Good afternoon, everyone. We are running a little bit behind today. On behalf of the American Enterprise institute i would like to welcome you with the conversation with pamela paul of the New York Times book review about her recent book how to raise a reader. She coauthored it with her colleague maria russo. So much about raising children is about what we dont want them to do, keep them dangers both real and virtual, no doubt this is a feature and bug of our helicoptering age with this attitude fails to promote a sense of independence in kids. Not only do they not know how to walk down the street by themselves but are incapable of entertaining themselves without a device in hand. For reasons both selfish, parents need a break, and selfless, we know this is an important life skill for them, the Current Situation is pretty untenable, our kids have trouble with any unstructured activity but reading for pleasure is the activity that has suffered the most. According to a recent analysis the share of americans who read for pleasure has fallen by more than 30 since 2004. If there is a way to reverse this trend it has to start with our children and i can think of no one who could help us better to learn to share the joy of reading with children than pamela paul. Before rising to her current position she was Childrens Book editor at the New York Times, she has three children herself and is author of six books and host of the book review podcast. I asked her to talk about her research and her book for a little bit. She and i will have a conversation we will open up to questions from the audience. With that i will turn it over to pamela. Thank you for having me. I will start by telling a story that runs against my instincts and temperament which is a story about my kids. I am more of the type that generally relays something terrible and embarrassing my kids have done but im telling it for a reason. This is happens my last time in dc but i came before the National Book festival over Labor Day Weekend to launch this book how to raise a reader and took the train down with my three kids and my husband and we were on the train and got seated separately so they were scattered around but we were passing things to them. It was clear as i got up to leave the train and gathering my family there was an older couple behind me and the man stopped me and said are those your children . Usually that fills me with fear, what have they done . I said yes a little tentatively. He said i just have to say that i am so heartened to see that they were all reading the whole way down here and they were reading actual books. I kind of 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 and she pointed to a piece that, as you know when you have a book coming out you will often read a piece, this is my piece for the oped section of the times called no gold star for reading about not rewarding reading, that reading in and of itself is the reward and to reward reading is counterproductive. I couldnt resist. It was my moment so i said i actually wrote that piece. It is in fact true, my kids are all readers, they are 10, 13, and 14. The reason i tell that story is not to show off about that but because i wanted to relay what i think naomi alluded to which is people are really panicked about kids reading, they are freaked out and the reason why people are so afraid of kids reading is not only the value of books but what it signifies for themselves and our culture and society. For themselves, for kids it is unquestioned at this point that reading is important. Theres a lot of research around it. We know reading is important to cognitive development, we know it is tied to academic success. We have research that shows reading improves executive functions, it is tied to a childs social and Emotional Development and my opinion is it also leaves us better human beings help people are very eager to have this wasnt the case in the 70s and 80s when i was coming of age. At that point no one trotted out there kid and said the reader. Think the word bookworm it is a massive competent, people were more inclined to show up out of filed in 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. Theres all kinds of effort on the local level to get kids to read and yet as naomi suggested the research isnt necessarily that strongly comforting that it succeeded. I will talk about how i came to write this book and then some of the findings. This book started off as a Digital Guide for the New York Times. When i was demoted as my kids say it from Childrens Book editor to edit of the book review in 2013 and hired a new Childrens Book editor, maria russo, i was asked to create a kind of guide for the website. We had done guides or the people had done guide on things like how to meditate. Even though i have yet to meditate, other guides about how to live a better life and they came to be and said what kind of guide for reading and books . For me this was the obvious answer, how to raise a reader, it is something i always wanted to do and something in my position as Childrens Books editor and parent of three kids i knew many parents wanted to do. We got together and created a Digital Guide. It went online and went viral, questions and comments flowed in as one of the most common without why print this out and turn it into a book, a guide about how to raise a reader should be a book and that is what we did which was to expand on all of the research we had done at the advice we had in the recommendations for books, for kids. We turned it into a book in short order. When i was a Childrens Book editor and even ongoing onthejob now, i got a lot of questions and a lot of what we wanted to do in the book was address those 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, he likes graphic novels and doesnt like lots of text and hates