For the grown-ups
Why letters?
A note on the thinking behind the Society.
I taught for more than ten years. My former students are in college now, and they still message me to say hi, or to share a memory from our classroom that makes them laugh. They don't remember the worksheets. They remember the books we read together and the feeling of belonging to that room.
The Dear Readers Society is my way of giving more kids that feeling. It's built on a few ideas I believe in as a teacher, and that researchers have been studying for years.
Real things in their hands
In The Anxious Generation, Jonathan Haidt makes the case for a childhood built around play, friendship, and real-world experience, with less of it lived on screens. A letter is a small piece of that childhood: paper, a pencil, a stamp, and a week of waiting for the mailbox.
Haidt, The Anxious Generation (2024)
A pencil helps build a reader
In a small brain-imaging study of four- and five-year-olds, children who practiced printing letters by hand showed more activity in a reading-related area of the brain than children who typed or traced them. Writing a letter to a friend is reading practice in disguise.
James & Engelhardt, Trends in Neuroscience and Education (2012)
Reading for fun, starting early
A study of more than 10,000 young adolescents found that kids who began reading for pleasure early in childhood tended to do better on cognitive tests and in school, and had better mental wellbeing, longer sleep, and less screen time. Being read to matters too: one picture book a day adds up to roughly 290,000 more words heard by kindergarten.
Sun et al., Psychological Medicine (2023); Logan et al., Journal of Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics (2019)
Belonging is something we build
Psychologist Geoffrey Cohen's research shows that belonging isn't luck. It grows from situations designed with care, through small, steady signals that say "you're one of us." That's why every Dear Reader signs the same promise, has a portrait on the same gallery wall, and gets a letter from a friend who loved the same book.
Cohen, Belonging: The Science of Creating Connection and Bridging Divides (2022)
One book. One letter. One friend in another town who loved the same ending.
That's the whole idea. — Megan & Millie