The Power of Stories: Why Access to Reading Changes Everything

At Reading Is Fundamental (RIF), we believe in the power of stories to inspire a lifelong love of reading and learning. Through our partnership with Storytime, a leading children’s magazine that brings tales to life through beautifully illustrated stories, we’re helping children build literacy skills, spark their imaginations, and discover the joy that comes from reading for fun. Read on to hear from Lulu Skantze, Publisher of Storytime Magazine about their mission to make story-sharing accessible, engaging, and magical for every child.  

Stories are our oldest human tradition. Long before we built cities or wrote laws, we told tales to make sense of the world. Stories have always been our greatest tool to share wisdom, to teach, and to inspire us to dream of what might be. Every great leap in human progress began, in some way, with a story. And they remain the best tool to learn from. One study found that while memory for facts dropped by nearly three-quarters over a day, memory for the same content wrapped in a story only dropped by about a third¹. (Harvard Business School)  

Storytime has spent more than a decade building a library of tales from around the world, from ancient myths to new adventures. The tales are beautifully illustrated and have a mission to make children fall in love with reading. Through these stories, we wanted to introduce young readers to every subject imaginable: history, science, kindness, courage, and imagination itself. We hoped that within those tales, children would discover that they can be anything they want to be.  

But, of course, creating stories is just part of it. The most important mission is making sure everyone has access to them. From all the things that hold us back, it often comes down to one simple truth: without access to resources, rights, and materials, nothing truly grows. 

However, when children have access to books and stories, they thrive. That’s a proven fact, repeated again and again across studies worldwide. Children who own even a single book at home are twice as likely to be “on track” for literacy and numeracy compared to those with none. Research from Ohio State University found that children who are read to daily hear 1.4 million more words by age five, dramatically enriching their vocabulary before school even begins ².  

In the US, the data tells us that roughly 61 % of low-income children grow up in homes without books of their own (USA Reads, 2024). Children who are read to at least three times a week are twice as likely to score in the top 25% on reading assessments as those who aren’t (Ferst Readers, 2023). Yet reading for fun is in decline: only 39% of nine-year-olds say they read for pleasure “almost every day,” down from 53% a decade ago (Pew Research Center, 2022). The stats are similar all over the world, also in the countries where Storytime is published as well, like in the UK and Australia.   

The equity gap runs deep. As a consequence, the less access children have to reading for pleasure, the wider the divide grows in literacy outcomes and in social mobility too. These figures are more than statistics; they are stories of children being left behind before they’ve even had the chance to read their own. Every educational gap is, at its heart, an imagination gap.  

Reading for pleasure has yet another powerful role in the world (and in the changes we want to see in it): it prepares children for school. Kids who read regularly are more confident, empathetic, and resilient learners. They show stronger emotional intelligence and adaptability, and they are more ready to learn by the time they join primary school.  

So, if we already know that access to stories is one of the simplest, most effective ways to improve children’s futures, why is it still so hard to make it universal? It’s a big task that would be impossible to make true, without great partnerships. By joining forces with Reading Is Fundamental, Storytime knows that real change is possible.