I had an incredible time at the Beyond School Hours National Education Conference in Orlando, where I accepted the 2025 Champion of Children Award from Foundations Inc. Trading Wisconsin’s 10-degree chill for Florida’s sun was lovely, but the true warmth came from spending time among 2,000 passionate educators and advocates. It was a wonderful group dedicated to helping youth feel seen, safe, and inspired through afterschool and out-of-school programming.
It was humbling and motivating to be recognized alongside iconic past recipients like Dolly Parton, Geoffrey Canada, and Barbara Bush, leaders I’ve admired for their transformative contributions to children’s literacy. But the conference’s true heart was its educators and program leaders—unsung champions whose daily efforts create life-changing opportunities for kids.
The conference reinforced my core belief: literacy isn’t just a school issue—it’s a community issue that requires all of us to act. Parents, educators, and community leaders all have a role in building strong readers, from nurturing oral language before kindergarten to fueling curiosity through out-of-school programs.
I appreciate every member of the Foundations team. They all went out of their way to welcome me, celebrate my work, and help elevate it by introducing me to prospective partners at organizations and foundations across the country.
I’m also grateful for the organization’s generous donation to Reach Out and Read Wisconsin, a program that brings books into pediatric care and encourages family read-alouds from birth. It’s among my favorite nonprofits and is exactly the kind of community-based early literacy intervention we need more of.
In my acceptance speech, I shared my personal journey, from championing my daughter Zora’s (named after novelist Zora Neale Hurston) literacy to advocating for every family seeking clear, practical guidance to raise strong readers. I honored my namesake, Maya Angelou, whose iconic poem reminds us:
“I rise… Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave, I am the dream and the hope of the slave.”
We rise, in part, through reading. And when some of us struggle to read, we all have a responsibility to address it. We must support:
- Parents to build oral language skills and print awareness from birth.
- Teachers who deliver high-quality instruction and intervention.
- Out-of-school programs that fuel curiosity and knowledge.
- Communities that nurture learning through conversation, play, and exploration.
I urged attendees to turn every touchpoint with children into opportunities for learning, including summer camps, afterschool initiatives, and community events. I challenged them to empower parents as children’s first teachers, by offering them practical tools and quick wins.
When I wrote my book, I titled it Reading for Our Lives because this is urgent. We don’t read for test scores—we read to thrive. We read for our health, our well-being, our livelihoods, and our shared future.
The journey continues, and I’m more energized than ever to spread the joy and urgency of early literacy.
Thank you, Foundations, for this honor and for creating spaces where education champions connect and strengthen our collective impact.
Together, let’s ensure that every child reads—and rises.
If you’d like to learn more about Foundations Inc.’s important work, visit www.foundationsinc.org.
Get Reading for Our Lives: A Literacy Action Plan from Birth to Six
Learn how to foster your child’s pre-reading and reading skills easily, affordably, and playfully in the time you’re already spending together.
Get Reading for Our Lives
There are years that ask questions and years that answer.
Zora Neale Hurston
To best usher your child towards literacy from birth onwards, it’s helpful to know what they can and should understand and do at different stages.
Let’s start by setting realistic expectations. Your baby cannot read. It’s not even something you should aspire to, let alone try to teach, despite the bogus claims of some products and the wishful thinking of the parents who buy them. The path to reading unfolds over the course of years, not months, and trying to shortcut the process can misdirect you from providing the critical early support and guidance that’s shown to predict later reading achievement and school success.
Reading is making sense of print at a glance. More specifically, learning to read is learning to recognize in writing words, ideas, and concepts that we already understand in spoken language. So there are two hurdles standing between babies and reading comprehension—sufficient oral language experience and knowledge of the alphabetic code.
Children must have enough back-and-forth conversation with parents, caregivers, and others to build the vocabulary, verbal reasoning, and knowledge of the world they need to make sense of words and sentences. Plus, they need direct explicit instruction in how written language works. That is, how letters and combinations of letters represent speech sounds in print. And both facets of reading—oral language and written language—take time to develop.
The parents’ job in the beginning is not to teach reading but to nurture its long-term development through active attention, book sharing, and caring conversation. Think of these as your own ABCs. Do them thoughtfully and consistently from the start, and you’ll create a rich early-language environment in which your child’s reading can bloom. No flash cards, computer screens, or baby “curriculum” required.
How to Use Language Milestones & Literacy Targets
Below, you’ll find a chronology of milestones and targets to help you anticipate the language experience, alphabetic knowledge, print awareness, and speech-sound insight that your child should accumulate as they grow into reading. By the end of this quick tour, you’ll better understand how your child grows from cooer and babbler to full-fledged reader and communicator.
Many linguists believe that modern human speech abilities, including vowel and consonant sound production, may have emerged roughly 200,000 or more years ago with the development of the larynx (aka voice box). That span has given our brains ample time to evolve the wiring that enables even very young children to produce and understand speech in their native language with ease.
Today, children’s oral language development is thought to proceed along a straightforward and predictable path with observable milestones (e.g., first coos, babbles, and spoken words). I will list some language developmental markers that align with norms published by organizations including the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and the Centers for Disease Control. The time frames I list correspond roughly to when most monolingual children have reached the milestones, according to analysis of parent surveys, clinical and observational data, intervention and longitudinal studies, and other research.
I’ll also list select targets related to written language skills. Reading, in contrast to oral language, doesn’t develop effortlessly. Rather, it’s a complex learned ability that emerged much more recently in human evolution. Reading requires the “recycling” of brain networks that originally evolved for other purposes (auditory, visual, semantic processing, and executive function). There’s incredible variation in how long it takes people to develop the oral language foundation and absorb the written language instruction they need to learn to read well—and far too many never get there.
