Pediatricians at St. Christopher’s Hospital for Children and the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia are developing a program that gives books to young patients during routine checkups. The effort targets areas where bookstores and home libraries are hard to find.
Reach Out and Read pairs book giveaways with developmental screenings. Doctors show parents how to read aloud and prescribe daily reading for children from birth through age 5. St. Christopher’s extends the program into the early teen years. Patients get to keep the books.
An estimated 46 percent of children in the Philadelphia school district don’t have the skills they need to start kindergarten. They lack vocabulary, language, reading and listening skills, according to pediatrician Daniel Taylor, who helps run the program at St. Christopher’s.
Taylor described North Philadelphia as “a book desert, where there aren’t a lot of bookstores, i.e., none, and families don’t have a lot of children’s books in their homes,” said Taylor to Northeast Times.
“Just like food insecurity and trying to feed people food. Here we’re trying to feed people with words and books.”
Caregivers don’t have time or don’t feel safe traveling to their local library in city areas with high crime, Taylor said. He runs Reach Out and Read out of the hospital’s Center for the Urban Child, an outpatient pediatric practice that sees about 48,000 children a year.
Pediatrician Trude Haecker, one of the founders of CHOP’s Reach Out and Read program, said parents who receive a book during a well visit are two and a half times more apt to read to their child. “The brain is burgeoning, so in the first three years of life, 80% of your brain is formed. There’s a million neurons a second being formed in that first year of life, which is incredible. So having that ability to engage with that child changes that child’s brain.”
St. Christopher’s has given out nearly 1 million books since 2001, written in English and about a dozen other languages. The program raised more than $120,000 last year for new books through its annual basketball tournament fundraiser.