Okay, I will admit it: I am a collector—mostly of children's books. The stories by Louisa May Alcott and Laura Ingalls Wilder that I grew up with often seem to remain fresh in my mind. When I discovered eBay (alas), I began pursuing the McGuffey readers of the 19th century, some of the Little Golden Books that are now out of print, and the Dick and Jane readers that took me right back to my elementary school where I spent some of the best years of my life. I even rediscovered the classic Nurses Who Led the Way, a glossy-covered tome (published in 1961 by the Whitman Company of Racine, Wisconsin) where I was first introduced to Mary Breckenridge, Edith Cavell, and Lillian Wald.
The history of children's literature dates back to the 17th century, when Charles Perrault (1628-1703) of France wrote stories that became the foundation for a number of fairy tales, including Little Red Riding Hood, Sleeping Beauty, and Cinderella. In 1744, John Newbery of England published A Little Pretty Pocket-Book, which marked the beginning of pleasure reading (rather than just instructional reading) for children. In the 19th century, the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen wrote down stories for children that previously had been passed down through rich oral traditions: Snow White, Hansel and Gretel, and The Emperor's New Clothes. And jumping ahead to the year 2000: With the publication of the fourth book in J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter series, the New York Times created the first separate bestseller list for children. Today, major awards for children's literature are bestowed by the American Library Association, including the Newbery Medal for writing, the Caldecott Medal for illustration, the Theodor Seuss Geisel Award for beginning readers, the Wilder Medal for impact over time, and the Coretta Scott King Award for work by an African American writer.
To help encourage young readers, a number of literacy promotion programs have been developed. The oldest and largest is the Reading is Fundamental (RIF) program (http://www.rif.org), a nonprofit organization dedicated to putting books in the hands of underserved children from birth to age 8 years. This program started in 1966, when former teacher Margaret McNamara brought a bag of used books to four boys whom she was tutoring in Washington, DC. By the early 1970s, that program had expanded to more than 60 of that city's public schools, and today RIF operates in each of the United States and territories, the United Kingdom, and Argentina.
The Reach Out and Read (ROR) program, which is probably familiar to many of you, celebrated its 20th anniversary this year. Founded in 1989 at Boston Medical Center, ROR provides training, technical assistance, and funding for the promotion of literacy at pediatric practice sites by building on the partnerships between parents and pediatric health care providers. The program was officially endorsed by the National Association of Pediatric Nurse Practitioners in 2008, and numerous peer-reviewed studies have demonstrated positive outcomes regarding parental behavior, beliefs, attitudes toward reading aloud, and children's language scores as a result of the ROR model (Mendelsohn et al., 2001, Needlman et al., 2005). ROR's Web site provides a wealth of information, including parent handouts (written in English and Spanish) summarizing developmental milestones of early literacy: http://www.reachoutandread.org/FileRepository/RORmilestones_English.pdf. To those of you who have been actively involved with developing the ROR model or who have implemented it in your practice site, well done! If you haven't, I encourage you to become involved and actively pursue the resources available to your practice from this remarkable program.
We need to maintain our commitment to putting books into the hands of children, whether through formal literacy programs or by just acting on the memories of our own love of reading at an earlier age.
In spite of all of these efforts, illiteracy among children today remains a significant problem. We need to maintain our commitment to putting books into the hands of children, whether through formal literacy programs or by just acting on the memories of our own love of reading at an earlier age.
To this day, on a rare, slow day in the pediatric clinic where I practice, I often find myself lingering over the treasures in the red book cart that sits in the hallway, where we encourage each child to stop by on the way out to take a book home. Along with our clinic's regular contributions from ROR, I try to do my part to keep that cart stocked as I whittle down my own collection in favor of passing on the joy. But I still keep a few classics on my bookshelf at home. I never know when A.A. Milne or Lewis Carroll might be calling me.
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