Maybe you, like us, have been wondering whether during the early days of COVID when families with young children were all staying home together and reorganizing their daily lives, if that meant more reading time, or less reading time, or just totally different kinds of reading time?

Well, The Read Lab (Dr. Read, with student co-authors Grace Gaffney (’21), Amina Imran (’21) and visiting UCLA student Ashley Chen) just published a new study of the impacts of COVID-19 related “stay-at-home” orders and early childhood education and care (ECEC) closures in the Spring and Summer of 2020 on young children and their families’ shared book reading at home.

The research found that, even while COVID massively disrupted young children’s care routines, families with the resources available still prioritized their children’s reading time, and found creative, screen mediated, ways to adapt – one small, but important sign of resilience for families in an otherwise tumultuous and challenging year. 

Here’s the link to the full paper published in the Early Childhood Education Journal, or a preprint archived here.