You Never Graduate From Picture Books and That’s Awesome
McJ Children’s Bookseller/ Award-Winning Author of Children’s Fiction/ Mom/ Genius Kate Milford recently shared this NPR piece with the McNally Jackson staff to help inform the suggestions they give to customers in our children’s section. The article, and her commentary (below) are worth the read.
Here’s a link to a short NPR piece about kids' brains on stories, which gives the science behind the importance of picture books. I wanted to send the article around because there's often an instinct with smart kids to push them to read "up"--to move from picture books to more challenging stories with more text and fewer pictures--too early. I can see it sometimes with parents who are super proud of their very advanced kids and are chomping at the bit to nudge them toward more advanced fare. I do it myself with Griffin, who will happily sit for a chapter of something complicated now and then.
This is *not* to say that I would ever second-guess a parent about what kind of book they want for their kid, or what kind of book their kid needs. But sometimes shoppers ask us which books are for which ages of readers, and if they come in looking for guidance on what to get for kids in that 3-6 year old range, picture books (and heavily illustrated beginning readers, which are often basically picture books with a different trim size) do the most good for the kiddo's developing brain. And among picture books there's such a wide range of storytelling complexity, there really are options for older and more advanced readers, too.
If you're still reading, the TL;DR of the article is that with stories relying primarily on audio, kids' language centers were activated, but there was less connectivity overall because the kids were spending most of their bandwidth just trying to follow the story; with stories told primarily through animation, the visual and auditory centers were activated but again there was less overall connectivity again because presumably the animation was doing most of the storytelling work for the kid. But with stories told through a combination of text and illustration, "researchers saw increased connectivity between--and among--all the networks they were looking at: visual perception, imagery, default mode [which the researchers describe as "the seat of the soul, internal reflection--how something matters to you"], and language." So there you go! Picture books rule.
