Reading Together: Tiny Moments That Grow Language

If reading with your child feels peaceful in your house, wonderful. If it feels like your toddler eats the corner of the board book, your preschooler interrupts every sentence, or your baby wants the same two pages again and again, also normal. Today we are talking about shared reading, not as a perfect bedtime performance, and not as a test of whether you are doing enough. The American Academy of Pediatrics, in its twenty twenty-four policy statement on literacy promotion, recommends shared reading from birth through at least kindergarten because it supports relationships, language-rich back-and-forth, and early learning. That is the big idea. A book is not a worksheet. A book is a place to take turns.