We make these books, so read this with that in mind
Penwynn makes personalized picture books, so we are an interested party. What follows reports what the studies say and links each one; where we draw a conclusion, we say it is our view. We do not claim a personalized book does more for a child than any other good book read aloud.
Children engage more with a book about them
In a 2013 study, seven families with children aged 12 to 33 months were filmed at home reading three books: one made for the child, a similar book with nothing personal in it, and the child's favourite. Children and parents smiled and laughed more with the personalized book than with the ordinary one, and talked more with it than with the child's own favourite.
Most of the children's smiles were in response to the book itself; most of the parents' smiles were in response to their child's.
Preschoolers learned more words from the personalized pages
In a 2014 study, 18 children with an average age of three years ten months were read a picture book that had personalized and non-personalized sections, with unfamiliar words placed in each. A week and a second reading later, the children knew more about the words from the personalized sections than about the words from the others.
Hearing the same story again is how words stick
Separately from personalization, a 2011 study read three-year-olds storybooks three times over a week. Children who heard the same stories each time remembered the new words and still knew them later; children who heard different stories, with the same new words in them, did not learn the words at all.
That is the case for the book a child asks for again. Our view, not a research finding, is that a book about a child and the people in their life is more likely to be that book.
On a screen, the parent mattered most
A 2021 lab study watched 26 mothers read a digital book with their three- and four-year-olds, with some pages carrying the child's name, photograph, favourite toy and food. Its authors stress the parent's part in moving the conversation beyond the child talking about themselves.
The caveats, stated plainly
The studies are small: seven families, 18 children, 26 mothers. They show differences in a lab or a living room over days, not lasting effects.
Personalization can narrow the conversation. Natalia Kucirkova, who led the studies above, writes that children reading personalized books referred “just to themselves” and “talked about ‘me, me, me’” through the session.
In a study she describes, personalized books, unlike their non-personalized equivalents, did not help children understand the moral of a story or apply it to their own lives.
Her view is that the strongest books pair personalization with a strong plot that also takes a child beyond themselves, and that claims about personalized books healing or fixing anything are not backed by studies.
Sources
- Natalia Kucirkova, “Read it for you: the fall of the personalised book?”, OpenLearn, 2020
- Kucirkova, Messer & Whitelock, “Parents reading with their toddlers: The role of personalization in book engagement”, Journal of Early Childhood Literacy 13(4):445–470, 2013
- Kucirkova, Messer & Sheehy, “Reading personalized books with preschool children enhances their word acquisition”, First Language 34(3):227–243, 2014
- Kucirkova, Gattis, Spargo, Seisdedos de Vega & Flewitt, “An empirical investigation of parent-child shared reading of digital personalized books”, International Journal of Educational Research 105, 2021
How Penwynn answers those caveats
Penwynn makes the book as a whole story written for the child, not a name placed into a fixed one, so there is a plot to follow as well as a face to find.
The people around the child are in it and recur, so the book is about a sister, a grandparent or a friend as much as about the child — more “us” than “me”.
And it is meant to be read aloud by an adult, as every book in these studies was — and the adult is the one who can take the conversation beyond the child. That is our view of how to use the evidence, not a claim the studies make.