On behalf of the american in enter enterprise, we will hear about her recent book how to raise a reader. She authored it with her colleague maria russo. So much of raising children these days seems to be about what we do not want them to do, keeping them away from dangers, real in virtual, no doubt this is a feature, perhaps a bug of her helicopter and age and i think this attitude fails to promote a sense of independence and kids. Not only do they not know how to walk down 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 and selfless, we know this is an important life skill for them, i think the Current Situation is pretty untenable. Our kids have trouble with any kind of unstructured activity but reading for pleasure is perhaps activity that has suffered the most. According to a recent analysis of the American Time study, the share of americans to read for pleasure have actually fallen by more than 30 since 2004. If there is a way to reverse the trend i think it will have to start with her children and i can think of no one who can help us better than to share the joy of reading with children then pamela before rising to her current position, she was the Childrens Book editor at the New York Times and she had three children herself. She is also the author of six books in the host of the book review podcast. After pamela talks about her research and the book for a little bit, she and i will have a conversation and then we will open it up to questions from the audience. With that i will turn over to pamela. Thank you so much. I will start by telling a story that runs against my instinct and temperament which is the story about my kids and a more of a type that generally something terrible and embarrassing that my kids have done but im telling it for a reason, first of all this happened 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, my husband and we were on the train and we got seated separately so they were scattered around. So we were passing things to them, snacks and whatnot so i think it was clear that they were in mind but as i got up to leave the train and gathering my family, there was an older couple behind me and the man stopped and said excuse me, are those your children. Usually that fills me with fear. Oh no, what have they done. So i said, yes, tentatively and he said i just have to say, i am so heartened that they were all reading the whole way down here and they were reading actual books armored and his wife chimed in and i was reading the most interesting article about the same subject. And she pointed to a piece, as you know we have a book coming out, you write a piece to go with it and this is my piece for the oped section for the piece called noble star for reading. About not rewarding reading in the reading of itself as a reward and that in fact to reward reading is counterproductive. And so i cannot resist, i have Marshall Mcluhan here who i said i actually wrote the piece, so it is in fact true, my kids are all readers, there ten, 15 and 14 and the reason i tell the story because i wanted to relay what i think naomi alluded to is that 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 not only the value of books but what it signifies both for themselves and for our culture and society. So for themselves, kids themselves, i think it is unquestioned at this point that reading is important, theres a lot of research around it, we know that reading is important for this development, and academic success, we also have research that shows that reading improves executive function that is closely tied to a childs social and Emotional Development in my personal opinion is that it makes us better human beings and so now people are very eager to have their kids become readers, this is really not the case in the 70s and the 80s when i was comingofage, at that point no one looked at the cadence of your such a reader, if you think of the word bookworm it is not exactly a massive complement. People were more inclined to show off about a gymnast or a violin player or someone that has quorum needed skills on the playing field. None of which i had. But now people really do want their kids to be readers, their reading contacts and theres all kinds of efforts and if you get kids to read naomi suggested the researchers necessarily that it succeeded so i talked a little bit about how i came came to write the book and 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 Childrens Book editor to the editor of the book review in 2013 and hired a new Childrens Book editor maria russo, i was asked by the group at the time to create a guide for the website we had done guides or other people to time addend guides on how to meditate and its a guide i read several times even though i had yet to try to meditate and other guides about how to live a better life, they came to me and said what kind of guides can we do for reading and books. To me this was the obvious answer, how to raise a reader because it was something i wanted to do and something in my position a Childrens Book editor and a pair of three kids i knew many parents wanted to do. So maria and i got together and created a Digital Guide and it went online and went viral and the questions and comments quoted in in the most common was how do i. This out and ride into a book. In fact that is what we did to really expand on all of the research that we had done and the advice that we had in the recommendations for a book. 