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. 

Shared Book Reading and Children's Social-Emotional Competence is an essential resource for researchers, professors, and graduate students as well as educators, bibiotherapists, and other practitioners in developmental, clinical child, and school psychology, social psychology, educational psychology, educational policy and practice, clinical social work, public health, and all related disciplines.

Dorit Aram, Ph.D., is a full professor at Tel Aviv University. She is the head of the Early Childhood Research Laboratory. Her research focuses on parenting, adult-child interactions, and their implications for early development. She studies adult-child literacy interactions and their impacts on literacy and socio-emotional development. She conducts interventions to improve preschool teachers’ and parents’ scaffolding, as well as children's early literacy and socio-emotional development. During the last ten years, she developed the "Parenting Pentagon Model" in collaboration with family therapists and child development specialists. She has studied the implications of beneficial parenting behavior on parents and children’s well-being across cultures. She is a board member of the Israeli OMEP (World Organization for Early Childhood Education). As an internationally leading literacy researcher, she is a member of the Reading Hall of Fame.

Rotem Schapira, Ph.D., is a lecturer and pedagogical counselor at the Department of Early Education at Levinsky-Wingate Academic College of Educationin Tel Aviv and the Bob Shapell School of Social Work at Tel Aviv University.  She received her Ph.D. from the School of Education at Tel Aviv University and was a postdoctoral fellow at the Mofet Institute, in collaboration with the Social Lab of the Hebrew University, as well as at the University of Milano-Bicocca (Lab-PSE)..  Her research focuses on young children's social–emotional development, with particular emphasis on emotion understanding, empathy, and social competence. She examines emotional socialization processes among parents and early childhood educators, including adult coaching, shared book-reading dialogue, emotional caregiving behavior, and the beliefs and perceptions that guide these practices. Additionally, she develops and evaluates intervention programs designed to enhance young children's social–emotional skills.