Diversity in Parental Storybook Reading∗

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Abstract
Reading picture storybooks to preschool age children has long been a major component of early childhood classrooms and is now commonly recommended to parents. The benefits of this practice are thought to include exposure to rich language experiences, the development of narrative, and the development of book and print‐related concepts. These views have become accepted and extended to culturally diverse segments of society, even though most of the research has been conducted with small samples of predominantly white, upper‐middle class families. The present study finds diverse storybook interactions within a static sample and questions the practice of generalizing findings about storybook reading to dissimilar populations.