Fewer families read to preschoolers than before 2020. Here is why the ten minutes matter.

Two studies landed this summer that belong side by side. One says fewer of us are reading to our preschoolers than we used to. The other says that reading together is tied to something most parents care about even more than literacy: calmer, kinder kids.

The slump

Researchers at Rutgers followed seven waves of a nationally representative survey of US parents of three to five year olds from spring 2020 through 2025, nearly 7,000 families in all. In spring 2020, about 82 percent of parents said they read to their child three or more times a week, close to the pre-pandemic national figure of 85 percent. Then it dropped. The steepest fall came in spring 2021, when the odds of frequent reading roughly halved, and by 2024 it still had not climbed back to where it started.

Nobody decided to read less. Routines broke, preschools closed, screens filled the gap, and the habit quietly slid. The study was published in JAMA Network Open on 3 August 2026.

What reading together is tied to

A second study, from Xi'an Jiaotong University, surveyed more than 21,000 parent-child pairs with children aged three to six. Children who were read to more often, across a wider range of subjects, and with more back-and-forth during the reading had fewer emotional and behavioral difficulties and showed more prosocial behavior: sharing, comforting, helping. Nearly one child in five in the sample had noticeable difficulties, and those children were read to markedly less.

It is a snapshot, not proof of cause. But it fits everything else we know: a lap, a book and a grown-up's voice is where a small child practices naming feelings, waiting for a page turn, and seeing a character get through something hard.

Three things the second study measured, and how to do them

• Amount. Three or more times a week was the bar in the Rutgers study. Daily is better, and ten minutes counts.
• Variety. Not just the same bedtime favorite. Books about feelings, books about animals, books about a first day somewhere new.
• Interaction. This is the one most of us skip when we are tired. Stop and ask: "How does Pip feel here?" "What do you think happens next?" Let them turn the page. The back-and-forth counted as much as the minutes.

A calmer takeaway

If reading slid in your house since 2020, you are in the majority and it is fixable. Put the book where the tablet used to be in the bedtime routine. Ask one question per story. That is the whole intervention, and the research says it does more than build readers. A book built for exactly this routine is Pip's First Day of School, written short and read-aloud for ages 3 to 5.