Why Children’s Books and a Love of Reading Matter | Karen Wilhelm & Nicole Skilliter
- Aisha Washington
- 1 hour ago
- 6 min read
A picture book may take only a few minutes to read, yet its influence can last for years. In their TEDxBGSU talk, educators Karen Wilhelm and Nicole Skilliter argue that children’s literature does far more than entertain: it helps young people develop language, encounter unfamiliar lives, recognize themselves, and rehearse the courage required to participate in the world.
Their central message is also a challenge to adults. A love of reading rarely emerges from instruction alone. It grows when families, teachers, librarians, and communities make books accessible, treat children’s interests seriously, and create experiences in which stories feel social, relevant, and alive. Teaching literacy skills matters, but so does building a culture that gives children reasons to use them.
Children’s Literature Can Carry Serious Ideas
Wilhelm and Skilliter resist the assumption that books written for children are necessarily simple. A short text can contain emotional complexity, social conflict, symbolism, and questions with no easy answer. The combination of words, illustrations, typography, and page design gives picture books a distinctive ability to communicate on several levels at once.
The speakers point to The Smallest Girl in the Smallest Grade by Justin Roberts as an example. Its young protagonist notices behavior that others overlook and decides to speak up. The story gives children an accessible way to consider what it means to recognize injustice, find a voice, and act despite being small or underestimated.
Books such as Big by Vashti Harrison similarly invite discussion about identity, judgment, and self-worth. Wilhelm and Skilliter use titles like these to show that children’s literature can address difficult realities without reducing them to abstract lessons. A well-chosen story gives readers a character to care about, a situation to examine, and a safe starting point for conversation.
That makes picture books valuable beyond the early grades. Their lessons about courage, compassion, resilience, and belonging remain relevant to adolescents and adults. Returning to them can remind experienced readers of values they first encountered in childhood—and reveal dimensions they were too young to notice before.
Reading Offers Something Screens Often Do Not
The speakers place this argument in a media environment saturated with screens. They cite figures indicating that video, television, and gaming account for more than 86 percent of the daily screen activity among children from birth to age eight. The point is not that every digital experience is harmful. It is that books now compete with media designed to capture attention continuously, so sustained engagement with reading is less likely to happen by accident.
Wilhelm and Skilliter also refer to Boston University research on differences between shared reading and screen use. In their account, being read to engages brain regions associated with language and emotional understanding, including the right temporoparietal junction. This area helps people reason about what someone else may think or feel, a capacity closely connected with empathy and perspective-taking.
Shared reading adds a human relationship to the text. A child can pause, ask why a character acted in a certain way, study an illustration, predict what will happen, or compare the story with personal experience. An adult can respond to confusion and curiosity in real time. The value lies not merely in receiving information but in making meaning together.
A book also changes the pace of attention. Unlike an automatically advancing stream of images, a printed page waits. That pause gives children room to notice details, form mental pictures, revisit an earlier clue, and tolerate uncertainty. Reading becomes both a linguistic exercise and practice in reflection.
Books Act as Mirrors, Windows, and Doors
Drawing on literacy scholar Rudine Sims Bishop, the speakers describe literature through the familiar concepts of mirrors, windows, and doors. A book can reflect a reader’s own life, offer a view into someone else’s experience, or invite the reader to cross imaginatively into another world.
The “mirror” function matters because recognition can be affirming. When children encounter families, bodies, languages, communities, and struggles resembling their own, literature tells them that their lives deserve space on the page. That sense of visibility can strengthen both belonging and engagement.
Windows are equally important. Stories allow children to spend time with people whose circumstances differ from theirs, creating opportunities to question assumptions and develop curiosity. Books cannot substitute for real relationships or complete cultural understanding, but they can interrupt the idea that one’s own experience is universal.
The metaphor of a door emphasizes participation. Readers do not simply observe a story from a distance; imagination lets them enter its moral and emotional landscape. They consider choices, consequences, fears, and hopes from within. Wilhelm and Skilliter present this movement between self and other as part of literature’s contribution to the public good: books can help people feel valued while teaching them to value lives beyond their own.
