Mom · StoryBeam co-host
Why We Leave the Tangents In
What the research on parent-child shared reading taught me about the moments I used to think were ruining our recordings.
Most StoryBeam episodes start the same way in my head and go a completely different way in the room. I'll have picked the book, read it myself the night before, maybe even jotted a couple of questions I want to ask her. Then we sit down, mics on, and about four pages in she stops me to ask why the fox is sad, or she wants to go back and look at a page we already passed, or she's decided the whole thing is actually a story about her stuffed rabbit now and wants to tell me about that instead. None of that is in my notes. Almost all of it ends up in the episode.
For a long time I thought of those moments as the thing I had to manage around — the detours I'd smile through and then try to steer us back from. It took me longer than I'd like to admit to realize the detour is not a distraction from the reading. For a five- and six-year-old, it might be the actual work.
What's really happening when we sit down to record
Here's the honest texture of a session, on a normal day, not a good day or a bad one: we get maybe two pages of clean reading before she has a question. Sometimes it's about the book — what's inside that door, why does the character look worried. Sometimes it's not about the book at all. Sometimes she wants me to read the same line again because she liked how a word sounded. A decent chunk of what we record never makes it into the final cut, not because it's bad, but because a six-year-old's attention moves the way a six-year-old's attention moves, and not every tangent resolves into something a listener two states away needs to hear.
What does make the cut, on purpose, is the back-and-forth. The stopping. The "wait, go back." The questions that don't have tidy answers. I used to feel a little embarrassed about how unpolished that is compared to a narrated audiobook. Then I went looking for what researchers actually say about this kind of reading, and it turns out the mess is not a flaw in the format. It's the format.
What the research on shared reading actually shows
The specific style of back-and-forth reading — pausing, asking open questions, letting the child talk, following where they take it — has a name in the research literature: dialogic reading. The foundational study, by psychologist Grover Whitehurst and colleagues, published in Developmental Psychology in 1988, took parents of two- and three-year-olds and trained one group to read this way: ask open-ended questions instead of yes/no ones, expand on whatever the child said in response, and let the child do more of the talking. A comparison group just read the book straight through. After a month, the children whose parents had used the dialogic style scored significantly higher on tests of expressive language than the comparison group. That study is where the term comes from, and it's still the one nearly every later study on shared reading traces back to.
Reading Rockets, the literacy education project run out of WETA (the PBS station behind a lot of early-literacy programming), breaks the technique down into two memorable acronyms for parents: PEER — Prompt, Evaluate, Expand, Repeat — for how you respond in the moment, and CROWD — Completion, Recall, Open-ended, Wh-questions, Distancing — for the kinds of prompts that work. "Distancing" is the one that stuck with me most: connecting the story to something in the child's own life. That's exactly what my daughter does unprompted when she brings up her stuffed rabbit in the middle of a fox story. She's doing, on her own, the thing the research says is the valuable part.
The American Academy of Pediatrics has built its own literacy guidance around this same idea. Its 2024 policy statement on literacy promotion — the first update to its longstanding recommendation since 2014 — encourages pediatricians to promote reading aloud with young children specifically in an "engaging and interactive" style, framing it as an opportunity to build language skills and a close, secure relationship at the same time, not one or the other. Reach Out and Read, the pediatric-practice program that gives out books at well-child visits and coaches parents on how to read with their kids, has a large and growing body of published research behind it — families in the program read aloud more often, and children show measurable language gains. And on the brain side, a study out of Cincinnati Children's Hospital, led by Dr. John Hutton and published in Pediatrics in 2015, used fMRI to show that preschoolers with richer home reading exposure had more activation in brain regions tied to mental imagery and narrative comprehension while listening to stories. It's a small study — nineteen children — and it shows association, not proof that reading caused the difference. But it points the same direction as everything else: what happens around the words matters as much as the words themselves.
What that means for how we make the show
I want to be honest about where StoryBeam actually sits in all of this, because it would be easy to overstate it. The research above is about live, in-person, real-time back-and-forth between a parent and their own child — not about a child listening to a recording of a different mother and daughter doing that. Nothing about our show can substitute for the version of this that happens on your own couch with your own kid. That's not false modesty; it's just what the studies actually measured.
What I do think is true is this: the mic time itself is real dialogic reading for us. It's not a performance of the technique — it's just what happens when you actually let a young kid interrupt, ask her real questions, and follow her real tangents instead of editing them out for pace. And if a family listens to an episode and it gives them a page to pause on, a question to try asking their own kid instead of just reading past it, or just permission to let the "wait, read that part again" happen instead of rushing through it — that's the whole point. Not a replacement for your own reading time together. A nudge back toward it.
So we keep the interruptions in. Not because they're cute, although they are. Because as far as I can tell from actually reading the research instead of assuming, they might be the reason any of this works at all.
Sources
- Whitehurst, G. J., et al. — "Accelerating Language Development through Picture Book Reading" (1988) — Developmental Psychology
- Dialogic Reading: An Effective Way to Read Aloud with Young Children — Reading Rockets (WETA)
- Use a PEER When You Read Aloud — Reading Rockets (WETA)
- Literacy Promotion: An Essential Component of Primary Care Pediatric Practice (2024 Policy Statement) — Pediatrics / American Academy of Pediatrics
- Beyond Literacy: Shared Reading Starting at Birth Offers Lifelong Benefits — HealthyChildren.org / American Academy of Pediatrics
- The Evidence — Reach Out and Read
- Hutton, J.S., et al. — "Home Reading Environment and Brain Activation in Preschool Children Listening to Stories" (2015) — Pediatrics, Vol. 136, No. 3
- Dialogic Reading Intervention Report — What Works Clearinghouse, Institute of Education Sciences
Kat co-hosts the flagship StoryBeam show with her daughter, reading and talking through their favorite picture books together.