Lifetime prescription
Nonprofit group pushes reading to kids to help them forever
It’s a prescription guaranteed to develop healthy brains, refine motor skills and prepare kids for school, doctors say.
But few parents expect a physician to hand their children a book at their first wellness checkup at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus.
“It was a fun surprise, for sure,” said Kristin Hummell, 34, of the city’s Victorian Village neighborhood, as her 18-month-old son, Jack, thumbed through a board book about baby animals in the hospital’s Livingston Ambulatory Center waiting room.
Jack first visited the center last year, after Hummell and her husband moved to Columbus from another state. Thanks to Reach Out and Read, a national nonprofit group that strives to improve childhood literacy, they have the opportunity to read with waiting room volunteers during every visit, and Jack also receives a book to take home.
His most recent, from a 15-month checkup, was a book of 100 first words.
“We read every night before bed, and that’s one of his favorites,” Hummell said.
Now celebrating its 30th year, Reach Out and Read, a program started by Boston Medical Center pediatricians, places books in more than 6,000 hospitals and doctors’ offices nationwide, including five in Columbus. The other local locations besides Nationwide Children’s are two family
practices affiliated with Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center as well as the Westside Health Center and Columbus Northeast Health Center.
When children participate, independent research has found their language development is improved by three to six months and parents are more than twice as likely to read to them, according to the Reach Out and Read website. When providing books, doctors also speak with a child’s parents about the importance of literacy and reading aloud.
A new study published this year found that parents also are more likely to bring their children to wellness checkups.
“Having that foundation sets children up to be able to reach their full potential, which is really the whole mission of what we do as pediatricians,” said Dr. Dane Snyder, a Nationwide Children’s physician. “Instead of asking for a sucker when we’re done, now they ask for a book.”
The hospital’s program has doled out 1.5 million books since 1998, with children ages 2 months to 5 years taking a book home after every wellness checkup, he said.
All of the new or gently used books are donated, a majority from longtime partners such as Barnes and Noble and Southwestern City Schools, which host collection drives annually.
The South-western Education Association will wrap up this year’s collection this week, with a goal of gathering 22,000 books, the approximate number of students enrolled in the school district. Donors can drop off books at school district and community buildings or call 614-801-3000 for more information.
Such efforts help level the playing field in preschool and kindergarten, because buying books is tough for some families, educators say.
One-third of young children and half of children living in poverty in the United States start kindergarten without the skills they need to succeed, according to the nonprofit research group Child Trends.
In the first six years of life, 95 percent of the brain is formed.
“Every child needs to be able to know how to read, but not every child has access to quality books,” said Debi Ballard, a reading teacher and the Southwestern Education Association’s vice president. Children who don’t have a head start when they come to school “are usually at a disadvantage — socially, academically and generally.”
Even just a few minutes of reading in a waiting room can spark a child’s excitement, especially if it has pop-up pictures or sensory surfaces, said Nationwide Children’s volunteer Audrey Jones, 67, of Reynoldsburg.
“These books open up a whole new world for them,” the retired nurse said.