Reading before age 5? Experts say 'yes'

In the pediatric waiting room at the HOYA Clinic in Washington, D.C., there is a round, blue, child-size table with four chairs. Against the wall, between two large windows, stands a bookcase with four shelves of books.

This is where medical students read to the children of patients waiting to be seen by a doctor. Kids are also given these books to keep, free of charge, at every wellness visit with their pediatrician.

"We have volunteers in the pediatric room and they read to the patients' children while they're waiting to be seen by a doctor," said Maggie Burke, a second-year medical student at Georgetown University's School of Medicine and the Education Coordinator at the HOYA Clinic, a student-run facility that sees patients twice a week.

"Our clinic is located in the old D.C. General [Hospital] campus, and it's now a homeless shelter for families. Most of our patients come from the shelter and they just don't have a lot of resources, so this is a great opportunity for us to reach out to them with these books," Burke explained.

The concept is part of a nationwide literacy initiative called Reach Out and Read, a non-profit organization that supports pediatricians to encourage parents to read to their children. At wellness visits for children ages 6 months to 5-years-old, doctors are giving out age-appropriate books to parents, and spreading the importance of interacting with their children to promote language development.

"I firmly believe that 0 to 5 has to be where we get children off to a healthy start," said Earl Phalen, CEO of Reach Out and Read.

"All the research says that 96 percent of a child's brain will be developed by the time they're aged five...so the book really is the vehicle for the interaction of talking, playing together and bonding [between parents and children]," Phalen said.

The program was conceived in 1989 by a group of pediatricians and early childhood educators, at what is now Boston Medical Center. Reach Out and Read supplies children's books to program participants, where doctors incorporate the development of a child's language and interaction skills into the standard physical growth benchmarks that a child should attain by a certain age. At each wellness visit, parents are given a new age-appropriate book for their child.

To date, Reach Out and Read programs are available in over 4,700 clinics, private doctor's offices and medical schools nationwide. In collaboration with Scholastic, last year they distributed 6.4 million books to 3.9 million children, according to their web site.

But what about the infomercials with toddlers reading 10-letter words or 4-year-olds reading Shakespeare? Phalen insists that this is not the goal of Reach Out and Read.

"It's helping parents, many of who don't know the importance of talking to, reading to and singing to their child as a way to stimulate their child," Phalen said. "So it's really about the stimulation and the interaction versus the rote memorizations."

A Disturbing Trend in Literacy among Minority Children

Early childhood advocates believe that literacy should begin before a child enters a school setting. But not all parents have the resources or the know-how to lay the groundwork.

The National Institute for Literacy, in a short report to policymakers in 2009, stated that children who develop more literacy skills in the preschool years perform better in the primary grades.

Claudia Aristy saw her son's interest in reading soar after she was introduced to the program by his pediatrician at Bellevue Hospital in New York.