Good afternoon, everyone. Sorry we are running a little bit behind today. On behalf of the American Enterprise institute i would like to welcome you for a talk with pamela paul about her recent book how to raise a reader. She coauthored with her colleague, maria russo. Colleague, maria russo. The Current Situation is untenable our kids have trouble with any kind of a structured activity but reading for pleasure is the activity that has suffered the most brick according to a recent analysis the share of americans who read for pleasure has fallen by more than 30 percent since 2004. If there is a way to reverse the trend it will have to start with their children and no one who can help us better than to learn how to share the joy they and pamela. She was the Childrens Book editor at the New York Times and has three children herself and also the author of six books and a host of the book review podcast. She and i will have a conversation and we will open to questions from the audience. Thank you so much and thank you for having me. I will start by telling a story that runs against my instinct and temperament which is boastful story about my kids i am more of the type that generally says something terrible and embarrassing but i am telling it for a reason. I was here for the National Book festival over Labor Day Weekend to help launch this book and took the train down with my three kids and my husband. We were on the train and we were seated separately so they were scattered around but we were tossing snacks to them so it was clear they were mine but as i got up to leave the train there was an older couple behind me the man stopped me and said excuse me are those your children . Normally that fills me with fear. And said i just have to say i am so heartened to see that they were all reading the whole way down here and actual books. His wife chimed in and said i was just reading the most interesting article about this very subject. She pointed to a piece to launch it and this is my piece its called no gold star for reading that i am not rewarding reading that in and of itself is the reward such a reward that is counterproductive. So i could not resist so i set i actually wrote that piece. So it is true that my kids are all readers they are now ten and 13 and 14. But i tell that story not to show off but because i wanted to relay what i think that people are really panicked about kids reading and they are freaked out. The reason why they are so afraid kids are not reading not only the value of books but what it signifies for themselves and our culture and society. For themselves, it is unquestioned reading is important there is a lot of research around it. We know reading is important to development and tied to academic success and we have research now that shows reading improves executive function and closely tied to a child social and Emotional Development in my personal opinion also makes better human beings. So now people are very eager to have their kids become readers. This wasnt the case in the seventies and eighties nobody cared if their kid was a reader. That wasnt a compliment they were more inclined to show up with a gymnast or somebody who had coordinated skills on the Playing Field and none of which i had. But now people really do want their kids to be readers. Their reading contest on the local level to get kids to read but yet as naomi suggested but it has succeeded. So i will talk about how i came to write this book and the findings. So it started off as a Digital Guide for the New York Times when i was demoted from Childrens Books editor to the book editor review as make it see it i was asked by a group at the time to create a guide for the website other people like how to meditate there is a guide for troubled times even though i have yet to meditate or how to live a better life and said what kind of guide could we do for reading and books . To me this is the obvious answer because this is what i wanted to do and in my position as Children Books editor and a parent of three kids i have many times wanted to do. We created a Digital Guide and it went online and went viral. The questions and comments poured in the most common was you would think it should be book and then thats what we did with all the research we had done with the advice and recommendations for books so we turned it into a book in short order. When i was a Children Books editor and even now i got a lot of questions from parents and what we wanted to do is address those questions they could be very basic a lot of times they just say my kid is into puppies i need graphic novels he hates photographs. Very specific request but then there are the other questions what do i do if my kid doesnt like to read . Or when shed my kid star reading or that shall chat Kindergarten Teacher said my child is two levels behind i dont know what to do about it. Them was a learn to read what they are choosing if theyre not reading enough or they are bored and wants to read graphic novels what if she doesnt want to do anything else . Do what we could see is there was a lot out there about what makes a reader, yes, i will move to the shot the slide shortly. Talking about some of those myths now i will do it with a visual aid. First, nothing is as important to raising a reader as reading aloud to your child this is what Everybody Knows that they are supposed to do and it is true you should read aloud to your child and there are lots of ways in which you do and dont read out loud that another interesting statistic is just as powerful as a number of books in your home is not immediately obvious but not tied to income or education level it isnt just something that people who have lots of money or books in their home have the advantage but anyone can do because as we all know they are incredibly easy so whats interesting is when you have books in your home they Say Something about your family culture and its also very hard one of the most annoying things to