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Stories make the chaos of the world small enough for us to be able to understand and to make some sort of sense of it. As a parent you reduce the world to a story, otherwise there’s too much information in the world. – Camilla Reid
The foundation stone of storytelling
The Early Years are one of the priority audiences for the National Year of Reading. Investing in reading with Early Years audiences helps cognitive function and lays the foundation for social and emotional development aiding vocabulary, creativity, and empathy. Here Jake Hope asks Camilla Reid about her passion for books for the Early Years.
AFTER years of working in children’s publishing and creating hundreds of books, Camilla Reid in her own words, believes ‘children need to learn to live their own story and to choose their own narrative paths so as to tell their own stories. We have to start doing that at the very beginning. I see my work as the foundation stone of storytelling. Everyone should keep telling themselves stories.’
Neurological research into the impact of reading shows the long-term benefits it provides. Camilla feels highly aware of this. “The benefits are extraordinary and complex – the effect it has cognitively is massive. All kinds of things are happening under the surface. Shared reading helps develop a child’s focus, concentration and attention. It can cause huge leaps in speech and language, hand-eye co-ordination and fine motor skills. Slowly and gently setting children up to start to see that books are fun and interesting means setting them up to want to learn later down the line.”
Camilla believes there are benefits for adult and child relationships too. “It creates an emotional connection between adult and child. We all need to know who are the people we can love and trust.
Spring-Summer 2026
Small children instinctively feel this and those feelings are founded upon shared experiences. Reading a book is going on a timely journey with someone we love, we find out about them, and they find out about us. It creates memories. Stories are the basis of our human relationships and our intimate relationships.”
During the early 2000s there was significant investment in provision for Early Years, but it’s an area that has all too frequently seen cuts in recent years. “I had a daughter in 2005 and used Surestart a lot as a slightly lonely mum in London. I went down to my Surestart to do bounce and rhymes and playtimes. As a mum, I benefitted and my daughter certainly did.”
Camilla feels positive that despite some of those losses that there’s a wider understanding about the importance of investing in the Early Years again. “This government seems to be understanding how important the Early Years are. Setting children up well is so much better than clearing up the mess later. The power of a good set up is vital. A lot of what I do is pre-education. A lot of pressure is put on teachers and Early Years practitioners and is placed on them to educate. Parents have sometimes lost their confidence in book reading in my experience and there’s a feeling that this is a job for
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