‘We occasionally miss a bath but we never miss stories’: Fathers reading to their young children in the home setting

Abstract

This paper reports findings from a mixed methods research project in 2011, which set out to examine the extent and nature of father and child shared home reading practices. There was a particular focus on exploring fathers’ perceptions of their role in reading with their child, aged five years old. The research was commissioned by Booktrust and conducted by the National Research and Development Centre for adult literacy and numeracy. It involved 254 fathers and the results from the study are supplemented and enhanced by analysis of data on fathers’ reading from the Millennium Cohort Study. One of the main findings from this study and the Millennium Cohort Study data is that significant numbers of fathers read to their children either every day or a few times a week. The other findings are presented under the headings of father’s own reading practices, their motivation for reading with their child/children, the place and the time reading occurs, the strategies and practices that are employed, the types of text that are read, the models or influences fathers draw on and the barriers that they believe militate against them reading with their child/children.