort of connect the dots in phonics, you can read a lot of picture book to them, and when one thing that is very important will get to this in the next one children enjoy books in many different waits at the same time. Ill get to that. First i just want to talk but harry potter. People thing that one over milestones now of childhood is reading harry potter aloud to your kids. This i not your job. Not your parent the parents job. No a number of reasons. No everyone loves harry potter. A lot of kids dont like fantasy but jr rowling rote rote the writer backs for age 12 and the last ones for from 12 and up. She dvded to grow the series with her reader as she what riteing realtime in theres a turning point in book 4 where one over main characters, cedrick no spoiler here dires and that is a very traumatizing thing for some children to process, and that is the transition from Childrens Books to young adult books, and not every child is ready for it when my kids were little everyone what showing off miskid read all seven harry potter in considering and that was the big thing that people wanted to show off about so if your kid wasnt there yet, what diparents do . Hey read it aloud to make sure their kids didnt feel like they were being left behind but but harry potter this he dessert. You do not have to feet harry potter to your kids. Thats a goal for. The, bed reading being the reward. I your child wants to read harry potter wait until she is ready to read the books and then let her read them herself. Thats the motivator for him. There are a lot of series that are really not great reading for parents. And i dont know how many parents of Young Children there are but if youre a parent of girls, you probably know rainbow fair riz. A great series for kid and terrible for adults. Theyre written by a nonperson named daisied inows who doesnt exist, and with girls who four, five, six, seven, eight, love them. They are torture for a parent to read aloud. The magic treehouse, similar. Huge long series, kids love them. Most parents have to read them aloud want to kill themselves after the fourth book because they all start with the same prologue. Im not saying anything bad. They serve a function. And the function they serve is that kids love them. And so they want to read in order to read this book. Those are not books you need to read aloud to kids. And then this gets to the point which is once theyre reading on their own, move on from picture books. Not true. Picture books should stay in the picture all throughout childhood andon. Picture books theyve their own beauty and own function and if people didnt like looking at picture well interest adulthood there would be no instagram. So, what picture books allow for a child to do is to appreciate a richer vocabulary to be able to absorb artwork and visuals to understand how to read pictures are, to follow the sequence of events through the art of verbal story telling and if your child is working on a book at school that pat and the cat sat on the mat. Chances are his or her brain is well beyond that in terms of what they are interesting in with story telling, and if you say, oh, as soon as youre reading this book on your own i wont read anymore to you, youre essentially punishing them for becoming an independent reader and for men kid especially if theyve green up in a home where reading aloud to your child is a cherished family habit and pleasure, to sort of pull out from underneath them at the moment theyre reading on their own is punitive. And moreover, it denies them the opportunity to enjoy books that have a richer vocabulary that are more visually interesting to them than the kind of early readers theyre getting at the at school. Is a you should continue to read aloud nonpicture bookers to them but if youre raving the hob built allow loud or little house on the prairie, whatever the series to continue to do that because kids are like adults. They enjoy story telling in all of its sort of various ways, and just like to raved, domestic thriller or spy novel. Like to listen to books on audio. So we all like to enjoy books of different kinds at any given moment and kids are the same way. Thats children poock the best Childrens Books their classics, this is