Her recent book how to raise our leader. She coauthored her colleague. So much of raising children these days seems to be about what we dont want them to do, keeping them away from dangerous both real and virtual, no doubt this is a feature, about our helicopter age but this attitude often fails to promote a sense of independence in kids. Not only do they not know how to walk the street by themselves but they are also pretty much incapable of entertaining themselves at least without a device in hand. So for reasons both selfish, parents need a break in his office, we know its an important life skill for them, i think the Current Situation is untenable, they have trouble with the kind of unstructured activity but reading for pleasure is perhaps the activity that has suffered the most according to a recent analysis of the american timing study, share of americans who read for pleasure has fallen by more than 30 2004. So if theres a way to reverse this trend from i think i 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 and pamela. Before rising to her current position, she was the 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. She talks about her books a little bit, she and i are going to have a conversation and then will open up to questions from the audience. But, i will turn it over to pamela. Thank you. I will start by telling a story that runs against my instincts and temperament which is story about my kids and i more of a type that generally relates to terrible embarrassing things my kids have done but im telling it for a reason. First of all, this happened the 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 our reader. The came down with my three kids and my husband and we were on the train and we got seated separately so they were scattered around but we were sort of passing things to them, snacks and whatnot so i think it was clear they were mine but as i got up to leave, my family, there is an older couple behind me and the man stopped me and said excuse me, are those your children . Usually that fills me with fear like zero no, what have they done . So i said yes, a little bit tentatively and he said i just have to stay, i am so heartened to see that they were all reading the whole way down here and they were reading actual books. I thought okay, 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 that, as you know when you have a book coming out, you often write a piece, this was the case for the section of the times called i think its called dark reading about rewarding reading, reading and end up its out is the reward and that to reward reading is counterproductive. So i couldnt resist, it wasnt kind of my i have marshall book one from its i said i actually wrote that piece. So it is true, my kids are all reasons, there ten, 13 and 14. I wanted to relay what i think she alluded to, people are really panicked about kids reading. They are freaked out. I think the reason why people are so afraid of kids reading is because only the value of books but what it signifies both for themselves and are culture and society. For themselves, forget themselves i think that it is unquestioned at this time that reading is important, because a lot of research around, we know reading is important for cognitive development, its tied to academic success, we also have researched now that shows reading improves executive function, its closely tied to us child social and Emotional Development in my personal opinion is that it makes us better 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, nobody said they are such a reader, if you think about the work performed, its not exactly massive complement, people were more inclined to show off about a gymnast or violent player or someone with basic coordinated skills on a playing field. None of which i had but now, people really do want their kids to be readers, they are having reading contests, theres all kinds of things on the local level to get kids to read and yes, as naomi suggested, the research isnt necessarily about the fact that it has succeeded. Ill talk about how i came to write this book and some of the findings. This book started off as a Digital Guide for the New York Times when i was demoted, as i kids see it, i knew editor, i was asked by a group at the time to create guide for the website, we had done things like how to meditate from even though i have yet to try to meditate and others that live a better life and it came to me and said what can you do for reading and books . To me this was the obvious answer. How to raise our reader because of something ive always wanted to do and its something in my position as Childrens Books editor, this is a parent of three kids, i knew many times its something i wanted to do. Maria and i got together and we created a Digital Guide and went online and i went viral and the questions and comments from parents vote and in one of the comments were, how to print this out and turn it into a book . You would think guide about how to raise our reader is a book so that what we did. It expands on all of the research we had done and the advice we had and recommendations for books. So we had that, we turned 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 want to do in the book was to address those questions. The questions were very basic a lot of times parents just come to me and say, my kid is into puppies but not stories, he likes graphic novels but he doesnt like text and hate photographs, or should he read . Very specific requests or suggestions but then there are bigger questions like what right do if my kid doesnt like to read . When should my kid start reading . My child inadvertent teacher says my child is to levels behind where hes supposed to be and i dont know what to do about it. Then once kids learn to read, they worry about what is my one of my child is not choosing to read or what if they say its burning her