Colleague maria russo. So much of raising children these days seems to be about what we dont want them to do keeping them away from danger both real and virtual could no doubt this is a feature perhaps a bug of our helicopter in engaged but i think this attitude often fails to provide a sense of independence and kids not only do they not know how to walk down the street by themselves but they are also incapable of entertaining themselves at least without a device in hand. For reasons both selfish and selfless we know this is an important life skill for them the Current Situation is untenable like kids have trouble with any kind of unstructured activity but reading for pleasure is perhaps the activity that suffers the most part according to recent analysis of the american study the share of americans who read for pleasure has fallen by more than 30 since 2004. So if theres a way to reverse this trend i think it will have to start with their 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 a Childrens Book editor at the news york times ricci has three children herself and shes also the author of six books and a the host of the book review podcast. After pamela talks about her research in the book for but she and i are going to have a conversation and then we will open it up to questions from the audience. With that im going to turn it over to pamela. Thank you so much. Thank you for having me. I will start by telling a story that runs against my instincts and temperament which is its a story about my kids of more of the type that generally is something terrible embarrassing that my kids have done but i was telling it for a reason. First of all this was in d. C. It 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 with my three kids and my husband. We were on the train and we were seated and we were scattered around but we were passing things to them. And whatnot. As i got up to leave the train im coming out in my family, there was an older couple behind me and a man stopped me and said excuse me are those your children . Usually that fills me with fear like oh no what they have done . I said yes little bit tentatively and 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. I thought okay treat his wife chimed in and said i was just reading the most interesting article in the news york times about this very subject and she pointed to a piece and when you have a book coming out you often write a piece. This is my piece for the oped section of the times, think it was called not rewarding reading that reading in and of itself is the reward and the reward is counterproductive. I couldnt resist. I have a Marshall Mccloughan moment and i said i ask who wrote that piece. Isnt that true. My kids are all readers and they are now 10, 13 and 14. The reason i tell that story is not to show off with them but i wanted to relay what naomi alluded to which is that people are really panicked about kids reading. They are freaked out and i think the reason why people are so afraid of kids reading is because not only the value of books that what it signifies both for themselves and for culture and for society. For themselves for kids themselves i think it is unquestioned at this point that reading is important. There is a lot of research around it. We know that reading is important to Cognitive Development and it tied to high academic success and we have researched now the shows reading improves executive function and is closely tied to a childs social and Emotional Development and my personal opinion is that it also just makes us better human beings. 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 comingofage. At that point no one said she is such a reader. If you think about it its not exactly the massive complement like a gymnast or a violin player or someone with coordinated skills on the playing field, none of which i had. Now people really do want their kids to be reading. Theres all kinds of effort on a local level to get kids to read and yet as naomi suggested the research isnt necessarily the fact that it succeeded. So ill talk a little bit about how i came to write this book and then some of the evidence. This book started off with a Digital Guide for the New York Times as i was demoted from childrens editor to book review in 2019. I was asked by a group at the time to create a guide for the web site. Things like how to meditate even though ive yet to try to meditate and how to live a better life. They came to me and said what can we do for reading and books . To me this is the obvious answer its something that i always wanted to do and something in my position as a Childrens Book editor and as a parent of three kids im new as many times i want to do. Maria and i created Digital Guide and went on line and it went viral as they say. The questions in the comments came in one of the most common was how delay turned it into book . He would think a guide with the book in and effect of weekend did which was to expand upon all the research we have done and the recommendations for books that we have for kids. He turned it into a book in short order. When i was a Childrens Book editor and ongoing in this job now i got a lot of questions from parents and a lot of what i wanted to do in the book was to address those questions to the questions can be very basic a lot of parents just come to me and to say my kid is into puppies and the likes graphic novels and he doesnt like lots of text. What should he read so specific questions. Then there were specific questions like what do i do if my kid doesnt like to read or when should my kids start reading or my childs kindergarten teachers that my child is two levels behind where he is supposed to be and i dont know what to do about it. Once kids learn to read they worry about what it might child isnt reading enough and what if she says reading is boring and a shield of us to read graphic novels and shes on instagram and she does want to do anything