Our mission is to promote language skills and literacy for children, beginning at birth, and to support parents as their babies’ first teachers. Our hope is that every family will understand the critical importance of early childhood literacy and will take an active role in their child’s reading development and that all children in Connecticut will have books of their own.

Books for Babies, the flagship program of Read to Grow in Connecticut, started 20 years ago at Yale-New Haven Hospital. Now in 15 hospitals, the program gives a free Literacy Packet to every mother with a newborn at those places.

A new aspect of Books for Babies, a program we call the Prenatal Project, began in late 2016. Through the project, we provide information and new baby board books to women receiving prenatal care at community health centers and clinics. The centers tailor the project to meet their needs in treating OB patients. We currently are collaborating with nine sites.