For this reason, I use the word target to describe the print-focused skills. These written-language achievements and book behaviors represent the age when kids “should” have the skills or knowledge in order to meet grade-level expectations down the road—not when most kids actually do achieve these skills. In fact, most kids aren’t currently meeting the targets, because there’s such poor communication and infrastructure linking early care to elementary school and beyond. As a society, we’ve raised the bar for kindergarten readiness without properly supporting families and early caregivers in preparing kids to clear it.
Keep in mind that your family’s mileage along the road to reading will vary. The chronology that follows isn’t a standardized, validated screening tool nor a curriculum guide. It merely overviews what kids need to know and do over time where language and literacy are concerned. It’s not meant to trigger a guilt trip about what you did or didn’t know or do at any given point in time.
If your child is older, scan the list to reflect on all that they’ve learned or where they might need support. Then read ahead to see what’s still coming. Get on board with doing what you can now to move forward from where your child is, and to help them learn and accomplish what they need next for school and life.
You can also visit readingforourlives.com/milestones for more in-depth information on the language and literacy signposts described, the research underpinning them, and ideas on what to do if you are concerned about your child’s development.
Language Milestones & Literacy Targets By Age
May the following lists remind you of the range of skills and experiences kids need—and give you the patience and perspective to be a loving guide.
- Language Milestones & Literacy Targets for Babies
- Language Milestones & Literacy Targets for Toddlers & Preschoolers
- Language Milestones & Literacy Targets for Kindergarten & Early Elementary Students
Keep in mind, the ultimate level of reading we’re aiming for is a moving target. The sophistication your child will need to thrive will depend on the individual goals they pursue in higher education, the demands of the workplaces they enter, and the invention of new technologies and media that we can’t even imagine today.
The term literacy itself changes over time. From the dawn of tablets (stone, that is) millennia ago to the global proliferation of the electronic variety today, social and technological change has altered the very definition of the word. As parents, we need to be aware of literacy’s dynamism as modes of communication change.
I think of how my daughter’s second-grade year was dramatically altered by quarantine and an influx of digital technology. A kid who’d had limited screen time suddenly spent hours online daily and became adept at classroom tech, videoconferencing, and ebook procurement—because she had to. The terms of engagement with her school, teacher, and classmates had transformed in an instant. A pandemic raised educational stakes by activating new approaches to technology, communication, and learning.
The need to leverage skilled reading to meet contemporary needs endures. And the best readers, whether 8 or 80, will be defined by their ability to identify the vast majority of words in any text they encounter and construct meaning from them, individually and collectively.
As each age and stage illustrates, this level of comprehension is built on the foundation of a stimulated brain, a robust vocabulary, wide-ranging exposure to writing, and explicit instruction in the alphabetic code. To read well may take a lifetime, but it all starts from day one with the language- and literacy-building experiences parents create.
Edited and reprinted with permission from Reading for Our Lives by Maya Payne Smart, published by AVERY, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.
Copyright © 2022 by Maya Payne Smart.
Get Reading for Our Lives: A Literacy Action Plan from Birth to Six
Learn how to foster your child’s pre-reading and reading skills easily, affordably, and playfully in the time you’re already spending together.
Get Reading for Our Lives Talking to babies is so vital to their brain development that it’s often called language nutrition. Yet parents of all stripes tend to overestimate how much we talk with our kids—and too often we talk at our tots instead of interacting with them responsively, which is best for their brain and language development.
Well, sometimes the secret to doing more of one thing is doing less of another. And such is the case with positive, responsive parent-child interactions and kids’ media use. If you want to talk more (and more dynamically) with your little one, then limiting the time they (and you) spend glued to a screen is a great place to start.
There was a time when parents only had to contend with television at home, but today smartphones and tablets make media accessible everywhere and every time. A 2023 study, relying on home recordings, found that average daily screen time for 3-year-olds was 172 minutes (2.86 hours) a day, almost triple the 1 hour per day maximum recommended by the Academy of American Pediatrics and the World Health Organization. And that difference amounts to a significant reduction in talk: 1,139 adult words, 843 child vocalizations, and 194 conversational turns lost per day, to be specific.
When to Limit Your Child’s Screen Time
Our words and care beat the unresponsive drone of the television or YouTube every time. Unlike older children, toddlers struggle to learn from video—even live video—without someone physically present alongside them to signal that the video content is useful and worth paying attention to. Only we (live, present humans) can provide the specific, tailored responses to kids’ utterances that they need to grow vocabulary and understanding.
For kids under two years old, the American Academy of Pediatrics guidelines recommend very limited media use, and only when an adult is alongside the child to “co-view, talk, and teach.” An example would be when parent and child are video chatting with out-of-town grandparents. That is, media use for the youngest kids should be brief, interactive, and supervised, in order to benefit little ones. Many parents don’t want to hear this, because digital devices have become an integral part of our lives, but the research is clear: showing a baby videos on your phone is not educational.
Indeed, LENA data shows a negative correlation between hours of television and other electronic media detected in recordings and language ability in young children. And a longitudinal study of 2,441 Canadian children found that higher levels of screen time at 24 and 36 months old were associated with worse performance on developmental screenings at 36 and 60 months old, respectively.
Once kids reach preschool age, the time they spend on devices should continue to be in the company of an adult and limited to minutes, not hours, per day. The bright side is: once kids are 3 years old, there is evidence that they can gain valuable alphabetic knowledge from educational media, such as the public television shows Sesame Street and Super Why!, especially if a parent watches alongside them, discusses, and elaborates on the content. So there comes a time when co-viewing video content can create opportunities to talk, build vocabulary, and support kids’ development.
