Literacy Promotion: The Next Chapter

Perri Klass, MD is Professor of Journalism and Pediatrics at New York University and Co-Director of NYU Florence. She attended Harvard Medical School and completed her residency in pediatrics at Children’s Hospital, Boston. She writes about children’s issues regularly for The New York Times.  Her book, A Good Time to Be Born: How Science and Public Health Gave Children a Future, is an account of how victories over infant and child mortality have changed the world. She coauthored with Eileen Costello, M.D., Quirky Kids: Understanding and Supporting Your Child With Developmental Differences, which just came out in a new revised edition from the American Academy of Pediatrics. She began writing about medicine and about medical training when she was a medical student; her accounts were collected in her two books, A Not Entirely Benign Procedure: Four Years as a Medical Student, and Baby Doctor: A Pediatrician’s Training. Her most recent book of medical journalism is Treatment Kind and Fair: Letters to a Young Doctor. Her medical journalism has appeared in a wide variety of publications, including Harpers, Atlantic, Smithsonian, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, The New England Journal of Medicine, and Harvard Medicine. Her other nonfiction includes Every Mother is a Daughter: the Neverending Quest for Success, Inner Peace, and a Really Clean Kitchen, which she coauthored with her mother, Sheila Solomon Klass.

Perri is the National Medical Director of Reach Out and Read; the program now reaches 4.8 million children a year, 80% of whom are growing up in poverty. She has received numerous awards for her work as a pediatrician and educator including the 2007 American Academy of Pediatrics Education Award, which recognizes her educational contributions that have had a broad and positive impact on the health and well-being of children; the 2006 Women’s National Book Association Award; and the 2011 Alvarez Award from the American Medical Writers Association. In 2016 the American Academy of Pediatrics honored her with The Arnold P. Gold Foundation Humanism in Medicine Award, citing the impact that she has made through her writing, service as an educator, and leadership in promoting early literacy through Reach Out and Read.

Learning Objectives:

  1. Describe how early literacy skills reflect foundational early relationships and the home literacy environment
  2. Explain ways to support early relational health by encouraging positive rich interactions between young children and parents/caregivers built around books and reading together
  3. Apply strategies to deploy literacy promotion as a universal primary prevention strategy to address disparities in cognitive and social-emotional development

Speaker:

  • Perri Klass, MD

This seminar was delivered as a Pediatric Grand Rounds Lecture at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, on October 6, 2021.

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  • 1 Lesson
  • Course Certificate
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