Parenting & Family Quote by Brian P. Cleary

Cleary isn’t just praising a format; he’s defending a social technology. “Read out loud” signals books engineered for performance: rhyme, rhythm, punchy phrasing, the kind of language that turns a page into a small event. That matters because children’s reading often gets framed as solitary skill-building, a private ladder toward “leveling up.” Cleary quietly argues the opposite: the hook is communal pleasure, and the learning rides shotgun.

The subtext is about access and confidence. A book that “wants” to be read aloud lowers the stakes for kids who don’t yet feel fluent; the voice carries them. It also recruits adults, siblings, librarians, and classmates as co-readers, turning literacy into something you do with people, not in front of them. There’s a democratic impulse here: sound-based reading doesn’t require the same endurance, attention span, or even silent reading proficiency. It invites kids in.

Then comes the second claim, almost more pointed: “books kids share with each other.” In a culture where screens individualize entertainment and school can individualize achievement, peer-to-peer recommendation is a kind of currency. Sharing makes reading contagious; it turns a book into a token of friendship, a dare, a joke, a common reference. Cleary’s “and I think that’s important” lands as a soft rebuke to any system that treats children’s books as mere instructional tools. He’s staking out children’s literature as a lived culture - voiced, traded, repeated - not just assigned.