Reading by age and stage

Birth to twelve months: voice, closeness and sturdy books

The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) advises paediatricians to encourage shared reading beginning at birth and continuing at least through kindergarten, including in neonatal intensive care where possible. Its reasoning is partly about language and partly about the relationship between child and caregiver, since reading aloud gives them a regular, close, shared activity. The AAP prefers print books to screens, stating that digital books do not foster the equivalent parent-child interactions. At this age, the AAP's milestones page suggests, babies respond mainly to the reader's voice and facial expressions, and the lead author of the AAP statement suggests making books part of the bedtime routine.^[1][2][3]

The AAP's early literacy milestones page describes babies of around three months as babbling, copying sounds and smiling at a caregiver's voice, and beginning to grasp a read-aloud, or at least the reader's facial expressions. From about six to twelve months, babies typically sit steadily, grab at pages and bring books to their mouths. The page treats mouthing as a sign of interest rather than a problem, and recommends durable board and bath books that withstand teething and drool. Such books also offer colour, simple objects and photographs of faces, which babies seem to prefer. These ages are approximate, and children develop at different rates.^[3]

One to two years: handling books and naming pictures

Between about twelve and eighteen months, the AAP page says toddlers can sit without support, which frees both hands for books. They turn board-book pages, often several at once, carry books around, bring them to a caregiver to read and point to a picture when asked where something is. Noticing that a book is upside down is described as an early step towards reading. Between eighteen and twenty-four months, toddlers typically turn board-book pages on their own, name familiar pictures when asked, fill in the last word of a familiar story, and may 'read' a favourite book to a doll or soft toy.^[3]

Why picture books and not conversation alone? A 2015 analysis in Psychological Science compared 100 children's picture books with samples of adults talking to young children, and found that the books contained more unique words. A separate longitudinal study of 48 US families found that parents' language during book reading was more sophisticated than at other times, and that book reading predicted later vocabulary and reading comprehension after controls. Both findings are descriptive or correlational: they show that books offer richer language, not that any one book causes a particular result.^[4][5]

Three to five: the foundations of reading

The US National Early Literacy Panel reviewed around 300 studies to find out which early skills predict later reading. Six measures held up even when IQ and socioeconomic status were accounted for, among them alphabet knowledge and phonological awareness, which is the ability to detect and manipulate the sounds within spoken language. Average correlations with later decoding were .50 for alphabet knowledge and .40 for phonological awareness. These are associations across groups of children, not predictions for any individual child, and the panel's work concerned children from birth to age five.^[6]

The same panel found that shared reading interventions improved children's language development, with the largest impact on vocabulary rather than on more complex measures such as listening comprehension. Interactive shared reading showed a larger average effect than non-interactive reading (0.59 against 0.41), although that difference was not statistically reliable. For this age group the evidence therefore points two ways at once: plenty of talk and stories to build language, and playful attention to letters and speech sounds, skills that the panel found code-focused interventions improved.^[6]

Five to seven: from listening to reading, and keeping the habit

When formal instruction begins, children learn to decode print. The US National Reading Panel, which concluded its work in 2000, reviewed research on phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension, and describes phonics as the knowledge that letters of the alphabet represent phonemes, the small segments of sound within spoken words. The studies cited here suggest that stories heard at home do not substitute for this teaching. In the National Early Literacy Panel review, shared reading mainly strengthened language, whereas code-focused instruction improved alphabet knowledge, phonological awareness, reading and spelling. A longitudinal US study likewise found that early book reading did not predict decoding.^[7][6][5]

Reading for pleasure is under pressure at this age in at least one country. The National Literacy Trust's 2025 survey, with 114,970 respondents aged 5 to 18, found that 44.5 per cent of five- to eight-year-olds read daily, 3.4 percentage points fewer than a year earlier and 9.1 points fewer than in 2019. This is a UK survey, not a UAE figure. A meta-analysis of 99 studies concluded that frequent readers are more successful students, but its authors describe a reinforcing cycle in which stronger readers read more, so cause and effect run in both directions.^[8][9]