else. What we perceive in these questions is that there is a lot of myths out there around reading about what makes a reader not i will move to th 5 shortly. Im going to talk about some of those myths and i will now do it with a visual aid. First myth, nothing is important to raising a reader is 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 their dos and donts about how to read aloud to it tieup another interesting statistic that is just as powerful as reading about your child is the number of looks in your home. This is really important. Not necessarily immediately obvious but its not tied to income or education level. This isnt just something that people who have lots of money and lots of books in their homes have an advantage. This is something that anyone can do because as we all know books especially used books are incredibly easy to acquire on line and you can also go to the library. Whats interesting about it is when you have books in your home you are saying something about your family, but your family culture which is reading is price. Its also very hard and im sure anyone here who has children knows the most annoying thing to hear from her child is on board. Its really hard to be bored if they are constantly books around you and books not only in the library of the home but looks for each child. If they dont have their own room a bookshelf in a shared room. Kids are inquisitive teachers and id like to collect in on things. They should have a place for their own books that they manage on their own spot book should also be throughout the house could book should be in the parlor. They should be wherever the television is and wherever the computers are produced to be in the kitchen were cookbooks can be another books about food. They should be in the bathroom where everyone does a lot of reading if they are not on their ipad. Obviously the former is better than the latter. Its important to keep books in the home to show that books are something that matter to you and to give kids the opportunity to read but if you dont own the books go to the library and take out 20 or 30 bucks a week and make sure you have a constant supply of walks. Kids dont always know what they want to read. Take up hooks that you are not sure might interest them and take out different kinds of books, books that are more visual and books they may not read familiar with to allow them the opportunity to turn to a book. This is a myth because all parents think in terms of developmental milestones its natural for us to think the earlier they do something the better they will be but the analogy if a child learns to tie her shoelaces at the age of fords not going to make her a better shoelace tire at the age of 25 then if she didnt learn until she was 10 and the same thing goes 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 teaching reading until age seven or eight and they dont do that because the Research Supports it. Kids brains arent necessarily all able to do the complicated decoding that reading requires and moreover if you do start to teach reading at a very early age at three or four or five when a child isnt ready they become frustrated and they become annoyed. Have negative feelings associated with reading. They think this is something im not good at and this is not for me and it leads to many years of anxiety and frustration. Again a child grows up and thinks this is something that i actually want to do with my free time. There is a correlation and even through personal experience the one who is reading the latest is the most ambitious and voracious reader. Heres another myth. Reading the same book over and over major child is stuck and i cant tell you the number of parents who said my kids wont stop reading harry potter and she doesnt want to read anything else. I have some reassurance on that front. There is a lot of good to reading over and over and theres a reason kids do it and it changes at every age but its true for adults too. With babies and toddlers they benefit from your reading those books over and over again but they learn to recognize the words. Word recognition is a big part of reading. They learn to memorize the test text but if your child is memorize sport books and this is about having books around is family culture. When you talk board books into your bed and you end up in the moment and it happens all parents were your kids are bored whether its in line at the Grocery Store the doctors office. Rather than do the easy thing and pull out of phone and headed to your child the takeout board books. If they have they have memorized the book they can read it to themselves. Again that builds confidence and a feeling of i am a reader from an early age. Older children benefit emotionally and cognitively from reading books. For kids and i can say this from personal experience. When you read the characters become your friends. They are your social life. These are people you are familiar with. The world they live in whether they are realistic or fantastical are places that you want to be. They are comfort zones. They are places for fantasy but also for feeling of belonging. So its good for kids to read and as any adult knows when you reread a book as an adult you get Something Different from it each time. If you read it at age 25 and reread it at age 40 after we have been through many of the things that describe in that book you experience it yourself. The passing of a generation and you may not have appreciated when youre 25 and you get more out of it. If you think about a child who is developing at every moment what they read six months from now, they are going to read it in a different way than i previously read it. They are going to get more out of that story and they will see new things in it because they are not only getting to know it better but they are in a different place themselves. Its really good for kids to reread and not worry about getting stuck with another myth start