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 and they can be very basic, a lot of times parents came to me and said my kid is in two puppies but not sad stories and he likes graphic novels and does not like a lot of text indicates photograph, what can he read, very specific request for suggestions and there are essential questions like what do i do if my kid does not like to read or when should my kids start reading or my child kindergarten teachers as my child is to levels behind, i dont know what to do about it. Once kids learn to read, they worry about what if my child is choosing not to reader ready fees not reading enough what if they say its boring, what is she only wants read graphic novels, what if she taught instagram and she doesnt want to do anything else. So what we perceived in these questions was there was a lot of this out there about reading and what makes the reader yes, i will move to the slide shortly. Some of those myths, i will now do it with a visual aid. First myths, nothing as 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. In fact it is true, you should read aloud to your child and theres lots of ways in which you have dos and donts of how to read aloud to a child but another interesting statistic just as powerful is the number of books in your home. This is really important, not necessarily immediately obvious but its not tied to income or education levels. This is not just something that people have lots of money and have lots of books in their homes have an advantage. This is something that anyone can do because as we all know books especially use books are incredibly easy to acquire online and you can also go to the library. Whats interesting, when you have books in your home, your saying something about your family, about your family culture that reading is a prize. It is also very hard, and anyone who has children knows one of the most annoying things to hear from a child is on board, it is really hard to be bored if their constant books around you. Books not only will vibrate in the home but books for each child if they dont have their own room, a bookshelf in a shared room and they like to collect in own things, 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, wherever the television is, the computers, the kitchen where cookbooks can be another books about food, they should be in the bathroom where everyone does a lot of reading if theyre not on the ipad. Obviously the former is the better than the latter. Its really important to keep books in the home to show the books or something that matter to you and to give kids the opportunity to read, if you do not own the books and you go to the library and take out 20 or 30 books a week make sure you have a constant rotating path of books. Another thing to remember about kids they dont always know what they want to read, there still developing their interest. Take up books that youre not sure that my interested them, take up books that are not subjects they may not be familiar with to always allow them the opportunity to turn to a book. Another myth, the earlier child learns to read and the more dependent reader beeper life, this is a myth, its a belief because all. Things on terms of milestones it is natural to think the earlier they do something, the better they will be but the analogy is shoelaces, if a child learns to tie her shoelaces at the age of four, it will not make her better shoelace tire at the age of 25 if she did not learn until she was ten. The same thing goes for reading, the agent your child learns to read is not related to future reading or cognitive ability. This is something that many countries in europe no very well, germany, scandinavian countries dont even begin teaching and reading until age of seven or eight and they dont do that because the Research Supports it. Kids brains are not necessarily all able to do the complicated decoding that reading requires. That moreover if you start to teach reading at a very early age at three or four or five when a child is not ready, they become frustrated, they become annoyed and have negative feelings associated with reading, they think its something im not good at, they think its not for me and it leads to many years of anxiety and frustration that dont correlate well with the child who grows up and says this is something that i actually want to do with my free time. So there is 0 correlation. I say even from personal experience of my three kids, the one who is reading the latest is the most ambitious of the three. Reading the same book over and over means your child is stuck, i cannot tell you a number of parents, first it was harry potter saying my kid will not stop reading harry potter, she does not want to read anything else. Now its dog man which people think its worse a graphic novel, every assurance on that front. There is actually a lot of good to reading over and over and theres a reason that kids do it and it changes for every age but is true for adults, babies and toddlers benefit from you reading those books over and over again, they learn to recognize the word, word recognition is a big part of reading, they memorize the test. Another big part of reading, if your child memorizes board books, this goes back to family culture, when you go out and you run errands, and you talk board books into your back so when you end up in the evitable moment that happens to all parents were your kids are bored and layin lg around whether youre in line at the Grocery Store the doctors office, rather than do the easy thing and pull out a phone and handed to your child you take out a board book and even if you are occupied if they memorize that, they can read it to themselves. Again that builds confidence and a feeling that i am a reader from a very early age. Older children benefit emotionally from rereading books. For kids, i certainly can say this from personal experience having been buried in a book as a child myself, when you read the characters become your friends. They are your social life, these are people youre familiar with, the world they live in whether realistic or fantastical, places that you want to be, their comfort zone, places