The importance of parental book‐reading; tensions between theory and practice

Abstract

This article is about book‐reading by nine lower class Curacaoan mothers and their children. All children visited a kindergarten in Curacao. Curacao is an island in the Caribbean. The kindergarten teachers had started a reading project to stimulate parents to read books to their children. Teachers did not know how parents actually read to their children. We conducted the study to describe parent and child activities during joint story‐book reading. We use this project as a case to clarify some of the tensions between notions based on research findings from studies which were mainly conducted with middle class families and projects for educational change which tend to focus on lower class families. Theory tells us that reading with young children should be interactive. Conversations, in which the child actively engages, linking the story or pictures to the child's own knowledge and experiences, are more important to the child's development than reading the story as such. The Curacaoan reading project is ju...