photographs. What should he read . Very specific requests or suggestions but there is excess dental questions, what do i do if my kid doesnt like to read owen should my kids start reading or my child at Kindergarten Teacher says my child is two level behind where he is supposed to be and i dont know what to do about it and once kids learn to read they worry what if my child isnt choosing to read, what if he isnt reading enough, what if she only wants to read graphic novels, what if ever since she got instagram she doesnt want to do anything else . What we perceived in these questions with a lot of myths around reading, what makes a reader. I will move to the slide shortly but i will talk about some of those myths and i will now do it with a visual aid. First miss, nothing is as important to raise a reader is reading aloud to your child. This is the thing Everybody Knows they are supposed to do and it is true, you should read aloud to your child and there are lots of ways, dos and donts how to read aloud to a child but another interesting statistic just as powerful as reading aloud to your child is the number of books in your phone. Is not necessarily immediately obvious but is not tied to income or education, not just something people who have lots of money or books have an advantage, this is something anyone can do because books now, especially used books are easy to acquire online and you can go to the library. When you have books in your home you are saying something, that reading is prized and also very hard, anyone who has children knows one of the most annoying things to hear from a child is on board. It is hard to be bored if there are constantly books around you and books not only in the library, in the home but books for each child if they dont have their own room, a bookshelf and shared room, kids are inquisitive creatures, they like to collect and own things, they should have a place for their own books but books should also be throughout the house, in the parlor or wherever the television is our computers, they should be in the kitchen where cookbooks can be, in the bathroom where everyone does a lot of reading if they are not on the ipad. The former is better than the latter. It is important to keep books in the home to show books are something that matters to you and to give kids the opportunity to read. If you dont own the book and you go to the library and take out 20 or 30 books a week make sure you have a constant rotating cast of books in there. Kids dont always know what they want to read. They are developing their interests. Take out books you are sure might interest them, take a different kind of books, books that are more visual, subjects they might not be familiar with, to always allow them the opportunity to turn to a book. The earlier a child learns to read independently the more he will read for life. This is easy to believe because our parents think in terms of development or milestones but it is natural to think the earlier they do something the better it will be but the analogy i would like to think of is shoelaces. If a child learns to tie his shoelaces at the age of 4 it will not make her a better shoelace tire at the age of 25 then if she didnt learn until she was 10. The same goes for reading. The age your 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 dont begin teaching reading until page 8 because the Research Supports it. Kids brains are not able to do the complicated decoding reading requires and if you do start to teach reading at an early age, 3 or 4 or 5 when a child isnt ready, they become frustrated, they become annoyed, have negative feelings associated with reading, this is something i am not good at and it leads to a lot of years of anxiety and frustration dont correlate well with a childs growth that this is something i actually want to do with my 3 time. There is 0 correlation. On personal experience with my 3 kids, the one who was reading the latest is the most ambitious ad for asus reader of the three. Reading the same book over and over means your child is stuck. I cant tell you the number of parents who first it was harry potter, my kid will not stop reading harry potter, she doesnt want to read anything else, now it is dog man, it is even worse, terrible graphic novels. I have some reassurance on that front. There is a lot of good to reading over and over and the reason kids do it and it changes for every age but it is true for adults too. When they become toddlers they benefit from reading those books over and over again, they learn to recognize the words or recognition is a big part of reading. They learn to memorize the text. Another big part of reading. Of your child is memorizing, it is good to have books around as a family culture, when you go out and run errands, you tuck more books and your bag that when you end up in the moment that happens to all parents when your kids are bored waiting around whether on the line to the Grocery Store or at a Doctors Office rather than doing the easy thing and pulling out a phone, you pull out some more books. If you are occupied, if they memorized the book they can read it to themselves and again that builds confidence and a feeling that i am a reader from a very early age. Older children benefit emotionally and cognitively from rereading books. For kids, i can certainly say this from personal experience, when you read, the characters become your friends. They are your social life, people youre familiar with. The worlds they live and whether they are realistic or fantastical, places you want to be, they are comfort zones, places for fantasy but also a feeling of belonging. It is good for kids to reread. As any adult nose, when you reread a book as an adult you get Something Different from it each time. If you reread a book at age 25 and then reread it at 40 once you have