And age but its a sense of independence in kids. Not only do they not know how to walk down the street by themselves but there are also be much people entertaining themselves, at least without a device in their hand. For reasons both selfish and selfless, this is an important life skill for them, the Current Situation is obtainable. His have trouble with any kind of unstructured activity but reading for pleasure is perhaps the activity i think has suffered the most according to a recent analysis of the American Family study. The share of americans who read for pleasure has fallen by more than 30 since 2004. If theres a way to reverse this trend, i think youll have to start with our children and wife can think of no one who can help us better to learn how to share the joy of reading with children before rising to her current position, should be Childrens Book editor of the New York Times. She has three children herself. Shes also the author of six books and a host of the book review podcast. I asked about her book for a bit, she and i are going to have a conversation and open it up to questions from the audience. Thank you for having me. I will start by telling a story that kind of runs against my instincts which is its boastful story about my kids and i, more the type that did something terrible and embarrassing my kids have done but im telling it for a reason. First of all, this will happen last time in d. C. I came down for the National Book festival over Labor Day Weekend to help launch this bo book, how to raise our reader. We were on the train and they were separate, they were scattered around. It is clear. As i was leaving the train, my family, there is an older couple behind me and a man stopped me and said excuse me, are those your children . Usually instills me a little bit of fear. When are they done . So i said yes a little tentatively and he said i have to say that i am so hardened to seek they were all reading their whole way down here, reading actual books. I thought okay well, his wife chimed in and said i was just reading the most interesting article in the New York Times about this very subject. She pointed to a piece when you have a book coming out, to logic and this is my piece about the times called i think its called noble start for reading about not rewarding reading, reading in and of itself is rewarding and that, to reward reading is counterproductive. So i couldnt resist, i had this moment and said i wrote that piece so it is true. My kids are all readers. They are ten, 13 and 14. The reason i tell the story is not to show off but because i wanted to relay i think naomi alluded to which is that people are really panicked about kids reading. I think the reason why people are so afraid of kids reading is because not only the value of books but what it signifies both for themselves in our culture and for society. For themselves, i think it is unquestioned that reading is important. Theres a lot of research around it. We know reading is important to cognitive development, for academic success and we have Research Shows that reading improves executive function products closely tied to a childs social and Emotional Development and my personal opinion is that it also makes us utter human beings so now people are very eager to have the kids become readers. This wasnt the case in the 70s and 80s when i was coming of age. No one said to the kid, there such a reader. Its a massive complement, people are more inclined to show up for a gymnast or violin player or somebody with basic coordinated fields on a playing field. But now people want their kids to be readers. There are reading contests and all kind of things on the local level to get to read. Yet, as naomi suggested, the research isnt necessarily hurting, the fact that it has succeeded. Ill talk a little about how i came to write this book. This book started off as a Digital Guide for the New York Times. When i was demoted from Childrens Book editor to editor of the book review in 2013, hired a new book editor, is asked by a group at the time to create kind of guide for the website. They had done guides on things like how to medicate, even though i have yet to try to meditate. And how to live a better life and they said what about reading and books . To me, this was the obvious book answer, how to raise our reader. My position as Children Books, i knew many times i wanted to do this. So we got together and created a Digital Guide and it went online and it went viral. The questions and comments floating in one of the most common ones was turning into a book. You think guide should be a book. So thats what we did which was to expand on all of the research we have done in the advice we had and recommendations for books that we had four kids. So we charted into a book in short order. And i was the Childrens Books editor. I got a lot of questions from parents and a lot of what we wanted to do in the book was to address the questions. The questions can be very basic. A lot of times parents come to me and say my kid is into puppies but not sad stories, likes graphic novels and he doesnt like tech, question he read . Very specific for suggestions but then other questions like what do i do if my kid doesnt like to read . When should my kid start reading . Or my child Kindergarten Teacher said my kid is to levels behind where hes supposed to do and i dont know what to do about it. They worry if i child is not choosing to read or what if they are not reading enough. She only wants to read graphic novels . What a farmer since she got instagram, she doesnt want to do anything else . What we have perceived in these questions, there are a lot of myths out there around reading, what makes our reader, yes. I will move to the side, shortly. They talk about some of those myths, i will now do it with a visual aid. Nothing is as important to raising our reader as reading aloud to your child. This is the thing Everybody Knows they are supposed to do. That is true. You should read aloud to your child and there are lots of ways in