Dr. Robert Needlman likes listening to people’s stories.
As an undergrad at Yale University, he explored stories of the fictional kind with a major in English literature. He viewed his pre-med courses as just another way to listen to what people had to say.
“This is like literature, because you’re dealing with people and you’re dealing with their stories.” - Dr. Robert Needlman
Now, as a creator of national program Reach Out and Read, Needlman is helping parents inspire a love of stories in their own children.
Inspired by a fellowship program, Needlman – who works at MetroHealth Medical Center practicing and teaching developmental and behavioral pediatrics – started Reach Out and Read about 27 years ago with his colleagues.
“There’s been a lot of work internationally as well,” Needlman says.
The organization has garnered enough attention to spur spin-offs in Italy, Germany, Haiti, the Philippines and Israel.
Needlman has also had a hand in creating literature for parents. He wrote Dr. Spock’s Baby Basics and was the revising editor of the last two editions of Dr. Spock’s Baby and Child Care, co-authored with Benjamin Spock. That, he says, was the only child care book anyone read when he was growing up.
Growing up in Chicago, Needlman was influenced by his mother, who was a nursery school teacher. She was a formative influence on him, he says, and he connects his future interest in childhood development to those early conversations he had with her about her work.
Needlman attended grade school and high school at the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools. He pursued medicine at Yale University School of Medicine, discovering that much of what he liked about literature could be seen in medicine.
“It’s about people’s lives,” he says.
Needlman went on to do his junior and senior residencies in pediatrics at Boston City Hospital, now Boston Medical Center, which helped financially disadvantaged families.
Working in that setting, he says, helped him understand the core issues that surrounded growing up in poverty. He wanted to more deeply explore how he, as a pediatrician, could help address those issues.
He got the chance during a three-year fellowship at the same hospital, which covered developmental and behavioral pediatrics. From that experience, Needlman worked with others to form Reach Out and Read.
“Most of the people who do what I do, who use books in primary care and are working with Reach Out and Read, have a story about growing up and loving books in some way,” he says.
This was true for Needlman as a child, and especially later as a parent when he would read to his daughter, Grace, now a 26-year-old artist.
“Children really thrive on stories.” - Dr. Robert Needlman says.
While Reach Out and Read has grown internationally, it’s growing in Cleveland as well. The program supports doctors in 18 clinics and offices around town, and Needlman says it is expanding.
Every pediatric and family practice clinic and office should be incorporating literacy into primary care, Needlman says. It’s an integral part of childhood.
“If you can imagine a childhood without stories, it’s a pretty bleak kind of landscape,” he says.
A Focus on Children
In addition to working at MetroHealth Medical Center, Dr. Robert Needlman also is professor of pediatrics at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine.
Over the course of his clinical career, he has also served as attending physician at Boston City Hospital and Rainbow Babies and Children’s Hospital. Needlman has received numerous honors and awards recognizing his work in pediatric education and the strides in children’s literacy made via Reach Out and Read. He has been a member of the Reach Out and Read National Board of Directors since 2009.
About Reach Out and Read
The national nonprofit Reach Out and Read was started in 1989 by Robert Needlman and Barry Zuckerman, pediatricians; and Jean Nigro, Kathleen MacLean and Kathleen Fitzgerald-Rice, early childhood educators. That initial program at Boston City Hospital, now Boston Medical Center, was responsible for the distribution of 1,000 books.
In 1991, Needlman published a peer-reviewed study of Reach Out and Read, in which he found that parents given books and guidance about literacy are four times more likely to report reading out loud at home to children than parents who didn’t.
By 1993, fueled by a three-year grant from the Annie E. Casey Foundation, Reach out and Read expanded to 34 programs in nine states. Just two years later, the program worked with the American Academy of Pediatrics Community Access to Child Health Program to grow to 107 programs in 28 states.
After further expansion, Reach Out and Read received $2 million from the U.S. Department of Education’s Fund for the Improvement of Education, the organization’s first federal award. By that time, Reach Out and Read numbered 795 programs in 49 states and Washington, D.C.
Today, Reach Out and Read has more than 5,500 programs serving 4.5 million children every year.
Sarah Sole is a contributing writer. Feedback welcome at feedback@cityscenemediagroup.com.
