As a supporter of reading with children and a fan of traditional print books, I cannot say I am entirely surprised by the results of new research suggesting that print books are the best way to go when reading with young children.

Written language will be only more important in our children’s lives as the world becomes more and more networked, in the largest written-word-based community that has ever existed. Our children will grow up to depend on their facility with reading and writing in their jobs, their personal relationships, their ability to access information and news, and their participation in civic discourse at every level. How can we help them into the world of written language, in all its many modern manifestations?

In a study published Monday in the journal Pediatrics, researchers at the University of Michigan asked 37 parents to read similar stories to their 2- to 3-year-olds in three different formats (the order was varied for the different families): a print book, a basic electronic book (no bells or whistles) on a tablet, and an enhanced electronic book with animation and/or sound effects (tap a sea gull or a dog and hear the sounds they make). The interactions were videotaped and coded, looking at the number and kinds of verbalizations by parents and by children, at the amount of collaborative reading that went on, and at the general emotional tenor of the interaction.

Reading print books together generated
more verbalizations about the story from parents and from toddlers, more
back and forth “dialogic” collaboration. (“What’s happening here?”
“Remember when you went to the beach with Dad?”)

Dr.
Tiffany Munzer, a fellow in developmental behavioral pediatrics at the
University of Michigan C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital, who was the first
author on the study, said the researchers had wanted to study toddlers
in particular because of a concern that the toddlers might be
particularly susceptible to distraction by electronic enhancements. That
was why the enhanced books were compared to print books but also to
nonenhanced electronic books.

“They were susceptible,” Dr. Munzer said, “but the basic electronic book without the enhancements was also distracting to toddlers, and they had less engagement with their parents than with print books.”

So while earlier research had suggested
that the enhancements were problematic for young children, the results
of this study suggested that even a nonenhanced story on the tablet
screen seemed less likely to generate that parent-child dialogue. “The
tablet itself made it harder for parents and children to engage in the
rich back-and-forth turn-taking that was happening in print books,” Dr.
Munzer said.

The researchers can only
speculate about why; it may be because of the patterns we are all
accustomed to in using our devices. Perhaps “the tablet is designed to
be more of a personal device, perhaps parents and children use it
independently at home,” Dr. Munzer said. There were also some struggles
over who got to control the tablet, and more “negative format-related
comments,” like “Don’t touch that button.”

And a print book, with a young child, may be a better piece of technology, if the goal is dialogue and conversational turn-taking. “A print book is just so good at eliciting these interactions,” Dr. Munzer said. “You’re comparing a tablet with the gold standard.”

I was one of the co-authors of a commentary accompanying the study,
which acknowledged the many potential benefits of electronic books for
children, but argued for continuing to rely on print books for the very
young, including in programs that encourage parent-child reading.

My
colleague, Dr. Suzy Tomopoulos, assistant professor in the department
of pediatrics at N.Y.U. School of Medicine, who was the lead author on
the commentary, said that whatever the medium, “parents need to read
together with their child, use what they’re reading, and expand on the
text.” With younger children, she said, there’s evidence that they get
distracted with e-books, and there’s a lot of technology being actively
marketed to parents nowadays. “You don’t need a lot of bells and
whistles to support your child’s development,” she said. “Engaging the
child and talking to the child does a wonderful job of supporting early
child development.”

Reach Out and Read has a partnership with Scholastic, which this week released the seventh edition of its Kids & Family Reading Report,
a national survey of school-age children and parents. It found that
though 58 percent of the kids surveyed said they love or like reading
books for fun, there has been an incremental decrease in reading
frequency among the children surveyed since 2010.

And as children reach the age when they are expected to have fully mastered reading, they seem to be reading less for fun. In what the report called a “decline by 9,” the percentage of kids who report reading books for fun five to seven days a week dropped to 35 percent of 9-year-olds from 57 percent of 8-year-olds.

Lauren Tarshis,
senior vice president at Scholastic and a contributor to the report,
pointed to the focus on third grade as the pivotal year when children
are expected to achieve full fluency as readers.

The
worry is that is that the pressure — and the testing — at that stage
may contribute to the perception that reading is no longer so much fun.

“I keep
saying to my colleagues, it made me feel sorrowful,” Ms. Tarshis said.
“If you have reading in your life as something you see as a way of
transporting you, opening doors, it’s just a wonderful, wonderful
thing.”

The report also highlighted
the importance of “reading role models,” pointing out that the children
who are frequent readers have people in their lives who enjoy reading,
and parents who read frequently. This is hardly a surprise, though
again, in the digital era, it might raise the question of just how our
children can tell what it is that we are doing on our devices.

(When
my own children were young, and I had just started to investigate the
literature on reading, I was delighted to discover that “sustained silent reading”
was an important pedagogical technique in elementary schools. I
promptly invented another important technique, which I termed “witnessed
sustained silent reading,” which I felt changed my parenting approach
from “don’t bother me now, I’m reading,” to something far more
laudable.)

But clearly parents play
an important role. The book that stimulates the dialogue between parent
and toddler is also the child’s introduction to the pleasures of written
language and stories. The pleasure that a parent takes in reading helps
shape a growing child’s attitude. And the message to parents should not
be that they’re doing it wrong (we all know we’re doing things wrong,
just as we all know that we’re doing our best), but that parents really
matter.

“Parents today work harder than ever,” Dr. Munzer said. “Our goal is to help families reflect on activities they engage in that spark connections.”

Culled from The New York Times