And you don’t have to commit to watching every episode of Daniel Tiger to fulfill your parental obligations. A rule of thumb is to watch a few episodes to gauge the quality and appropriateness of a show for your child and model how to engage with its content. Once you’ve set the tone and shown them how media works, then you can slip away from future episodes to tackle other tasks or take a break.
Preschooler media use is particularly prevalent in households with multiple children, because parents use smartphones or tablets to calm or separate bickering siblings. But researchers warn that the quick fix has lasting consequences: “the negative impact brought by excessive screen time will actually increase the burden for parents in later life.” That’s because each additional hour of screen-time exposure is associated with kids’ increased risk for emotional, behavioral, social, and attentional problems down the line.
How to Limit Your Child’s Screen Time
One strategy that works for many families is drawing hard boundaries around screen use, such as having device-free dinners; setting curfews after which all devices are docked, charging, and unavailable for use; or creating screen-free rooms or zones at home. Thousands of families have signed on for Screen-Free Saturdays, a nonprofit initiative that promotes unplugging, recharging, and disconnecting from the incessant marketing and manipulations of media and technology companies. You could give it a try and make it an event by powering down devices at sundown on Friday, getting a great night’s rest, and fueling a day of family fun and conversation on Saturday.
Parents’ own use of media also adversely affects family talk. Numerous studies have found that when parents are on their phones, they’re less engaged with and responsive to kids—verbally and nonverbally—sometimes even leading to injury when kids engage in risky bids for attention.
Now, I’m not saying we have to give up Netflix and devote our full attention to our children every waking second. But let’s be honest about where our focus is, what that focus means, and how we might take more opportunities to unplug from devices and tune into our kids. A survey of two thousand parents of school-aged children revealed:
- 69 percent of the parents felt “addicted” to their phones.
- 62 percent admitted to spending too much time on their cell phones when they were with their kids.
- 50 percent had been asked by their child to put their phone away.
Knowing better and doing better are two different things. Breaking our bad phone habits often requires serious intervention—mindfulness, that is. Jon Kabat-Zinn has defined mindfulness as “paying attention in a particular way: on purpose, in the present moment, and nonjudgmentally.” Practically speaking, mindfulness is the ability to create mental and emotional space between a stimulus and our response. It’s cultivating the awareness, self-regulation, and perspective to consciously choose our words and actions (or silence and inaction) in the moment.
In the past decade numerous studies have investigated mindful parenting and found evidence that it can reduce caregiver stress and coparenting disagreements. Some of the same techniques that have helped parents step out of autopilot and respond to kids more skillfully can also serve to help us set aside our phones and converse more in person. Mindfulness-based approaches have helped people battling phone addictions in other contexts. In a pilot study of phone-obsessed university students, mindfulness-based training was associated with a reduction in the students’ cravings for their smartphones and in their smartphone use time.
An easy way for parents to curb device use is to make a mindfulness practice out of the phone itself. We can follow the example of Marta Brzosko of the Self-Awareness Blog, who “created room for more conscious decision-making” around her phone by taking ten mindful breaths whenever the urge to reach for it emerged.
Similarly, clinical psychologist Mitch Abblett recommends that after we reach for our phones we pause and sit with our devices in hand. Let our thumbs hover over the screen. Take a full, deep breath into the belly and notice whatever thoughts, physical sensations, or emotions arise. Get curious about it all, note whatever feelings come up, and continue to return to attending to the breath.
“We simply (and yet with great difficulty) need to learn to hold our technology more lightly—with more awareness,” Abblett explained in a Mindful magazine article. “Consider making your phone itself a cue for waking up instead of checking out.”
Edited and reprinted with permission from Reading for Our Lives by Maya Payne Smart, published by AVERY, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.
Copyright © 2022 by Maya Payne Smart.
Get Reading for Our Lives: A Literacy Action Plan from Birth to Six
Learn how to foster your child’s pre-reading and reading skills easily, affordably, and playfully in the time you’re already spending together.
Get Reading for Our Lives Whatever the intellectual quality of the education given our children, it is vital that it include elements of love and compassion, for nothing guarantees that knowledge alone will be truly useful to human beings.
His Holiness the Fourteenth Dalai Lama
Humans have been reading at least since the late fourth millennium BCE, when pictographic script was first etched into clay tablets with the original stylus, a writing tool sharp enough to leave an impression. And explicit reading instruction in English—directly teaching the links between letters and sounds—has been going on since the sixteenth century.
But it’s just been in the last several decades that we’ve had the benefit of rigorous experiments, massive data sets, and targeted technologies to illuminate how kids learn to read: the earliest roots of reading in children’s lives and parents’ critical role in sustaining them. Perhaps this new knowledge can push us from literacy for the elite to literacy for all.
There are crucial prereading and early-reading subject areas that parents are especially well-equipped to teach kids, with love and lightness, in daily life. They include oral language, speech-sound awareness, and letter-knowledge skills that research shows are critically important for later reading skills. They also include the simple work of familiarizing kids with books and how print works, as well as the more advanced work of matching letters to sounds (and sounds to letters).
Are there other things that parents can and should do to nurture literacy? Absolutely. But these are meaningful, life-altering, often-overlooked areas that are well within our capacity to start addressing (and, yes, teaching) today.
Although abilities like these tend to show up in preschool and kindergarten screenings, they apply to a much wider age span—I’d say from birth to 116, given the remarkable story of a woman named Mary Walker, born in 1848.
