To Encourage Kids' Health, Pediatricians Add Reading to Essential Check-Up List


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JEFFREY BROWN: And now, a prescription for succeeding in school. It comes from pediatricians making their patients' reading skills a part of regular examinations.

The NewsHour's special correspondent for education, John Merrow, has the story.

JOHN MERROW: Today, 2-year-old Shadman Uddin is here for his routine check up.

DR. CINDY OSMAN, Bellevue Pediatric Clinic: Good job.

JOHN MERROW: His pediatrician, Dr. Cindy Osman, checks his eyes, ears and heart, but that's not all.


WOMAN: Juice, water.

CINDY OSMAN: Great. Does he ever put words together?



WOMAN: Say mommy.

CINDY OSMAN: Oh, so he's doing great with his language. Perfect.


JOHN MERROW: She's a new breed of pediatrician, part doctor, part teacher.

CINDY OSMAN: You can see a lot in how they handle a book. You can check out their fine motor skills. So I'm both checking their development, and I'm getting a sense of how frequently they're read to.

What sound does a train make?

What is he saying?

WOMAN: Go, go, go.


JOHN MERROW: Dr. Osman works in the pediatric primary care clinic at Bellevue Hospital in New York City. It's part of a national literacy program called Reach Out and Read.



JOHN MERROW: Why the doctor's office? Because that's the one place where all children, including those most at risk, go regularly before they enter school.






CLAUDIA ARISTY, Reach Out and Read: Most of the families that we serve are immigrants. And a lot of them didn't -- were not able to finish school. Some of them were not even sent to school ever.


ESTHER AKINWUNMI, volunteer: My goal and my approach is to let them have fun while they're reading, so that they don't -- they don't feel like, I'm reading a book, or I'm hearing a boring story, something that is interesting to them, so that it encourages them to read.


ELIZABETH KASOWITZ, volunteer: I'm always looking up to see whether the parents are engaged. And very often, I see them with an ear kind of tilted towards what I'm reading.


JOHN MERROW: The Reach Out and Read program can be found in 5,000 medical centers across the country. It touches almost four million mostly low-income children, at a cost of $10 per child, per year. Bellevue's program is one of the largest.



CLAUDIA ARISTY: One of the ideas that I share with her is that she can be reading a book aloud to her 11-month-old while he's walking in the room, just putting language out there for him.


JOHN MERROW: Families are likely to pay attention to advice given at the doctor's office, especially when it comes from their pediatrician.

CINDY OSMAN: We help them through difficult times, whether it's, you know, a kid with temper tantrums or a kid who's up all night and is having trouble sleeping.

We have an opportunity to -- to bond with families and make some suggestions that hopefully work. Families do turn to pediatricians for more than just prescriptions. That's for sure.

JOHN MERROW: In this program, a child will have 10 regular checkups between the ages of six months and five years. That's just 10 books, just 10 opportunities for the doctor to stress the importance of reading. Is it enough?

CINDY OSMAN: There's solid research that shows that just that intervention of handing a family a book, giving them a couple of age-appropriate pieces of advice about how to read with their kid, and just encouraging reading, they -- those kids will do better in school.



For those who haven't gone to kindergarten or who aren't being raised in homes filled with books, school will be even tougher.

JUDY WOODRUFF: And a sad postscript to John's story. The Reach Out and Read program at the pediatric primary care clinic at New York's Bellevue Hospital lost thousands of books last week in the storm.

