Reach Out and Read: A smart initiative to engage toddlers and young children with books

Manatee County community leaders who created an admirable crusade to improve the futures of our children took a giant leap forward by adding another weapon to its arsenal. In uniting with Sarasota County in the Suncoast Campaign for Grade-Level Reading, the brain trust behind this indispensable drive is adopting a program called Reach Out and Read, a startlingly simple concept.

Besides parents, who else is close to children from six months to five years old? Their pediatricians. Besides medical care, those physicians who join the Reach Out and Read effort also prescribe books. They stress the importance of reading and language and coach parents about best practices in reading to children. Exposing toddlers to books at the earliest ages stimulates early brain development, sets the stage for vocabulary building and recognizing the written word, and thus preparing them for kindergarten and success in school. MRI tests of the brain of a child when being read to shows “deep learning.”

Science confirms a child’s first five years are critical to future learning. Language competency is the decisive factor in educational and career success as well as health, as other studies confirm.

Dr. Dipesh Navsaria, a Wisconsin pediatrician who was in Bradenton last week to help promote Reach Out and Read, zeroed in on the importance of the initiative in an interview at the Herald: “The single biggest challenge (for pediatricians) is what’s going on between the child’s ears. The biggest indicator of lifelong health is not diet or exercise — it’s education.”

Navsaria, the founding medical director of Reach Out and Read in Wisconsin, explained that parents should read, talk, sing and interact with their toddlers — without any screens like smartphones and televisions around. And let the child hold the book to complete the engagement. Pediatricians coach and model simple interactions, thus empowering parents. Every visit to the doctor brings in a new book.

Reach Out and Read dovetails perfectly the Suncoast Campaign for Grade-Level Reading. Both initiatives emphasize school readiness especially for children from low-income families, parental engagement and health. The campaign’s goal is ensuring children can read at grade level by the end of third grade, another key to a lifetime of success. By this time, remediation is very difficult and expensive. More than 1,275 third-graders in Manatee County are not reading at grade level.

“We see how society fails children long before those children ‘fail us,’ ” Navsaria wrote in a column for the Herald.

Some 27 years ago, two Boston Medical Center pediatricians recognized their singular circumstances to influence the intelligence of their young patients alongside their health. Today, the Reach Out and Read model has reached all 50 states, with nearly 5,800 program sites distributing millions of books to 4.7 million young children and their families. Now, Manatee County joins this remarkable endeavor starting with five pediatric practices.

This story was originally published March 1, 2017 at 3:55 PM with the headline "Reach Out and Read: A smart initiative to engage toddlers and young children with books."