What Every Pediatric Clinician Can Do To Promote Early Literacy and Early Learning

Here are recommendations adapted from the AAP policy statement to promote early literacy in clinical practices and communities: 

1. Encourage all parents and caregivers to read aloud with their young children with engaging and interactive styles.
2. Discuss with parents and caregivers how reading together enriches early relationships, supports resilience, builds brain circuitry, and enhances social-emotional, language and literacy development. 
3. Support reading together, starting in the newborn period, including, when possible, in the NICU. 
4. Discuss and model joyful and developmentally appropriate reading, and techniques such as dialogic reading that prompt reciprocal, responsive, and positive experiences.
5. Provide high-quality, developmentally and linguistically appropriate, and culturally diverse books at health supervision visits for all young children; placing the highest priority on provision of books for children from under resourced families who may lack access to them. 
6. Support the AAP recommendation of limited screen use in early childhood, with an emphasis on print books for young children because digital books do not foster equivalent parent-child interactions. If digital books or audiobooks are used, recommend that parents interact with their children around these modalities. 
7. Identify parents and caregivers with limited literacy skills and tailor book guidance to emphasize language-rich interactive activities that do not require reading print but may include conversations about colors, numbers, shapes, characters, or actions depicted in the book. 
8. Support parents who want to improve their own literacy skills and refer to community-based programs. 
9. Reinforce early literacy messages with posters and parent information materials about public libraries, story times, and book distribution programs. All materials should be diverse, culturally responsive, inclusive, and accessible to those with limited literacy skills. 
10. Emphasize the value of books representing diverse cultures, characters, and themes for all children and support the use of these books to generate conversations about cultural pride, inclusion, belonging, and equity. 
11. Incorporate guidance and encouragement about reading aloud even in visits when books may not be readily available 
12. Partner with other child advocates to influence national messaging and policies that support promoting reading aloud starting in infancy  

Implementing a Primary Care Literacy Promotion Program:

Reach Out and Read is a widely disseminated and evidence-based primary care literacy promotion model. It includes the parental guidance and physician modeling recommended above, starting at the newborn visit and continuing until the age of kindergarten entry, and the provision of developmentally and culturally appropriate books at those well child visits.

For more information on the Reach Out and Read model and how to start a program in your clinic please see here.

Other Early Literacy and Early Learning Resources:   

• Reach Out and Read 
• US Department of Education: Talk, Read and Sing Together Every Day! Tips For Preschool Teachers & Other Early Childhood Education Program Providers
• National Association for the Education of Young Children: Articles for families on literacy
• Head Start: Effective Practice Guides on Language and Literacy
• Reach Out and Read the Reach Out and Read Podcast 
• Zero to Three: Early Childhood Resources
• Talking is Teaching
• Canadian Children’s Literacy Foundation: Provider Toolkit
• Canadian Children’s Literacy Foundation: Book Sharing Tips
• Center on The Developing Child, Harvard University