Walker’s dream of literacy, beautifully told in Rita Lorraine Hubbard’s picture book The Oldest Student: How Mary Walker Learned to Read, was deferred through slavery and sharecropping, through the lives of two husbands and three sons, and the administrations of twenty-six presidents of the United States. She learned at last at 116 years old, and read until her death at age 121 on December 1, 1969.
“She studied the alphabet until her eyes watered,” Hubbard wrote. “She memorized the sounds each letter made and practiced writing her name so many times that her fingers cramped… She studied and studied, until books and pages and letters and words swirled in her head while she slept. One fine day Mary’s hard work paid off. She could read!”
Literacy is still deferred for too long for too many, for lack of a strong foundation. I know a high school literacy coach whose job is to give teachers strategies to help teenagers who can’t read make sense of the science, math, social studies, and other course content in class. Imagine being expected to learn advanced content with no understanding of the printed information in textbooks and classroom materials.
When she can, the coach pulls students out of class to tutor them in the basics of letter-sound associations that they never mastered in elementary or middle school. It’s not a service she expected to provide high schoolers, but one they desperately need. And who will be there to help them when they struggle after they graduate—or drop out?
Would-be readers of any age must master the basics. There are areas of study that just cannot be skipped.
Edited and reprinted with permission from Reading for Our Lives by Maya Payne Smart, published by AVERY, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.
Copyright © 2022 by Maya Payne Smart.
Get Reading for Our Lives: A Literacy Action Plan from Birth to Six
Learn how to foster your child’s pre-reading and reading skills easily, affordably, and playfully in the time you’re already spending together.
Get Reading for Our Lives Think back over your last few months of spending. What were the big-ticket items or experiences that you purchased for your child? If you were to judge yourself on where you invested dollars on their behalf, what would those expenses say about your priorities?
Sports, travel, and clothing topped my list of spending for my daughter this summer. She moved to a new soccer team, which required buying all-new everything: socks, shorts, four different jerseys, a backpack, outer gear for all weather, and the list goes on and on. As luck would have it, the one thing the team didn’t require—new footwear—made its way into our shopping cart anyway, because her old cleats no longer fit.
I’m talking hundreds and hundreds of dollars, far more than I spent on education during the same time frame. Do I value soccer over education? No. Does my spending look like it? Yes.
While there’s not an exact correlation between what we spend and what we value, I do believe that our visible spending sends kids strong messages about our priorities. How we spend says more than we intend.
Reading on the Road
So to tip the scales a bit in reading’s favor, I decided to put a lit-rich trip into the mix. If we can travel to Missouri and Arizona for soccer, I thought, why not go to our nation’s capital for reading? The Planet Word Museum and the National Book Festival had long topped my list of literary destinations to check out, so I brought my mom and my daughter along to make a weekend of it.
The Planet Word Museum was well worth the time and travel. Educator and philanthropist Ann Friedman’s founding vision for transforming the historic building has been beautifully realized, down to minute details like language symbols embedded in flooring and elevator interiors that look like library shelves. Every inch of the space exudes intention and enthusiasm for the human experience of language.
Most remarkable for a museum dedicated to words, it resists the urge to overwhelm visitors with print. It offers immersive, sensory, memorable experiences with language, using movement, light, and sound to capture visitors’ attention. It leaves space for guests to create our own meaning from what we consume, versus having it spoon-fed to us through the long placard descriptions typical of museums.
Everything at Planet Word is engaging, but here are a few of our favorites to give you a taste of the experience.
Global Voices
In your excitement to enter the museum, don’t miss the courtyard’s gorgeous, interactive art. Experiential and evocative, a towering aluminum sculpture, called Speaking Willow by visual artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, commands the space. Ivy creeps up its trunk and bell-shaped LED lights and speakers dangle from its branches.
When visitors pass under, it murmurs words from 364 different languages, representing the languages spoken by more than 99% of the world’s people. The speech —general statements about the various languages and cultures represented—isn’t meant to be parsed. Rather, let the words wash over you and inspire your sense of wonder at the richness, diversity, and interconnectedness of human communication.
Iconic Idioms
The Joking Around exhibit gives visitors a shot at shouting out iconic idioms—if you can take a visual hint from the provided props. We caught on to some pretty quickly, like “in a pickle” and “two peas in a pod,” but others left us stumped… to this day. Go ahead, have at these word puzzles. Then visit Planet Word for more. This light-hearted, interactive exhibit gets kids (and adults) thinking about the playfulness and creativity of figurative language.
The Word Wall of All Word Walls
Kids may be familiar with classroom word walls, filled with high-frequency words or lesson-specific vocab. This is not that. Planet Word’s 22-foot-tall talking word wall tells the story of the English language, through video and illuminated words. Visitors play a role, too, using microphones to interact with the exhibit and help shape the narrative.
Native Speakers
The Spoken World exhibit showcases iPads arrayed around a globe of lights. The screens offer mini-lessons in languages from Icelandic to Wolof, which highlight the diversity of world languages for us, as well as the universality of communicating culture and community. We loved the chance to practice words in unfamiliar tongues and ponder the heritage and identities of the speakers, as well as our own.
Gifts of Gab
I love a good gift shop, and Present Perfect at Planet Word had it all—bookish socks, pins, puzzles, games, and even dishes digging into tricky words like they’re, their, and there. There were books for word nerds of all ages, from Spelling Bee savant Zaila Avant-Garde’s Words of Wonder from Z to A picture book to Joe Gillard’s The Little Book of Lost Words: Collywobbles, Snollygosters, and 86 Other Surprisingly Useful Terms Worth Resurrecting. If you’re on the hunt for a baby shower gift, I recommend this adorable onesie. It pairs perfectly with my book, Reading for Our Lives.
