Reach Out and Read

Stuttering affects approximately 5% of U.S. children—it’s very common!  Jordan Scott, poet and author of “I Talk Like a River”, and Brooke Edwards, Director of Speech for SAY: The Stuttering Association for the Young, join us to talk about how stuttering affects children, and how all of us — caregivers, professionals, and beyond — can make their interactions with people who stutter a more positive and communicative experience.

Thanks to advances in brain imaging, we can measure reading’s structural and functional benefits. Dr. John Hutton, a pediatrician and assistant professor in the Division of General and Community Pediatrics at Cincinnati Children’s Medical Center, joins us to talk about what we can learn from neuroimaging about how children’s activities can affect their brain structure, and what probably helps — or hinders — children’s development.

After three years, the annual Reach Out and Read Leadership Conference was finally back in person. More than 150 leaders gathered in Madison, Wisconsin over three days to share their vision, values, and voice - all in the name of ROR’s mission. Listen to their conference takeaways, what inspires their work, and what drives our community forward.

Why would someone write a research paper involving puppets?  Well, puppets can not only be a tool for helping children feel more comfortable in medical settings, but more recently have been used to support relational health.  Dr. Gretchen Domek, Associate Professor and the Frankenburg Research Professor in Developmental Pediatrics at the University of Colorado, joins us to talk about her work introducing finger puppets as a tool to help caregivers talk with their infants both at home and abroad.

Children are uniquely vulnerable to climate change: rising temperatures and poor air quality increase asthma attacks and allergies, and natural disasters can lead to physical displacement, food insecurity, and an increase in mental health concerns. Dr. Jerry Paulson, Professor Emeritus of Pediatrics and of Environmental & Occupational Health at the George Washington University School of Medicine, joins us to talk about this subject - and how caregivers can separate the noise from the science.

There’s a lot of conversation around health equity, and rightly so: research suggests that many disparities in overall health and well-being are rooted in early childhood.  But how can one meaningfully address that in our healthcare system?  Dr. Darrell M. Gray, the inaugural chief health equity officer for Elevance Health, joins us to talk about how to help shift health care from a transactional relationship to a deeper one, using an equity framework.

The world of literacy has a dizzying array of systems that go well beyond schools and home — including legislatures, philanthropies, and other NGO’s — but they aren’t always collaborating well. Munro Richardson, Executive Director at Read Charlotte in North Carolina, reimagined the way these systems could work, creatively connected groups that hadn’t done so before, and got community buy-in in the process; a clear example of how to make a whole greater than the sum of its parts.

Parenting is often tough. While our society has better normalized talking about the highs, lows, and the in-betweens of raising children, there’s still a lot that’s hard to say publicly. Keith Gessen, author of the new book Raising Raffi, takes on these challenges, asks the many unvoiced questions, and does so as someone not heard as frequently in the parenting book space: the perspective of a father.

As in other times, women in the late 1910s-20s from all over the U.S. looked for parenting advice.  Who did they ask? The federal government, believe it or not.  They flooded the Children’s Bureau, a division of the Department of Labor, with letters about their worries and concerns around raising children. Molly Ladd-Taylor, author of “Raising a Baby the Government Way: Mothers’ Letters to the Children’s Bureau”, joins us to share the story behind the letters and what they can tell us about what has changed - and what hasn’t - regarding maternal and infant care.

What can a piece of clothing tell us about how a child lived?  How can parent interactions be revealed through a pair of gloves? What might a baby’s quilt tell us about family dynamics? Dr. Sarah Anne Carter, Executive Director of the Center for Design and Material Culture at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School of Human Ecology takes us on a field trip into the Center’s vast collection to examine childhood objects throughout history, and how these objects can help tell the stories of the children who used them.