reading in preschool and teach them to progress year by year. We all hear about Parent Involvement and we believe in supporting her childs education all that is in fact true. We should be doing those things but school is where children learn to read at home is where children learn to love to read and thats a very different job for parents but if you think about trying to get your kids to get to the mechanics and learn how to do something thats very different from getting your child to want to do something and choose to do something, to enjoy something. If your child is struggling for example to learn how to read in school the last thing hes going to want to do is have experience replicated at home. If hes feeling about the fact that hes in group k and everyone else in his group is an n indy were forcing them to go through those level readers at home that again is continuing what might the a negative experience. While he is struggling to learn how to reduce school and if you have doubts about it you can if you can offset that negative experience you can make sure books are something that are pleasurable and its pleasure and not pressure at home. When you are with your child at night rather than have him read and struggle with the early level readers whether its trying to pronounce a connect the dots in phonics you can read aloud a picture book to them. Something thats very important that we will get to the next one in a couple of minutes is that children enjoy the looks in many different ways at the same time. I will get to that of the moment but i want to talk about harry potter. A lot of people think one of the milestones is reading harry potter aloud to your kids. This is not your job. For a number of reasons. First of all not everyone loves harry potter. I happen to love it a lot of kids dont like it or they find a books frightening but importantly j. C. Rolling wrote the first book says middle grade books which means they are for ages eight to 12 in the last hour for 12 and up. She decided to grow the series along with the reader said she was writing it in real time and theres a turning point at the end of look for were one of the main characters, cedric. I hope im not spoiling something here. Its a traumatizing thing for some people to process introducing from Childrens Books to young adult dogs. When my kids were little everyone is showing off my kids read all seven terry potters in kindergarten and that was a big thing people wanted to show off about. Kids wanted to feel like you were being left behind that harry potter is the desert. You dont have have to feed harry potter to your kids. Thats something to inspire and about reading as a reward. If your child wants to read harry potter wiggins as shes ready to read those books and let her read them herself. Thats a motivator for her. Similarly there a lot of series that are really not great reading for parents. I dont know how many parents and children there are in this room but if youre a parent of a girl he probably no rainbow ferries. This is a great series for little kids and its a terrible series for adults. There are about 70,000 of them in their written by a nonperson she doesnt exist in the girls who are four, five, six, seven or eight love them. They are torture for a parent to read aloud. The magic treehouse, similar. A huge long series. Most parents after reading aloud want to kill themselves. Im not saying anything bad about these books. They serve a function in the function they serve is to give up pleasure of wanting to read. And then it gets to the point which is once they are reading on their own move off the picture books. This is not true. Picture books should stay in the picture all through childhood and beyond. Picture books have their own function and if people didnt like looking into pictures well into adulthood there would be no instagram. What picture hooks allow for a child to do is to be able to absorb artwork in visuals and understand how to read pictures through a series of advancing the art of visual storytelling and if your child is working on a book at school like pat and the cat sat on the mat chances are his or her brain is well beyond that in terms of what they are interested and was storytelling but if you say since you are reading these books in their own and not going to read anymore you are since the punishing them for becoming a reader or for many kids especially if they have grown up in a home where reading aloud to your child as a cherished family habit and pleasure to have pulled out from underneath them at the moment they are reading on their own is really punitive. Moreover it denies them the opportunity to enjoy the looks that have richer vocabulary and are visually interesting to them than the readers they are getting at school. In a similar way at the same time when they are going through those early reader she should continue to read aloud nonpicture books to them but if youre reading the hobbit or little house on the prairie whatever the series might be to continue to do that. Kids are like adults. They enjoy storytelling in all of its various ways and just as many of us while we might enjoy putting for fun we might occasionally like to read a domestic thriller or a 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 are classics. This again is kind of the myth. They are great classic looks out there for kids if you look at Childrens Books in this country you will find the books that continue to outsell all of the new books in aggregate. When all of us become new parents are new grandparents we say oh my gosh i cant wait to share dr. Seuss or richard scary or whatever church favorites are from calvin and theres nothing wrong with that but the reason people go back to that is because they dont know the whole world is out there and we are living in a new golden age for Childrens Books. I dont just say that because i work at the book review. I was so shocked by how good Childrens Books hav