We tapped out after two hours at the museum, which means there’s still much, much more to explore. On our next visit, we’ll be sure to dine at Immigrant Food, tackle a word-puzzle case in Lexicon Lane, and dig into the “I’m Sold” advertising exhibit. And I’m sure we’ll pick up a few more SAT words in the photo booth, sponsored by the College Board.
Long story, short. We loved it. Five stars. We’re sold on the idea that Planet Word truly is “the museum where language comes alive.”
Summer break arrives, and with it, the familiar quest to keep kids reading during their time off from school. Many parents optimistically enroll children in summer reading programs, hoping it helps kids foster a love for books and learning. And to sweeten the pot, libraries tout rewards like coupons and gift certificates to entice kids to hit milestones—say, a certain number of books or minutes read.
As a child who loved to read, I know the appeal personally. I recall carrying a stack of books taller than myself to the checkout desk at my local library in preparation for their summer reading program. I’d scavenge the library, meticulously looking through each section, hoping to find interesting books that were short enough to finish in time to receive a prize.
But now I wonder: What comes first, the love of reading or the enticement of a reward? Do rewards really help kids fall in love with books, or are they just icing on the cake for kids who already enjoy reading?
Let’s look at the arguments for and against summer reading rewards programs—and the story of one library that ditched them in favor of building up kids’ basic reading skills in a county where low literacy is endemic.
The Case for Summer Reading Rewards
Conventional wisdom says incentives get kids into the library, encourage them to seek out books they enjoy, and get them reading more. A whopping 97% of public libraries nationwide offer reward-based reading programs, doling out everything from stickers, stuffed animals, and temporary tattoos to free books, coupons, and tablets. As one librarian noted, kids may come for the prizes but then “leave reading for their own sake.”
Surveys of and interviews with middle schoolers who participated in summer reading programs and their parents suggest that the effectiveness of prizes is a mixed bag: a combination of what’s called “intrinsic” and “extrinsic” motivation.
Essentially, “intrinsic” motivation is when you want to do something for the sense of satisfaction you get from doing it. In this case, that would be reading for the love of reading. “Extrinsic” motivation is when you want to do something because you’ll get some kind of compensation or outside approval for doing it. Here, that would be reading to get a reward.
Popular thinking is that intrinsic motivation is more powerful, but research suggests that people aren’t driven completely by intrinsic motivation or completely by extrinsic motivation, but rather by a complex mix.
Indeed, the surveys showed that some kids who already enjoyed reading appreciated program perks as nice add-on incentives and said they read more than they might have otherwise to meet program targets. Others felt the content of the prize itself was less compelling than the sense of accomplishment they gained from doing the reading required to earn it.
Most of the parents surveyed felt that their kids read more, improved their reading skills, and gained reading confidence as a result of the summer reading rewards programs.
The Case for Ditching Reading Rewards
But not everyone is convinced that such summer rewards programs meaningfully fuel a love for reading—or even that administering them is a good use of librarians’ limited time.
Veteran children’s librarian Anne Kissinger believes libraries should focus on directly helping kids gain reading skills (which many lack, according to the numbers) instead of celebrating pages turned over the summer. In fact, she successfully lobbied for her library system to abandon summer rewards programs altogether.
For years, she says librarians at the Wauwatosa Public Library where she worked spent most summer days stamping coupons for participants in their reading rewards program. In summer 2017 alone, the library system distributed 3,000 rewards.
But at the height of this apparent success of the summer reading program, she worried that the library had evolved into a “clearinghouse” for promotional goods instead of a bastion of reading skill and interest. “They’re not reading for their own enjoyment,” she observed of kids participating. “They’re reading to fill in our logs or meet our requirements.”
With her branch located in a county where 25% of adults read at or below the lowest literacy level, peddling extrinsic motivation at that scale felt to her like shirking responsibility. Faced with the choice of sticking to the status quo or championing a deeper commitment to reading, she advocated to free librarians’ time up from stamping coupons and direct it toward better equipping parents to help their kids learn to read in the first place.
Reading specialist and Wauwatosa library patron Christine Reinders noticed the change in what the library offered physically—and culturally. It had always been a place where parents could find material to read to their children, but now it was becoming a space where parents could support their kids to read to themselves. For example, it was offering more books with simple words that kids can sound out along with more support for parents teaching their children to read.
“‘[Wauwatosa] is a really special place, because they had a library and a children’s librarian who recognized this need” to cultivate basic literacy, Reinders said. “The library was filled with all these wonderful books, but many were not accessible because kids were just learning to read. Now, we have those beginning readers to help them establish that solid foundation to become proficient readers and writers.”
Lessons for Parents From the Reading Rewards Debate
Ultimately, rewards may get some kids in the library and reading more in the short term, but parents would do well to attend to the longer term and intrinsic motivation, too. That’s the kind of motivation that stems from kids learning to read with enough skill, fluency, and understanding to enjoy it.
And libraries like Wauwatosa’s can be great partners in that pursuit when they offer resources for parents about fostering reading skills, as well as simple early reading material for kids.
After all, reading motivation is no simple black-and-white matter. Once we can read, we do it for many reasons: interest in the story, curiosity about the topic, the satisfaction of learning or getting to “the end,” the joy of personal choice, the prospect of a prize. We’re driven by a messy mix of reasons and inspirations. Parents and others hoping to encourage kids to read, or read more, may be best served by leveraging the gamut of motivations.