been through many of the things discussed in that book, you have experienced some of that, parenthood and loss and the passing of generations that you might not have appreciated when you were 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 will read in a different way than a previously read it, they will get more out of the story, see new things in it because they are normally getting to know it better but are in a different place themselves so it is good for kids to reread and not worry they are stuck. Anonymous. Parents should work with their children starting in preschool to teach them how to read and help them progress year by year. This feels like an obvious, of course, we all hear about parent involvement, we are supposed to be supporting our Child Health Education and that is true. We should be doing those things but school is where children learn to read. Home is where children learn to love to read and that is a very different job for parents. If you think about trying to get your kids to do something, to learn how to do something that is different from getting your child to want to do something, to choose to do something, to enjoy something. If your child is struggling to learn how to read in school the last thing hes going to want to do is have that experience replicated at home. If hes feeling bad that he is in group k and everyone else in his class is in group in and youre forcing him to go through those levels at home, it is continuing what might be a negative experience. While he is struggling to learn to read at school trust your teacher to do that job. If you have doubts you can always consult your reading specialist. What your child as a parent to do, offset the negative experience, make sure books are something pleasurable, that it is pleasure, not pressure at home. When youre with your child at night rather than have him read and struggle through those early level readers whether it is trying to pronouns and sort of connect the dots in phonics you can read about a picture book to them and it is important to get through the next one, children enjoy books in different ways at the same time but let me talk about harry potter. A lot of people think one of the milestones of childhood is reading harry potter allowed to your kids. This is not your job. Not the parents job for a number of reasons. Not everyone loves harry potter. I happen to live it but a lot of kids dont like fantasy or find books frightening. Jk rowling wrote the first four books as middle grade books meaning they are for age 812 in the last three books in the series are why a books for 12 and up. She decided to grow the series with her readers as she was writing in real time and there is a turning point at the edge of book 4 when one of the main characters, i hope i am not no spoilers here, dies. That is a traumatizing thing for some children, that is the transition from Childrens Books to young adult books and not every child is ready for it. When my kids were little everyone was showing off my kid read all we 7 harry potters in kindergarten and that was the big thing people wanted to show off about so if your kid wasnt. What did parents do . They read it aloud to make sure their kids felt like they werent 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, something to aspire. 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 let her read them herself. Why would you give that away . That is a motivator for her. Similarly a lot of series are not great 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. A great series for little kids. It is a terrible series for adults. There are 70,000 of them written by a nonperson named daisy meadows, she doesnt exist, girls were 4, five, six, seven, eight, love them. They are torture for a parent to read aloud. The magic treehouse, similar, huge long series, kids love them. Most parent have to read them aloud want to kill themselves after the fourth book because they all start with the same prologue. Im not saying anything bad about these books, they serve the function in the function they serve, kids love them and they want to read in order to read the book, those are not books you need to read aloud to kids. Then this gets to the point which is once they are reading on their own, move on from picture books, this is not true. Picture books should stay in the picture throughout childhood and beyond, picture books have their own beauty in their own function, well into adulthood. There would be no instagram. What picture books allow a child to do is to appreciate a richer vocabulary, to absorb artwork, visuals, understand how to read pictures and follow that sequence of events through the art of visual storytelling and if your child is working on a book at school that says 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 in with storytelling and if you say as soon as youre reading those books on your own i will not read anymore to you you are essentially punishing them for becoming an independent reader. If kids have grown up in a home where reading aloud your child is a cherished family have it and pleasure, to pull out from underneath them at the moment they are reading on their own is really punitive. Moreover, it denies them the opportunity to enjoy books that have a richer vocabulary, are more visually interesting for them than early readers they are getting at school. In a similar way at the same time they are struggling through those levels you should continue to read aloud nonpicture books. If youre reading the hobbit or little house on the prairie or 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 reading for fun we might also occasionally like to read a domestic thriller or spy novel. We might like to listen to books on audio. We all like to enjoy books of different kinds at any moment and kids are the same way. The b