“Hey, That’s My Name!” What a Child’s Own Name Can Do for Reading

Years ago my niece, who was “almost five,” was excitedly reading a book to me. When I told her I worked at a place that makes books, she got more excited still. So I promised to write a book and name the main character Daisy Rose. She got a huge smile and said, “Hey, that’s my name!”

That promise became The Tiniest Amazon series, and that sentence inspired Name It Me. I think it matters to everyone who writes or illustrates for children, because the numbers on children’s reading are heading the wrong way, and we are the people who can help turn them around.

The numbers, without the drama

On the 2024 Nation’s Report Card, 40% of fourth graders scored below the Basic level in reading, and only 31% reached Proficient.^[1] The National Assessment Governing Board called that the largest share below Basic since 2002.^[2]

Reading for fun has slipped too. Among 9-year-olds, 39% read for fun almost every day in 2022. In 1984 that figure was 14 points higher.^[3]

A reason for hope

Parents have plainly not given up on books. While Common Sense Media found that daily reading among 5- to 8-year-olds, counting both reading and being read to, fell from 64% in 2017 to 52% in 2024,^[4] the same report found that daily reading to the very youngest children has gone up.

In the United Kingdom, the National Literacy Trust surveyed 125,375 children and young people in 2026. Of those, 36.1% said they enjoy reading in their free time, up from 32.7% in 2025. The Trust calls it the first increase in reading enjoyment since 2021.^[5]

The Trust is careful to say this sits inside a longer downward trend, and I will be careful too. Still, a line that fell for years just went up, as did daily reading to the youngest children. I’ll take it.

Why the habit matters

A long-running study of nearly 4,000 American students found that children who were not reading proficiently by third grade were four times more likely to leave school without a diploma than proficient readers.^[6] That is a correlation, measured on one kind of reading test, and it does not prove that one thing causes the other — they just travel together.

Habits travel together too. In a 2025 paper from HarperCollins Children’s Books, using NielsenIQ data, only 13% of 5- to 11-year-olds who were rarely read to chose to read every day. Among children who were read to daily, it was 66%.^[7] That is also a correlation, and it comes from a publisher. I find it persuasive anyway: children who are read to, read.

So the useful question for those of us who make books is a small one. What gets a child to pick this book up, and then ask for it again tomorrow?

What the research says about a child’s name

Here is what I can point to, with the sample sizes left in.

1. Word learning. Researchers read a picture book with personalized and non-personalized sections to 18 children averaging 3 years and 10 months old. When they were tested afterward, the children knew significantly more of the new words that had appeared in the personalized sections.^[8] Eighteen children and one book is a promising start, and a long way from a verdict.
2. Letters. A study of 339 four-year-olds confirmed that children do not learn letters in random order. One of the patterns it confirmed is an “own-name advantage”: the letters in a child’s own name come early.^[9]
3. Picking the book up. Natalia Kucirkova, the researcher who has studied personalized books most closely, puts it this way: “When children see their name or photo in a book, they are more likely to pick it up.”^[10]

What authors and illustrators can do

1. Write the story first. The name gets the book opened. The story gets it opened again, and again.
2. Let more than one character be renamed. A child who can bring a sister, a best friend, or a grandfather into the story is reading about the people they love.
3. Keep the door open for imagination. Leave characters and places in the book that are nothing like the child. They should meet somebody new in there.
4. Make it a pleasure to read aloud. The adult doing the ninth reading in a row is your second audience, and the research above says that adults matter a great deal.
5. Offer the personalized edition next to your original, not in place of it. Some children want to be in the story. Some want to watch from a safe distance. Both of them are your readers.