IStock Photo 7481073 © Judy Barranco

Why do so many parents love reading to their kids? Sure, it’s a chance to quit chasing after their own Wild Things, Madelines, and Harry Potters, and just sit down for once. It’s a nice way to share time. And it lets grownups revisit their own favorite childhood books.

But reading to children is also an important step in helping children learn to read for themselves. According to expert groups like Reading is Fundamental and the National Institute for Literacy, reading with children is one of the most important things parents can do to help kids become early readers and learn to love books.

Yet what do old-fashioned analog books mean to today’s little digital darlings, who spend at least as much time looking at screens as at printed pages? At least two generations have blamed television for shortening kids’ attention spans, and now the Internet offers even more compelling (and interactive) distractions.

There’s some evidence that other media are leading kids away from books. The odds today that a child aged 5 to 17 will use the Internet every day are 1 in 3.03, higher than the odds that he or she will read a book for fun every day (1 in 4.17). Another survey estimates that the odds of a person aged 8 to 18 spending at least one hour in a day watching television are 1 in 1.66 (60%)—twice as likely as the odds that he or she will spend at least 30 minutes in a day reading a book (1 in 3.23).

But long-term trends also show that younger children have made significant reading gains over the past several decades. The average reading score for 9-year-olds in 2008 on the National Assessment of Educational Progress was 12 points higher than in 1971, while scores for 13-year-olds showed a 5-point gain. On the other hand, scores for 17-year-olds did not change significantly. Improvements in early childhood education may be responsible for the younger kids’ improvement; teenagers may be too distracted texting and tweeting to focus on reading. Whatever the causes of the improvements and the age disparity, the results do suggest that growing up in a multimedia world doesn’t automatically mean children will be less literate.

Some parents, educators, and librarians credit Harry Potter for getting many kids to read—indeed to line up outside bookstores at midnight for the latest release. But surveys found that for most readers, the Hogwarts effect didn’t influence how much time children spent reading after they finished the series. All the more reason for parents to read with their kids, well beyond simple fare like Where the Wild Things Are, so that they’ll continue to enjoy reading and look forward to the next book, and the next, and the next.