hear from a child is im bored. Its really hard to be bored if there are constantly looks around you. Not only in the library in the home but for each child if they dont have their own room of bookshelves in a shared room they like to collect and own things they should have a place for their own books that they manage on their own but they should also be throughout the house in the parlor or wherever the television is, the computers, the kitchen where cookbooks can be and other books about food and in the bathroom or they do a lot of reading if not on the ipad. So it is important to keep a book in the home to show that they matter to you to give kids the opportunity to read. If you dont own the book and take out 20 or 30 per week make sure you have a constant to the rotating subject but they dont always know what they want to read so take books that youre not sure my interest them are different kinds of books that are visual or subjects they are not familiar with. Give them the opportunity to turn to a book. Here is a myth that all parents think it is a developmental milestone the earlier they do it the better they will be but the analogy is that if a child learns to tie their shoelaces at age of four she is not better at the age of 25 then if she didnt learn until the age of ten the age your child learns to read is not related to future reading or cognitive ability. This is something many countries in europe a very well germany, scandinavian countries dont even begin teach reading until seven or eight because the Research Supports it that kids brains are not necessarily able to do the complicated decoding that reading requires and moreover if you do start to teach reading at an early age when a child is already they become frustrated and annoyed with negative feelings associated with reading and saying this is something i am not good at and with many years of anxiety and frustration that dont correlate well with a child that says that this is something that i want to do with my free time. There is zero correlation even from personal experience of my three kids and one reading the latest is now the more voracious of the three. Reading the same over and over mean your child is stuck. The number of parents with harry potter was the guilty thing my kid will just not stop she doesnt want to read anything else. Now people think its even worse with the graphic novels there is a lot of good to reading over and over and there is a reason kids do it and it changes for every age but its also true for adults. With babies and toddlers when you read them over and over and learn to recognize the words. They learn to memorize the text. If your child has memorized word books this goes back to always having books around when you run errands and you put board books into your bag so when you are in a moment where the kids are aboard a loan dashboard and waiting around in line or at a Doctors Office rather than pull out the phone you take out a book even if you are occupied even if they have memorized it they can read it to themselves than the feeling that i am a reader from a very early age. Older children benefit emotionally and cognitively for rereading books having a very bookish child myself the characters become your friends they are your social life and people you are familiar with. The world they live in realistic or fantastical are places that you want to be. For fantasy or a feeling of belonging. Its good for kids to reread and any adult those if you reread books as an adult you get Something Different from that each time if you read one at age 25 and then another at 40 then you have experienced some of it yourself and the passing of generation you might not have appreciated at 25 and you get more out of it think of a child was developing at every moment what they read six months from now if they are rereading it they will reread it in a different way than they previously read and get more out of the story and see new things because they are in a different place themselves so its really good for kids to reread work with their children in preschool to teach them how to read. This again feels like obvious because we all hear about Parent Involvement we are supposed to be supporting our childs education. We should but school is where children learn to read home is where they learn to love to read and thats a very different job for parents prick if you think about trying to get your kids to do something the mechanics to learn how to do something thats very different from getting your child to want to do something or choose to and enjoy something. If your child is struggling to learn how to read in school the last thing he was to do is replicate that at home. Was feeling bad about the fact he is in a and then he is a letter and you are forcing him at home dad again is continuing what might be a negative experience. So while he is struggling how to read at school then you could always consult a Reading Specialist but you can offset that negative experience and do something that is pleasurable in your home and with your child at night rather than have him read and struggle through those early level readers when they try to pronounce and connect the dots and phonics read a picture book. But also children enjoy books in many ways at the same time the first want to talk about harry potter. People think one of the milestones now is reading harry potter aloud to your kids. This is not your job. For a number of reasons. First of all not Everybody Loves harry potter some kids find them frightening or they dont like fantasy that jk rowling wrote the first four books for ages eight through 12 the last three are 12 and up she decided to grow the series along with her readers writing in real time and there is a turning point at the edge of book for when the main character dies and its very traumatizing for some children to process and transitioning from children to young adult and not every child is ready for it my kid read all seven of