which their dues and donts but another interesting statistics is the number of books in your home. This is really important, and its not necessarily immediately obvious but its not tied to income or education level. This is not just something people have lots of money and therefore have lots of books in the home have an advantage. This is something anyone can do because books, especially used books are easy to acquire online. Whats interesting is that when you have books in your home, you are saying something about your family and family culture. Reading is comprised. Its also very hard and im sure anyone who has children knows that one of the most annoying things is to hear your child say im bored. Its hard to be bored if there are constantly books around you. Books not only in the library but books for each child, they dont have their own room, a bookshelf 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. Books should also be throughout the house. Book should be in the parlor, wherever the television is, where the computers are. They should be in the kitchen. The cooks books can be and in the bathroom for everyone does a lot of reading if they are not on the ipad. The former is better than the latter so its really important to keep a book in the home to shut books or something that matters to you and to give kids the opportunity to read. If you dont own the books and go to the library and pick up 20 or 30 books a week, have a constant rotating collection of books there. They dont always know what they want to read, they are still developing their interests. Take out different kinds of books, books that are more visual, books they may not be familiar with. Always allow them the opportunity to turn to a book. You have milestones, its natural for us to think earlier do something, the better they will be but the analogy i like to think of his shoelaces. If they know how to tie the shoelaces at the airport, it will not make them a better shoelace tire at the age of 25 then if they did if they learned at ten. Its not belated to future reading or cognitive ability. Germany, scandinavian countries, they are even begin teaching reading until seven or eight. They dont do that because the Research Supports it. Kids brains arent necessarily all able to do the kind of complicated decoding that reading requires. Moreover, if you just start to teach reading at an early age, three or four or five my child isnt ready, they get frustrated, annoyed, they have negative feelings associated with readings. Its something im not good at. Its not for me. It creates a lot of anxiety in many years. This is something i actually want to do with my free time if you wait. There is no correlation, even from personal experience with my three kids, one whose reading the latest is the most ambitious reader. I cant tell you the number of parents, harry potter was the guilty thing. My daughter doesnt want to read anything other than harry potter. Its even worse, these terrible graphic novels. Theres actually a lot of good to reading over and over. As a reason kids do it and it changes every age but its true for adults, too. They benefit from he reading those books over and over again. They learn to recognize a word, word recognition is a big part of reading. They memorized the text from another big part. This is and always having books around, when you go out and talk board books in your bag so when you end up in an inevitable moment, when kids are bored and waiting around in the line at the Grocery Store or at a doctors office, easy thing is to plot a phone and handed it to your child but take out a board book instead. If theyve memorized the book, they can read it to themselves and again, that builds confidence and a feeling that i am a reader. At an early age. Older children benefit emotionally and cognitively from rereading books. For kids, this is from personal experience, when you read, the characters become your friends. These are people who are familiar with. The world they live in, whether they are realistic or fantastical, places that you want to be, their comfort zone. Cap places for fantasy but also for a feeling of belonging. Its good for kids to read. As any adult knows, when you recreate a book, as an adult, get Something Different for each time. If you recreate, you recreate from 25 and that 40, you experience that yourself. The passing of generations but you might not have appreciated that at 25 and you get more out of it. If you think of a child whose developing at every moment, what they read six months from now, they are going to read it in a different way the previous read it. They are going to get more from it. They will see more things from it because theyre getting to know it better and they are also in a different place themselves. Its really good for kids to. Reporter and not worry that they are stuck. Parents should work with their children starting in preschool to teach them how to read and progress year by year. We all hear about this, we are supposed to support our childs education and all that is true. We should be doing those things but home is where the children love to learn to love to read. Try to get your kids to do something, to learn how to do something, thats very different from getting your child to want to do something, to choose to do something and enjoy something. If your child is struggling to learn how to read in school, the last thing he will want to do is have the experience replicated at home. If hes feeling bad, hes in group k and everyone else is in group and you are forcing him to go through those leveled readers at home, its continuing what might be of negative experience so while hes struggling how to read at school, trust your teacher to do the job. You can always consult your Reading Specialist but what your supposed to do as a parent, you can make sure books are something that are pleasurable and distant pressure in your home. When you read with your child at night, rather than have him plead early level readers, trying to pronounce and connect the