Confession time: For someone who preaches deep family and community involvement in children’s education, I’m not a constant presence at my daughter’s school. I couldn’t pick many of her teachers out of a lineup, and I rarely sign up for parent-teacher conferences.
In my defense, they’re virtual and so short that by the time we exchange pleasantries, they’re practically over. My emails to the school are mostly logistical: “She’ll miss class for a family commitment/soccer tournament/orthodontist appointment, sorry!” And you know what? I’m okay with that.
The truth is, your involvement with your child’s school will naturally ebb and flow based on your circumstances, interests, and—most importantly—your child’s needs. And that’s exactly as it should be.
When my daughter was younger, I was all in. She attended a public Montessori school for a brief time, and I wore every hat: school board member, reading buddy, field trip chaperone, you name it.
I felt a deep obligation to advocate for all children in a school serving many under-resourced families. Plus, I wanted to make sure she was getting the foundational skills she needed for long-term success. But as she has grown and her needs have changed, so has my school involvement.
Now that she’s a teenager, I focus more on empowering her to take responsibility for her education. I want her to check her own grades, follow up with her teachers, and learn to communicate effectively—life skills as much as academic ones. My role now is backup and coach.
I’m still deeply engaged, but my involvement looks different: daily conversations directly with her, gentle nudges, and teaching moments about things like the perils of group projects, email etiquette with teachers, and how to ask for help.
So, what’s the takeaway for you?
Parental school involvement and supporting your child’s education doesn’t have to look one way. It doesn’t have to mean signing up for every conference, attending every event, or leading the PTA.
It just needs to reflect your family’s unique circumstances and your child’s needs at the moment. And here’s the good news. You get to decide what that looks like.
Three Simple Steps to Meaningful Engagement
- Stay Aware
Keep a pulse on how your child is doing developmentally and academically. If they’re in preschool, know the milestones typical for kids their age. For school-aged kids, familiarize yourself with grade-level expectations and where your child stands. If something feels off, ask questions. Teachers and administrators are there to help. - Reflect on the Data
Look at report cards, state assessment scores, and other information the school provides about your child’s learning. Even a quick review can give you insights. If teachers raise concerns—whether academic or behavioral—engage in constructive dialogue and work together to find solutions. - Seek Support When Needed
If challenges arise—and they will at some point, about something—explore resources both within and beyond the school. Schools often offer tutoring, reading buddies, or other support. Libraries, community organizations, and even your personal network can be incredible allies in your child’s learning journey, too.
Above all, give yourself permission to change your approach and intensity as you and your child grow. Some seasons of life will call for all-hands-on-deck engagement. Others may let you step back. Both are okay.
Set Your Own Standard
Here’s the bottom line: Thoughtfully decide how you want to show up for your child, and then show up that way. Whether you’re the board member parent, the email-only parent, or somewhere in between, your ultimate goal is the same: to meet your child’s needs and support their development. Sometimes for busy parents that means leaning on others, too—a partner, grandparent, or someone else who can fill in when you can’t.
You don’t have to do it all. Nurturing a child’s development is its own kind of group project.
Get Reading for Our Lives: A Literacy Action Plan from Birth to Six
Learn how to foster your child’s pre-reading and reading skills easily, affordably, and playfully in the time you’re already spending together.
Get Reading for Our Lives This year marks the 10th anniversary of my turn as The Richmond Christmas Mother, a community fundraising campaign I led that raised more than $325,000 to make the holidays a little brighter for Central Virginia families in need. It was the 80th anniversary of the Christmas Mother Fund, and I was the youngest woman—and first black woman—to helm the effort. I quipped at the time that for the last several years the committee had selected Christmas Grandmothers. (Daphne Maxwell Reid, the original Aunt Viv from The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, followed me in the role in 2018.)
In retrospect, that campaign signaled a turning point—not just for the fund, but for me personally. It marked a pivotal early step in my personal transformation from community volunteer and book cheerleader to early literacy leader and parent engagement pro. The campaign added “child literacy advocate” to my name in news headlines for the first time, and it stuck. In the years since, I’ve added new titles like “author” and “parent educator” to the mix, as I’ve sharpened my understanding of what it takes to really move the needle on reading achievement.
The Christmas Mother Fund historically directed most of its support to the Salvation Army’s Christmas assistance programs. But during my tenure, we expanded its impact by launching a competitive grant project in partnership with the Community Foundation. We interpreted “Christmas” broadly to extend all the way from Thanksgiving to New Year’s and aimed to reach into 80 different pockets of the community through local organizations big and small. This allowed us to support incredible work, such as providing home-cooked meals to homebound seniors and disabled people and bringing joy to kids battling cancer.
While I did the usual hustling—placing calls, talking with media, meeting with local businesses, and presenting to civic organizations—I also put my own spin on the campaign. I donated copies of Each Kindness and other Jacquelyn Woodson books to local children at schools and child care centers. By the season’s end, I’d distributed more than 1,000 books. My Christmas Parade float, too, reflected my passion for literacy: I decked out a trolley in homage to Ezra Jack Keats’s classic picture book The Snowy Day. The marvel of art, craft, and engineering on wheels was brought to life by a dedicated team of volunteers. (Yes, we hung countless hand-cut snowflakes from the trolley windows to ensure a white Christmas.) All in the hopes of inspiring reading, encouraging parents to read to their children, and getting families to give books for Christmas instead of only toys.