them in kindergarten that was the big thing people wanted to show off of your kid wasnt there yet but then to make sure that they were not being left behind by harry potter is the desert you do not have to feed harry potter to your kids that is a goal that is about reading being the reward if your child wants to read harry potter wait until she is ready to read those books and i let her read them herself. Why would you give that away cracks that is a motivation. There are a lot of series that are not great reading for parents. If you are a parent of girls you probably know rainbow fairies is a great series for little kids its a terrible series for adults there are 70000 of them written by a person who doesnt exist in the little girls love them but they are torture for a parent to read aloud the magic treehouse is similar a huge long series kids love them most parents leave them alone out loud want to kill themselves im not saying bad they have a function that they serve kids love them and they want to read them these are not books you have to read aloud to kids so once they read on their own leave picture books picture books should stay in the picture throughout childhood they have their own beauty and function and if people did not like looking at pictures well into adulthood there would be no instagram. What picture books allow for a child to do is to appreciate a richer vocabulary and to absorb artwork and visuals to understand that sequence of events and if your child is working on a book at school pat and the cat sat on the mat chances are his or her brain is well beyond what they are interested in with storytelling and if you say you are reading the books on your own i have to read anymore you are punishing them for becoming an independent reader especially if they have grown up in a home where that is a cherished family habit and pleasure now to pull that out at the moment they read on their own is punitive. And it denies them the opportunity to enjoy books that have a richer vocabulary that are more visually interesting to them than the early readers they get at school than at the same time you should continue to read aloud if youre reading the hobbit or little house on the prairie whatever the series might be to continue to do that because kids enjoy storytelling and all the various ways and just as many weights while we may enjoy reading Edith Wharton for fun you might also like to read a domestic thriller or spy novel or listen to books on audio we all like to enjoy books of different kinds at any given moment and kids are the same way. The best Childrens Books other classics. Again there are great classic books out there for kids if you look at the sales of Childrens Books in this country you will find the books that outsell all the new books in the aggregate are the classics there is a reason why because when we become new parents we say i cannot wait to share dr. Seuss or whatever our own favorite cherished book there is nothing wrong with that but the reason they go back to that is because they dont know the world that is out there and we have a new golden age of Childrens Books i dont just say that because i work at the book review i was so shocked by how good Childrens Books have become when i was an editor that i asked at the time for more pages and when i got them there is still more books that deserved attention so i started to write one online a week 52 more just to cover the greatness that is out there. They improve at every age and format even with board books with the books that kids can chew on are now available in other formats they are called indestructibles they are delivering the major go into the bathtub and sense of production has gone through so much they can do cutouts that use to be it was a picture book to adapt it to a board book format because it couldnt hold as many pages that now they have improved production to the point that i have to abridge them so they are better than ever. With picture books i cannot even describe is it a shame the book review has to be printed on newsprint because the glorious illustration of the quality of the stories is truly phenomenal also the diversity of the Childrens Books with the experiences and the children depicted in pages have improved enormously they reflect the reality of our world today you cannot publish a picture book today with all race faces not only children of color but that they are reflected but also children who are white and do not necessarily encounter that experience in their everyday life because they will thats the world theyre coming into and that is one of the most powerful path to foster empathy the way we can see through other peoples eyes. See their stories and learn about other experiences and this is something with picture books that all children can do. They are more global to have incredible children picture books coming from europe and latin america from asia to china that does not have a tradition of picture books they have started in producing incredible work and that is coming over here it is a world opening up to your kids. In terms of nonfiction they have gotten incredible when i was a kid and then i would go alphabetical looking for the girls Abigail Adams to Dolly Madison and essentially it was all first ladies and nurses and that was great then helen keller was the exception but now there are childrens biographies of everyone you can imagine from artist to entrepreneurs, writers, politics , Public Service sports heroes, across the spectrum and highly illustrated and beautifully produced a lot of board books the hero books for Young Children going through picture books for older children who are more visual readers who appreciate the rich photography and that photography produced because of the lower printing cost and production in asia it has gotten much better so a book of photographs that used to be unaffordable for most kids now National Geographic produces incredible photography books for kid