Literacy Promotion and Child Health: The Role of Reach Out and Read

This Special Article draws on a State of the Art Plenary, Literacy Promotion and Child Health: Reach Out and Read at 37, presented at the 2026 Pediatric Academic Societies meeting, which reviewed the evolution of Reach Out and Read (ROR) as a clinical intervention, a subject of research, and an increasingly incorporated component of pediatric primary care. The ROR model, supported by a national organization, now reaches 4.8 million children and families throughout the United States. Much of this growth has been driven by clinicians seeking to support family relationships, child development, and educational trajectories through primary care, especially for families at social risk. This article is based on 6 brief talks, each identified by theme and speaker, focusing on the original concept and rationale for early literacy promotion in pediatric primary care; ROR as an instrument for social justice in the context of brain development, toxic stress, and resilience; efforts to define critical elements of the intervention and strengthen them through training and engagement of both practicing clinicians and residents; a multistage collaborative research effort centering parent leaders across the ROR network in the design of the CONNECT Survey, a measure of the parent/caregiver-clinician relationship; and the crucial contribution of parent voice. Research on ROR has shown positive effects on parent reading and child vocabulary; more recent research, highlighting parent/caregiver voices, emphasizes the importance of modeling by clinicians and of the relationships between primary care clinicians and families.