Along the Dominion Energy Christmas Parade route, I tossed stuffed dolls of Peter, the main character of The Snowy Day, into the crowd. (Throwing board books into the air felt too risky.) I was joined by author friends Meg Medina, Gigi Amateau, Robin Farmer, and Stacy Hawkins Adams. At the time, I thought I might follow them into publishing fiction. Instead, I walked a different path, writing for parents and encouraging families to raise readers.
This wasn’t my first foray into advocacy. Previously, I’d launched a campaign to raise funds and awareness for Friends Association for Children, an early childhood development center that I adored and that I later highlighted in the conclusion of Reading for Our Lives. But my Christmas mother campaign gave me a platform to articulate what I now see as my core conviction: if we want to address society’s most entrenched challenges, we need to invest in children’s early education and literacy.
Looking back at a 2014 interview with Cheryl Miller on Virginia This Morning, I’m reminded of how long and deeply I’ve held this belief. All those years ago I said, “I’m a really big advocate for early childhood education programs and literacy programs for our children. I think as a community, we can invest more in children earlier and prevent a lot of the problems that many social-service organizations are grappling with as the children age.”
Some things never change! Ten years in the game and I say some version of this daily. Only now, I have the privilege of taking stages nationwide to spread the message. In 2024 alone, I addressed thousands of early childhood educators, K-12 teachers, librarians, interventionists, and parent educators in states as far-flung as Wisconsin, Louisiana, Iowa, Ohio, Maryland, Florida, and Idaho.
The Richmond Christmas Mother campaign wasn’t just a fundraiser. It was a turning point, a launchpad, and a testament to the power of a community coming together to create change. It’s been 10 years, but the lessons I learned and the momentum it sparked continue to shape the work I do today.
Get Reading for Our Lives: A Literacy Action Plan from Birth to Six
Learn how to foster your child’s pre-reading and reading skills easily, affordably, and playfully in the time you’re already spending together.
Get Reading for Our Lives Literacy First, an Austin-based high-impact tutoring program, kicked off its 30th anniversary celebrations in a meaningful way: with a virtual book club discussion of my book, Reading for Our Lives.
Rather than just retrospective fanfare, the organization chose to ponder its mission by engaging staff, board members, district partners, and the broader community in a thoughtful dialogue about work outside of its current scope. The topic: engaging with parents of kids before they arrive in school. This choice underscores Literacy First’s commitment to continuous learning and using collaboration to drive change.
Reading for Our Lives Book Discussion
It was a pleasure to join the conversation with readers who had already engaged with the book. Their questions showed real curiosity and thought, diving into the nuances of my writing process: Why that title? How did I decide which histories and voices to feature? We also explored practical strategies for supporting young readers—tools that anyone, whether a parent, teacher, or community member, could use.
The discussion took on some of today’s most pressing literacy topics, including how to embrace multilingualism as an asset to literacy development. Another topic we addressed was the role organizations like Literacy First, along with partners such as BookSpring and school districts, can play in achieving literacy for all children.
Participants were eager to dig into early literacy milestones, reflecting on the need for schools to raise expectations around specific literacy skills like phonemic awareness and decoding. A recurring theme emerged: the challenge of communicating to parents and educators that just good enough isn’t good enough—early literacy skills matter deeply, and they set the foundation for future success.
We also tackled practical concerns. How can preschools recognize the importance of systematic instruction? What strategies work for families with neurodiverse children or late talkers who aren’t ready to jump into conversations but still want to build literacy skills? And finally, I was asked a fun yet intriguing question: Have you thought about starting a podcast? (My answer: Try me in 2026!)
Literacy First: The Gold Standard of Reading Tutors
For three decades, Literacy First has set the bar for reading intervention through its effective approach, inclusivity, and measurable impact. Serving students from kindergarten through second grade in both English and Spanish, the program will support 2,000 children this year—adding to the more than 30,000 students it has helped since its founding.
I’ve followed Literacy First since 2017, and I can attest that it’s the real deal. During my time in Austin, I had the opportunity to observe its tutor training sessions, attend a tutor swearing-in ceremony, visit schools to see tutors in action, and celebrate the program’s successes. Making it possible for well-trained tutors to intensively support kids’s reading development in English or Spanish for 30 minutes a day 5 days a week is as impactful as it is rare.
Two key lessons stood out during my Literacy First observations. First, focus and intensity matter. To be effective, educators need to engage with research, identify the exact skills students need, and deliver targeted instruction at a dosage high enough to move the needle. Second, tracking progress is essential. Literacy First not only holds itself accountable to results, but it also makes sure its efforts translate into measurable improvements for students.
A Reading Mission That Matters
I’ve seen firsthand how transformative qualified tutors can be. There’s simply no substitute for a focused, intentional effort to teach more people how to teach reading. Sadly, in too many settings, reading tutoring falls short—not due to lack of effort, but because of a lack of expertise and funding.
Children deserve better. They need programs like Literacy First that combine research-backed methods with a commitment to excellence and accountability.
After 30 years of remarkable impact, Literacy First remains a beacon of hope for students, families, and educators. Despite its age, I think it’s just getting started.
Get Reading for Our Lives: A Literacy Action Plan from Birth to Six
Learn how to foster your child’s pre-reading and reading skills easily, affordably, and playfully in the time you’re already spending together.
Get Reading for Our Lives Newsflash:
All those beautiful children’s books you’ve been collecting?
They won’t help your child learn to read or love it unless you actually read them—regularly. Sharing books with kids gives them indelible experiences and positive emotions around reading that make them want to read on their own. Yet many parents focus on what they plan to read to their kids and neglect the urgent matter of assigning time to actually do it.
