Why is Family Literacy Important?

For many reasons, family literacy is important. One of the biggest, however, is that until members within the family unit can successfully read and write, it makes it difficult to break the poverty cycle.

According to a Place of Our Own, an educational website dedicated to caregivers, family literacy is when family members improve their reading and writing skills by things they do together, such as through drama, art, or story-telling by reading picture books or regular books.

An effective family literacy program is designed to improve the literacy abilities of both children and parents. Most are developed for parents of preschoolers or early school-age kids with the goal of enhancing a child’s school readiness and success while supporting the literacy development of the parents, says a white paper on the importance of family literacy.

It also adds that by the time babies are one and a half, the bottom 10 percent will only understand approximately ninety words while the top 10 percent will understand 300 plus words. Studies also show that a child who has access to books at home will do better than a child with none.

It was once believed that kids learned to listen and speak before they were school age and learned how to read and write after that, the white paper says. An article from the Harvard Family Research Project states that literacy is not a onetime phenomenon that begins when a child starts school, but rather has its origins prior to that, a term referred to as emergent literacy. The white paper says also that reading aloud to kids is the best way to build early literacy abilities.

One program that’s making a big difference for Hispanic families is the Latino Family Literacy Project. The Project educates parents on why family literacy is important and helps them in setting up a successful, at-home, bilingual reading program. Teachers can attend a half-day program training at a workshop near them or view an online webinar.