Reach Out And Read

Reading aloud is the single most important thing parents can do to foster and maintain their child’s love of books.

Physicians use their unique and supportive relationship with parents to stress the benefits of reading aloud to their children and to encourage the family’s everyday interaction with books.

Reach Out and Read is a pediatric literacy program created in 1989 by a group of pediatricians and educators at Boston City Hospital to help curb illiteracy in Boston’s poorest neighborhoods. As an early affiliated site, Lynn Community Health Center launched its program in 1996 and is now one of the most vibrant Reach Out and Read programs nationwide.

Reach Out and Read integrates parent education about literacy and literacy development into routine pediatric care. A free, age-appropriate book is given out to children six months to five years of age at every pediatric check-up so that books (and sharing them together with parents and siblings) may become a routine part of family life for our patients.