dots in phonics, read aloud a picture book to them. One thing that is important look at two in the next one, and a couple of minutes, children enjoy books and many different ways same time, i want to talk about harry potter. A lot of people think one of the milestones now is reading harry potter about your kids. This is not your job. For a number of reasons. First of all, not everyone loves harry potter. I love it but a lot of kids dont. They find them fighting. Jk rowling wrote this is a middle grade book which has been for ages eight to 12. Alpha 12 and up. She desires to grow with her readers as shes writing in real time as a turning. Where one of the main characters, i hope im not spoilt, dice and thats a very traumatizing for some children to process. Thats a transition from childrens to young adult books and not every child is ready for that. My kids were little, my kid read all harry potter books in kindergarten that was the thing people wanted to show off about. So what do they do if their kids couldnt read it . They read aloud to their kids. But harry potter is a desert. You do not have to feed harry potter to your kids. That circle, something to aspire. Thats about reading being the reward. If your child wants to read harry potter, wait until shes ready to read those books and let her read them herself. Why would you take that away . As the moderator. There a lot of series that are not great reading for parents. I dont know how many parents of Young Children there are in this room but if youre part of it, you probably know rainbow fairies, its a great series for little kids. Its a terrible series for adults. About 70000 of them. She this nonperson, daisy doesnt exist. Girls for to eight love them. They are torture for parents to read aloud. Magic treehouse, a huge long series, kids love them. Most parents have to read them aloud and want to kill themselves. They all save the same prologue. The function they have is that kids love them so they want to read. Cannot books you need to read aloud to kids. Then heres the point, once they are reading on their own, this is not true picture books should stay in the pictures throughout out childhood. They have their own beauty and function if people dont like looking at pictures well into adulthood, there would be no instagram. What picture books allow for a child to do is to appreciate richer vocabulary, absorb our visuals and understand how to read pictures through the art of visual storytelling and if your child is working on a book at school, pat the cat sat on the mat, chances are his or her brain is well beyond that in terms of what they are interested in with storytelling. If you say as soon as you are reading this book, im not going to read anymore, youre essentially punishing them for becoming an independent reader. Reading aloud to your child is a pleasure, its pulled out from underneath them. That is punitive. Moreover, it denies them the opportunity to enjoy books that have a richer vocabulary that are visually interesting to them than the early readers they are getting at school. In a similar way, at the same time they are struggling, you should continue to read aloud non picture books but if youre reading the hobbit aloud to them or little house on the prairie or whatever the series might be, continue to do that because kids are like adults. They enjoy storytelling in all of its various ways and just as many of us, while we might enjoy reading is important for fun, we might also occasionally like to read a domestic or a novel or books on audio. We all like to enjoy books of different kinds at any given moment in kids are the same way. The best Children Books are the classics. Again, its kind of a mess. Their great classic books out there for kids. If you look at the sales of Children Books in these country, you will find the books have continued to out sale all of the new books. Theres a reason why its because when all of us become new parents or grandparents, you think i cant wait to share blueberries for south or dr. Seuss or whatever our favorites are from childhood. Theres nothing wrong with that but i think the reason people go back to that is because they dont know that whole world out there. We are living in a new golden age for children book. I dont just say that because i work at the book review i didnt just say that as a Childrens Books editor, i was so shocked by how good Children Books have become. I asked at the time i was not editor, i asked for more pages and when i got more pages, there were still more books that deserved attention and i continued to write so i wrote one Online Review of week. Just to be able to cover a small sliver of the greatness thats out there. The books have improved at every age and every format. Even Something Like board books, the books can be chewed on. There are books that are deliberately created to go in the bathtub, there are all kinds of board books and because of production improving so much, the way the books can be created, there are things they can do, cut outs. It used to be you would have to abridge a picture book because the board book couldnt hold as many pages. Now they have improved the production so they dont have to do that. They are better than ever. With picture books, i cannot even describe to you, its such a shame the book review has to be printed on newsprint because of the glorious illustration and quality of the story is truly phenomenal. The diversity of the Children Books in terms of the kinds of experiences and the children who are depicted in their pages has improved enormously. They reflect the reality of our world today. You cannot publish a picture book today with those phrases. It is not good only for childr children, its even reflected in the pages of the books they read but its also good for children who do not necessarily encounter this experience in their everyday life because they well. Thus the world they are coming into. Books like this is the most powerful to fostering empathy. Its a weight in which we can see through other peoples e