Reach Out and Read: Promoting pediatric literacy guidance through a transdisciplinary team

The mission of Reach Out and Read (ROR) is to make literacy promotion a standard part of pediatric primary care, to help ensure that children grow up with books and a love of reading. Pediatricians and early childhood specialists founded ROR in 1989 at Boston City Hospital, now a part of Boston Medical Center. By its 15th year, ROR had grown to serve more than 2 million children annually living in poverty in over 2,200 clinics in all 50 states and in a wide variety of location types. More than 28,000 physicians (pediatricians and family practitioners), pediatric nurses, family nurse practitioners, and physician assistants nationwide have received training in emergent literacy and the ROR model. 

Reach Out and Read is designed to take advantage of the existing structure of pediatric primary care, in which parents of young children have regular, one-on-one, developmentally focused visits with pediatricians during the first years of a child's life. Children with a medical home routinely see their doctors for health supervision visits 10 times between the ages of 6 months and 5 years. For many families, especially for families living in poverty, these are the earliest, and often the only, regular contacts with a child development professional.

By integrating conversations about early literacy into standard health supervision visits, primary care providers promote the later acquisition of spoken and written language skills in young children, thereby increasing the likelihood of learning to read in school. Emergent literacy skills are the precursors of formal reading, which ultimately help children to succeed in the first three grades of elementary school.

Reach Out and Read builds on the special relationship between primary care providers and other staff in the outpatient clinic and parents of young children (ages 6 to 60 months) to encourage each parent to read aloud to his or her children daily. Providers convey to parents the importance of books and reading in their children's lives. A body of research synthesized by Snow and Tabors in 1996 has demonstrated that being read to early and often creates a strong foundation for later learning and ultimate success in reading; being read to also promotes enjoyment and engagement with books and reading in young children.