Reading Skills and Reading Desire Must Grow Together
The science of reading has reinforced the need to teach foundational skills explicitly. Children require systematic support as they learn how written language works. Wilhelm and Skilliter do not frame enthusiasm for books as a replacement for that instruction. Instead, they argue that rich literary experiences give those developing skills meaning and momentum.
A technically capable reader who sees books only as assignments may rarely choose to read. Conversely, enthusiasm cannot eliminate the need for effective instruction. Strong literacy education must therefore pursue two related outcomes: helping children become proficient readers and helping them imagine reading as something worth doing.
Read-alouds connect these aims. Children can participate in language and ideas that may exceed what they can yet decode independently. They hear rhythm, expression, and vocabulary modeled by a fluent reader. They also learn that books invite laughter, disagreement, suspense, comfort, and inquiry.
Wilhelm, who spent two decades working in an elementary school before entering higher education, recalls read-aloud time as a particularly meaningful part of her teaching. Watching children connect with stories taught her that the way an educator introduces and discusses a book shapes how students receive it. Adult enthusiasm is not a decorative extra; it signals that reading is genuinely valued.
Future Teachers Need Authentic Encounters With Books
If children learn partly by observing adults, teachers must be more than distributors of reading tasks. Students notice whether an educator approaches books with curiosity or treats them merely as curriculum materials. For that reason, Wilhelm and Skilliter believe teacher preparation should help future educators renew their own relationship with reading.
The Curriculum Resource Center they discuss is designed around this principle. It functions not simply as storage for books and instructional aids but as a welcoming place where future teachers can explore, test ideas, and make connections. Its atmosphere matters: comfort, access, and permission to browse can turn a collection into a community.
One initiative, called “Starbooks,” adapts the idea of a tasting event to children’s literature. In a café-like setting, students sample picture books, record titles they enjoy, explain what attracted them, and connect each work to academic content or teaching standards. The playful format serves a serious purpose. It gives participants time to discover books before asking them to design instruction around those books.
These experiences can alter how prospective teachers understand their role. Instead of seeing literacy teaching only as delivering prescribed material, they begin to imagine themselves as hosts who invite children into stories and ideas. Some participants have carried the book-tasting model into their own classrooms, translating a memorable learning experience into a practice for younger readers.
A Reading Culture Is Designed Through Small Choices
The talk suggests that relatively modest changes in time, environment, and access can reshape attitudes toward reading. Schools do not need elaborate installations to begin. They need carefully selected books, opportunities to browse without pressure, adults willing to share their responses, and spaces where discussion feels safe.
Useful practices might include gathering around a table to examine picture books, assembling text sets that offer several perspectives on a topic, or allowing teachers to rehearse read-alouds with peers. Collaboration among librarians, professors, teachers, and students can improve selection while encouraging thoughtful questions: Whose life appears here? Who remains absent? What conversation might this story open? How does the author or illustrator create meaning?
Authenticity is crucial. Children quickly recognize activities constructed only to secure compliance. A credible reading culture makes room for individual interests and accepts that reading does not have one approved form. Picture books, novels, informational texts, poetry, comics, and other formats can all become routes into sustained curiosity.
Access alone is therefore necessary but insufficient. A shelf full of books becomes influential when someone opens a door into it—by recommending a title with genuine excitement, reading aloud with care, or listening closely when a child explains what matters to them.
Rediscovering Reading as a Shared Human Practice
Wilhelm and Skilliter ultimately describe reading as both personal and communal. It offers individuals a chance to slow down, think, and reconnect with parts of themselves that everyday demands may obscure. At the same time, discussing stories creates shared language for examining relationships, choices, and the kind of community people want to build.
Their call to action extends beyond classroom teachers. Families can establish rituals around stories. Librarians can curate collections that welcome many kinds of readers. School and community leaders can protect time and resources for literacy. Adults can model curiosity by allowing children to see them reading, questioning, and changing their minds.
The first step is deliberately ordinary: pick up a book. Read it with a child, recommend it to a future teacher, or revisit it as an adult. A lifelong relationship with reading is rarely produced by a single dramatic intervention. It develops through repeated invitations—each one showing that stories are available, that the reader belongs, and that books can still enlarge the world.