And it’s no wonder. Endless book reviews and recommendations (mine included!) feed our picture book cravings and tout books for every theme, holiday, or moment in your child’s life. The coverage journalists and influencers give to the content of books grows our libraries and Amazon wish lists, far outpacing reports on how to build strong family reading habits.
There’s a lot to keep us parents from reading to our kids daily—from a wavering motivation to read and competing priorities to busyness, fatigue, and more. Not to mention our kids’ moods, attention span, age, and interest level.
But I’m here to tell you that looking beyond bedtime and identifying multiple, recurring opportunities to read with your child will pay off big-time. Building these routines not only fosters better vocabulary and language skills for your little one, but also more quality time, bonding, and well-being for the whole family.
The Anatomy of Family Reading Culture
Let’s face it: Reading stories is important, but building reading culture is transformative. Culture requires depth and frequency, so families that weave multiple strands of reading into the fabric of their daily lives reap the greatest impact.
Each family’s reading culture is the product of a unique mix of resources, relationships, and rituals. Factors include the books and other reading material you have in your home, how you show up to share them, and how frequently you do so. All of these can nurture your kids’ reading attention, interest, and motivation.
A family living in a book desert, for example, might not have much reading material, but could read fewer texts more frequently and with great warmth and get good results nonetheless. By the same token, a family with more resources might fill a child’s room with kid-lit but never take the time to read or discuss the books together—coming up short on relationships and rituals. Luckily, regardless of your starting point, there are always opportunities to ramp up your book collection, book talk, and reading routines.
Of all these elements of reading culture, rituals are especially powerful, because they increase the dosage of the other two: reading material and relationships. Reading together daily—preferably multiple times a day—boosts your child’s exposure to the vocabulary and knowledge in a wide range of books, plus it increases your engagement and conversation. The benefits of consistency are so pronounced that I believe that when you choose to read to your child matters as much as what you choose to read.
Designing Reading Rituals
Ready to establish some reading rituals to ensure that the books you’ve been collecting get read and discussed? Here’s how:
Step One: Choose Your Moments
As I learned from behavior scientist BJ Fogg’s Tiny Habits method, timing is critical. Fogg recommends consciously tethering new habits you want to build to your most deeply entrenched existing routines. This makes it easier to remember and implement the new habits. That’s part of why bedtime story reading is such a common ritual for families, with 87% of more than 2,000 parents surveyed by Scholastic saying their read-alouds occurred at bedtime or naptime. Kids go to sleep (or at least get in bed) every night, so it’s less of a stretch to add reading into the mix of tucking them in.
Bedtime is far from the only consistent, daily event that you can anchor reading to, though. Pay attention to your time with your child and make a list of the daily habits, routines, and points of interaction you share. Do you wake them up? Prepare meals? Eat together? Drive them to daycare or other activities? List out all the recurring moments. Think of things you do before noon, afternoon, and in the evening, right before they go to bed, etc.
Step Two: Brainstorm Behaviors
With your existing patterns in mind, look for opportunities to make reading tag alongside those activities.
Can you open up a book of five-minute stories after you wake your little one? Turn on an audiobook after you fasten your seat belt in the car? Point out words and letters on signs, or comment on your morning reading, as you drive through your neighborhood?
The goal is to weave reading and literacy into your day via small actions, making new behaviors as inevitable as brushing your teeth or eating dinner. Think of “tiny” as something that can be done in 30 seconds or less or in 5 reps or less, e.g. reading a page of a book (not reading for an hour) or pointing out a word or letter (not a dozen).
This doesn’t mean that you can’t aim high, just that you’re focused on starting small and (importantly!) celebrating sooner.
Step Three: Celebrate Your Successes
As you try out new habits, remember to celebrate your wins. Parents don’t get enough credit, so give yourself a mental high-five every time you successfully incorporate reading into a new part of your day. You could also celebrate out loud and bring your little one in on the action. Give them a high five along with saying “we did it!” to share your enthusiasm with them and put an exclamation mark on the experience.
In the Tiny Habits method, celebrations are truly the key to making the new behaviors repeatable. When you give yourself a pat on the back, pump your fist, or engage in the celebration of your choice immediately after accomplishing the new habit, you reinforce that behavior. Your celebration’s positive vibes trigger a dopamine surge, wiring your brain to link your habit with those feel-good moments.
If, on the other hand, you follow the accomplishment by mentally beating yourself up for not reading more, or sooner, or better, you do the opposite—discourage yourself. So be your own cheerleader to best instill positive habits.
As Fogg puts it in the Tiny Habits book: “There is a direct connection between what you feel when you do a behavior and the likelihood that you will repeat the behavior in the future.”
That’s great news! It means that we can form new habits quickly, even if it doesn’t always feel that way. Contrary to popular belief, it’s not how many times you repeat a habit that makes it stick. It’s how positive your emotions connected to the habit are— and that’s something we can consciously impact.
Step Four: Tweak and Repeat
Start by experimenting with a few new reading habits at once, so you can compare and contrast results. Don’t feel pressured to nail the perfect routine immediately. Try different times and methods of incorporating reading and see what sticks. This is a design process. Observe what works, adapt when needed, and keep refining your approach.
Through it all, stay tuned in to your child. If they’re squirmy before meals, distracted during playtime, or tired at night, don’t push it—try other times and places. And if the books you’ve picked aren’t grabbing their attention, switch things up until you find some they love.
Remember, the most compelling picture book in the world won’t build a lasting reading habit on its own. You reading it regularly to your child will.
And a proven way to make that happen is the kind of purposeful behavior design described above, bolstered by positive emotions. So skip obsessing over finding the perfect books and focus on weaving reading throughout your busy days instead.