As a pediatrician in a practice that serves inner city, rural and suburban children, one of the best things about my job is a program called Reach Out and Read.
Through Reach Out and Read, pediatricians and family practice physicians join together with parents to affect the literacy development of our most vulnerable patients — children who often are at risk for reading failure — by handing out books as part of routine pediatric care. Doctors and nurses also encourage parents to read aloud to their children, so they hear plenty of rich language and are familiar with books — two factors that impact children’s ability to read on schedule.
For six years, I have been doing just that. In my practice we see 4,250 children a year. That’s more than 8,500 books and a lot of advice on reading. The look on children’s faces when they ask, “Can I keep it?” and I get to answer, “You certainly may!” is incredibly rewarding. I also ask questions such as, “Who reads with you at home?” and “What is your favorite story?” I do this because I want children to grow up loving to read, and because they are more likely to read on their own and perform better in school if they enjoy books.
The fact is one-third of all children in this country are not prepared to learn when they enter school. They lack basic language skills, which are usually acquired at home. One study shows that in professional families, children heard an average of 2,150 different words per hour, while children in working-class families heard 1,250 words per hour, and children in families receiving public assistance heard only 620 words.
This is a serious gap. Children learn language by what they hear.
The results correlate with vocabulary at age 3; the children from the families on public assistance had vocabularies averaging only 500 words, close to the cutoff for developmental delay. This compares to average vocabularies of 700 and 1,100 words, respectively, for the working class and professional class children. Children served by Reach Out and Read show four- to eight-point gains in expressive language scores, which represents an approximate six-month gain in language skills for a 2-year-old child. Reach Out and Read benefits children at the earliest stage of development and before nearly all other literacy programs. Children in a Reach Out and Read program begin receiving books at their six-month checkup and continue receiving them until age 5. By the time a child finishes the program, he or she will have 10 new books. Book by book and child by child, we build small home libraries for families who may have no other books.
Currently there are 159 Reach Out and Read locations throughout Massachusetts distributing almost a quarter-million books to 125,000 low-income infants, toddlers and preschoolers. Reach Out and Read serves 15,509 children in Worcester alone. With the recent addition of two new private practices in Whitinsville and Westminster, as well as another Fallon Clinic in Worcester, Reach Out and Read now serves 24,593 children in Central Massachusetts.
But our work is not done. There are about 28,000 children in Worcester County who still do not have access to this vital program. Sens. Edward Augustus Jr. and Robert Antonioni have worked to help secure funds to expand the number of Reach Out and Read programs in Central and Western Massachusetts, targeting families in school districts such as Worcester, Fitchburg and Leominster. This effort will put more books into the hands that need them.
Our duty as physicians is not only to cure illness, but also to foster healthy, enriched home environments so our patients grow and thrive. I call upon my colleagues and peers to bring Reach Out and Read to their own medical practices. We need our littlest patients to associate their families and parents with a love for books and reading. It is these seeds that plant future successes in school and in life.
Terry Callahan, M.D., is a pediatrician at Medical Associates Pediatrics in Leominster.
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