for not reading enough, what if they only read graphic novels, shes got instagram from she doesnt want to do anything else. What we perceived in these questions, there are a lot of myths out there around reading, about what makes a reader yes, i will allude to that shortly. Ill talk about some of the myths, i will now do it from a visual aid. Nothing is as important to raising our reader is reading aloud to their child. So think that Everybody Knows they are supposed to do and in fact, it is true. You should read aloud to your child and there are lots of ways in which you can do or dont another interesting think that is powerful 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. It isnt just something people who have lots of money and therefore thought of books in the home have an advantage, this is something anyone can do because as we all know, books, especially used book are easy to acquire online and you can go to the library. Whats interesting about it is that when you have in your home, your saying something about your family, your family culture which is that reading is prized. Its also very hard and im sure anyone here who has children nurse at one of the most annoying things to hear from a child, im bored. Its hard to be bored if their costly books around you. Not only the library in the home but books for each child if they dont have their own room, a bookshelf in a shared room from kids are closed if they should have a place for their own books. That they manage on their own but books should also be throughout the house. Books should be in the parlor, where the television is, however the computers are what they should be in the kitchen where cookbooks can be and other books about food, they should be in the bathroom for everyone does a lot of reading if they are not on the ipad. The former is better than the latter. Its really important to keep books in the home from official books are something that matters to you to give kids the opportunity to read. If you dont own the books, you go to library to cap 20 or 30 books a week, constant rotating stack of books, kids dont always know what they want to read. Theyre still developing their interest. Check out books youre not sure if they might be interested in. Books with subjects they are not familiar with, allow them the opportunity to always turn to a book. A child learns early, the better reader, its natural for us to think earlier they do something from the better they will be but the analogy i like to think of the child learns to tie their shoelaces at the edge of four, is not going to make her about her shoelace tire when she 25 then if she didnt learn until she was ten. The age a child learns to read is not related to future reading or cognitive ability. This is something many countries in europe know very well. Germany, scandinavian countries, they dont even begin teaching reading until seven or eight. They dont do that because the Research Support it because kids brains arent necessarily able to do the kind of comfort gated decoding reading requires. Moreover, if you do teach reading at an early age at three or four or five when a child isnt ready, they become frustrated, annoyed, they have negative feelings about reading, they think its just something im not good at, its not for me. It leads to a lot of years of anxiety and frustration that again doesnt correlate well with child who grows up in it something they want to do with my free time. So if theres a correlation, even just from personal experience of my three kids, the one who was reading the latest is the most ambitious and voracious leader reader of the three. Reading the same book over and over into your child is stuck. I cant tell you the number of times who, for there was harry potter, my kid would just not cap reading harry potter, she doesnt want to read anything else. Now it dog, they think zero no, its even worse. I have reassurance on that. Theres actually a lot of good to reading over and over. Theres a reason kids do it. It changes every age but its true for adults, too. The babies and toddlers, they benefit from you reading those books over and over again. They learn to recognize a word, recognition is a big part of reading. They learn to memorize. If your child has memorized books, this goes back to always having books around when you go out and run errands, you have to get board books and so when you end up in the inevitable moment, it happens to all parents, kids are born whether its in line at the Grocery Store or doctors office, rather than doing the easy thing and pulling out a phone, you take out board books. And if youre occupied, if they memorize that book, they can read it to themselves. Again, the link that i am a reader at a very early age and older children benefit emotionally and cognitively from three reading books. For kids, and i can say from personal experience, when you read, the characters become your friends. They are your social life. There are people who are familiar with. The world they live and whether they are realistic or fantastical, places you want to be. Their comfort zone. Fantasy but also a feeling of belonging. Its good for kids to. Reporter . I think is any auto knows, when you. Reporter a book as an adult, you get Something Different from each time. If you read it at 25 and three reading at 40 when youve been through the things that were in the book, you have experienced some of that yourself. The passing of generations that you might not have appreciated when you are 25 and you get more out of it. If you think about a child developing at every moment, what they read six months from now, theyre going to read it in a different way six months later. Theyre going to get more out of the story, they will see new things in it because theyre not only getting to know better but they are in different places themselves. Its really good for kids to. Reporter and not worry