It’s the same ritual every night. Your preschooler begs you to read The Cat in the Hat— and you’re ready to refuse. Think again.

The time you devote to reading to your kids can pay enormous personal and professional dividends for them throughout their lives. Research confirms that good little readers tend to achieve greater levels of success as adults.

Good reading skills frequently predict academic performance—poor readers are at greater risk for dropping out of school. Despite our belief in the transforming power of the printed word, our children exhibit alarming deficiencies — an estimated 40 per cent of the nation’s students can’t read at a basic level. Particularly hard-hit are low-income and urban kids who struggle with issues of literacy and comprehension.

By promoting a love of literature in your child, you can also give a gift that holds to an even higher standard.

“Good literature helps us see ourselves and others as the human condition is reflected in the literature. It helps us develop empathy for those in dissimilar situations to our own. Leland Jacobs once said that we all walk this world alone and literature helps us do it in a less lonely way,” says Carol Hurst, nationally known lecturer, author and language arts consultant. Hurst, a native of Massachusetts, has written a number of books, including Once Upon a Time, an encyclopedia for teaching literature to young children and a recent novel for young adults, Through the Lock (available on amazon.com).

Children improve their reading skills by practice—it’s critical to encourage children to read often. The more children read the better they like to read. They achieve fluency, enrich their vocabulary and magnify their ability to understand what they’re reading—all the things that help make reading pleasurable.

“It’s great for parents to help guide children toward interesting and challenging reading, but whenever possible children should feel free to make their own choices. We all read a lot of junk and everybody needs to wade through a lot of it in order to develop a sense that it is indeed junk. Even then, most of us do not always reach for the most challenging reading. We read sometimes to learn and sometimes to relax and we should allow children to do the same. As for material that is too sophisticated, usually the child will absorb what he or she is ready for and let the rest slide away,” says Hurst.

Protecting your child from the emotional rigors of a sad story isn’t necessarily a good thing, according to Hurst.

“Good literature helps children see how to mourn and grieve the deaths and that tragic circumstances and events are survivable and a part of everyone's life. Restricting any child's reading to that of happy families who act and think just as that child is supposed to act and think is stupefying. Such a reader would get a parochial view of life from such reading and no sense that the world is full of color and varying cultures and beliefs.”

Book Smart:

Hurst suggests the following:

• Read aloud to your children: Start early—although it’s never too late to begin. Choose books that touch on the child’s interest, use reading aloud to open doors to all sorts of wonder. Children with reading difficulties may never enjoy the books their peers are reading unless you take the initiative to read to them. By being read to, reluctant readers learn that the chore of learning to read is worth the effort.
• Let children see you reading adult material: Kids are highly attuned to hypocrisy. Parents who extol the virtues of reading and yet do not themselves read have a credibility problem.
• Discuss what you’re reading: Share tidbits from your own reading—newspapers, magazines, books—with your children.

“Be wary of some books that are considered children's classics. While many have stood the test of time, others have not,” says Hurst. “Black Beauty, for instance, was written to create a public outcry against cruelty to animals and it served its purpose well, but it is a sentimental and not terribly well-crafted piece of work, best viewed in its historical context.”