Shared Book Reading and Children's Social-Emotional Competence

This book examines the contribution of shared book reading to various aspects of children's social-emotional development across a broad range of environments and with different reading agents, including home (parents), educational settings (teachers), and clinics (bibliotherapists). It demonstrates how shared book reading creates a safe and nurturing environment in which children can express themselves and learn about social relationships by discussing the characters' intentions, feelings, thoughts, desires, beliefs, and actions. The book explores the ways in which adults engage with young children in interactive reading, fostering aspects of social-emotional competence, including emotional knowledge, empathy, self-awareness, prosocial behavior, morality, values, and effective communication skills. This volume explores shared book reading interventions aiming to promote social-emotional competence from toddlerhood to childhood. It addresses shared book reading with at-risk children from different socio-economic backgrounds. The book concludes with recommendations for how parents and preschool teachers can promote social-emotional competence through shared-book reading. Key areas of coverage include:

• Emotion and mental-state discourse during shared book reading: How parents, teachers, and children talk about emotions, thoughts, and social situations while reading together, and why shared reading is a uniquely rich context for mental-state dialogue.
• Cultural and contextual differences in shared-reading interactions: Cross-cultural patterns in emotion discourse, parental practices, and adult-child meaning-making across diverse sociocultural settings.
• Story features that shape emotion discourse: How elements such as human vs. animal protagonists, narrative structure, and story themes influence emotion talk and social-emotional understanding.
• Shared book-reading interventions at home and in educational settings: Evidence-based programs that strengthen children's empathy, emotional competence, and prosocial behavior through guided reading practices.
• Shared reading and children's social-emotional development: Correlational and meta-analytic findings linking shared book reading with gains in emotion understanding, empathy, prosocial conduct, and broader socio-emotional skills.