they are stuck. Another myth, parents work with her children starting appraisal to teach them how to read and progress your funkier so this again is like an obvious thing because we care about parent involvement, we are supposed to be supporting our childs education and all that is in fact true, we should do those things but school is not where they learn to read, children learn to love to read at home. If you think about trying to get your kids to do something to learn how to do something, its different from getting your child to want to do something, to do choose to do something and enjoying something. If your child is struggling to learn how to read in school, the last thing is going to want to do is have the experience replicated at home. If hes given thought about the fact that hes in group k and everyone else in his class is in group and in your forcing him to go through those readers at home, that again is continuing what might be a negative experience so while he has struggling to learn how to read at school, trust your teacher to do that job. You can always consult a Reading Specialist but what your job as a pensioner, if you can offset the negative extremes, you can make sure books are something that are pleasurable, its pleasure not pressure in your home. When youre with your child at night, rather than have him read and struggle through bob books or early readers, trying to pronounce and connect the dots and phonics, you can read picture books to them. When think thats important, we are get to this in the next one, and a couple of minutes, children enjoy books in many different ways at the same time. Ill get to that in a moment but i want to talk about harry potter. A lot of people think one of the milestones now is reading harry potter aloud to your kids. This is not your job. Its not a parents 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 thats frightening. Importantly, jk rowling wrote the first four books for ages eight to 12. The last three books in the series are 412 and up. She decided to grow the series along with her readers as she was riding in realtime. One of the main characters, cedric, i hope im not being a spoiler here, he dies and feta traumatizing thing for children to process. Thats the transition from Childrens Book to young adult books. Not every child is ready for that. When my kids were little, everyone was showing off that my kids read all seven harry potter books and can a garden and that was the thing that people want to show off so if your kid wasnt there yet, they were allowed to make sure their kids felt like they were being left behind but harry potter is the desert. You do not have to feed harry potter to your kids. That is a goal for them, its something to aspire. Thats about reading think the report. If your child wants to read harry potter, wait until shes ready to read those books and read her read themselves. Why would you give that away . Similarly, there are a lot of theories that are not great reading for parents. I know how many parents of Young Children there are in this room but if youre a parent of girls, you probably know rainbow fairies, its a great series for little kids. Its a terrible series for adults. Theres about 70000 of them written by a nonperson named daisy, she doesnt exist. Girls were four to eight love them. They are torture for a parent to read aloud. The magic treehouse, similar. Acute lung series, kids love them. Most parents who read them aloud they want to kill themselves because they start the same prologue. Im not saying anything bad about these books, these are the function. The function they serve as i kids love them so they want to read. Those not books you need to read aloud to kids. Then it gets to the. , once they are feeding on their own, picture books, this is not true. Picture books should stay in the picture all throughout childhood and beyond. Picture books have their own beauty into their own function and if people didnt 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, to absorb artwork and visuals and understand how to read pictures from the art of visual storytelling and if your child is working on a book high school buses hat the cat sat on the m mat, chances are, his or her brain is well beyond that in terms of what they are interested in and storytelling and if you say as soon as youre reading them on your own, im not going to read anymore to go, youre essentially becoming punishing them. If you grow up in homes where reading aloud to your child is a cherished family habit and pleasure, pulled out from underneath them the moment they are feeding on their own, it is punitive. Moreover, it denies them the opportunity to enjoy books that have a richer vocabulary that are more visually distinct to them than the early readers that are getting at school. In a similar way, at the same time from they are struggling through those you should continue to read aloud none picture books but if youre reading aloud to them betsy casey or little house on the prairie or whatever this race 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, we might also occasionally like to read a domestic trailer novel might like to listen to books on audio. We all like to enjoy books of different kinds at any given moment in kids in the same way. The best Childrens Books are the classics. This is kind of a mess, there are great cassock books out there for kids. If you look at Childrens Books in this country, he will find books continue to outsell new books. Theres a reason why it needs because when all of us become new parents, grandparents, would think i cant wait to share doctor seuss or richards i am a bunny or whatever the favorites are from childhood. Theres nothing wrong with us but i think the reason people go back to that is because they dont know that world thats out there. We are reliving a new golden age for Childrens Books. Not just say that