for fantasy but also a feeling of belonging, it is good for kids to. Reporter and i think if any adult knows, when you. Reporter a book as an adult you get Something Different each time. So if you. Reporter at age 25 and then you. Reporter at 40 many things he had in the book, youve actually experience some of that in yourself and the passing of generations that you might not of appreciated when you are 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 if there rereading they will. Reporter it in a different way that they previously read. It will get more out of the story and see new things because they are not only getting to know what is better but theyre in a different place themselves. It is really good for kids to. Reporter and not worry that they are stuck. Another myth, p and should work with their children starting in preschool to teach them how to read and progress yearbyyear. This feels like an obvious course because we hear about Parent Involvement and were supposed to be supporting our Child Education and that is in in fact true. We should do those things but school for our children is where they learn read, home is where they learn to love to read. That is a very different job for parents. If you think about trying to get your kids to do something to get them the mechanics to learn how to do something, that is very different from getting your child to want to do something, to choose to do something to enjoy something. So if your child is struggling for example to learn how to read in school, the last thing he is going to want to do is have the experience replicated at home if you feeling bad about the fact that he is in group k and everybody else is in group in and you are forcing him to go through the level readers at home, that again it is continuing what might be a negative experience. While he is struggling how to read in school, trust your teacher to do that job. If you have doubts about it, you can consult your reading specialist. Your job as a parent is to offset the negative experience and make sure books are something that are pleasurable and pleasurable not put pressure. When youre with your child at night rather than having him struggle through the bob books or early level readers were there trying to pronounce and connect the dots in phonics, you can read a lot of picture books to them. One thing that is very important that we will get to in the next one, well get to it in a couple of minutes. Children enjoy books in many different ways at the same time, i will get to that in a moment. I want to talk about harry potter, a lot of people think that one of the milestones now is reading harry potter out loud to your kids, this is not your job, its not the parents jobs for a number of reasons. First of all not everyone loves harry potter, i happen to love it but a lot of kids dont like fantasy or find them frightening. But very importantly jk rolling wrote the first four books is middle grade books from ages 8 s in the series are for 12 and up. She decided to grow the series with the readers as she was riding in real time. There is a turning point at the edge of book for where one of the main characters, cedric, i hope im not a spoiler here, he dies and its a very traumatizing thing for some children to process. That is the transition from Childrens Book to young of adult books. Not every child is ready for it and when my kids were little everyone was showing off like my kid read all seven harry potters in kindergarten and that was the big thing that people wanted to show off, if your kid was not there, what appearance do they read out loud to make them feel like they were being left behind. But harry potter is the desert, you do not have defeat harry potter to your kids, that is a goal for them, that is something to inspire that is about reading being the reward, if your child wants to read harry potter, we intel she is ready to read those books and let her read themselves. Why would you give that away, thats a motivator for her. There were a lot of series that were not good reading for parents and i dont know how many parents of Young Children there are in this room but if youre a parent of girls, you probably know rainbow fairies, this is a great series were little kids, its a terrible series for adults, theres about 70000 of them written by a nonperson named daisy meadows who does not exist, girls who are four, five, six, 78, they love them, their torture for a parent to read aloud. The magic treehouse is similar, a huge long series, kids love them, most parents have to read them aloud and want to kill themselves after the fourth book because they start with the same prologue. Im not saying anything bad about these books, they serve a function, kids love them so they want to read in order to read this book, theyre not books that you need to read aloud tickets. And then this gets to the point, once they reading on their own, this is not true, picture books should stay in the picture all throughout childhood and beyond. Tricks picture books 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 to observe artwork individuals into understand how to read pictures and follow the sequence of events through the art of a visual storytelling. 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 theyre interested in with storytelling. If you say as soon as you read this on your own i will not read anywhere to you, you are essentially punishing them for becoming an independent reader. Many kids who have grown up in a home where the reading aloud to your child is a family habit and pleasure to get a pull out from underneath them at the moment there reading on their own is punitive. And moreover it denies them the opportunity to enjoy books that have a richer vocabulary that are visually interesting to them that they are gettin