Letter from a ROR Physician Dear Friends, I had a wonderful experience in clinic the other day. I was working together with a third-year medical student, and we were meeting with the family of a five-year-old boy who was getting ready to go into first grade. I asked the patient a couple of questions about starting school, and his mother and father and older sister urged him to answer me, but I was another stranger, and he was shy. Then I suggested that we give him a book, and that we let him accompany us down the corridor to the cabinet where the books are kept, so he could choose his own. When we got to the cabinet, he immediately seized a copy of Jorge, el Curioso, (Curious George) and held on to it tightly. I heard laughter, and turned to see that the rest of the family had followed us down the hall, and were applauding his choice, explaining that he had watched the cartoon, but did not know Curious George was a book. When we got back to the exam room, he not only answered questions about the book, in both English and Spanish, but happily identified individual letters for us on the page, smiling all the while. We were able to praise his intelligence and his familiarity with the alphabet, to talk with his family about the ways that reading to him would help him in school, and to make suggestions about discussing the letters and the words and the story. Every time you give a child a book in the exam room, new conversations open up with the parents-and with the child. Whether it's a toddler who can point out a funny picture, or a shy preschooler who starts naming colors and characters, the ways that children respond to books offer doctors a chance to do so much at the primary care visit. We can see where they are developmentally, we can watch them interact with their parents-and we can offer the families we care for the kind of encouragement and advice which really helps parents understand how to enjoy books with their children. Taking that book home from the clinic visit means taking home the pleasure and the possibility of books and reading. I so enjoyed watching everything that went on in that exam room - the child enjoying the book, the family taking pride and pleasure in his engagement, and the medical student incorporating books into her own developing clinical style. Books lead us down so many interesting corridors, in and out of the exam room, and they make such a difference in children's lives. Thank you so much for all of your continued support which means that Reach Out and Read doctors, like my patient, can look into the book cabinets and see wonderful possibilities. Perri Klass, MD, is a Professor of Journalism and Pediatrics at New York University, and the Medical Director and President of Reach Out and Read.   Return