There is a substantial body of literature providing evidence that shared reading between parents and their young children has a range of positive impacts, including literacy and language development and strengthening emotional relationships (Bus and Ijzendoorn, 1995; Mol et al., 2008). Similarly further research has shown that early exposure to reading in the home provides skills needed to create an academic and social foundation (Swick, 2009; Morrow, 2001).

Yet not all young children are read to, or engage in shared reading practices in the home.  It is therefore important to understand what both motivates and discourages parents from reading with their children, but this is not a straightforward issue. While international research has indicated that parents within low-income groups are less likely to read with their children than parents within more affluent groups (Adams, 1990), further research has reported that book reading is not dependent on Social Economic Status (SES) (Bus et al., 1995) and that low-income households value literacy (DeBaryshe, 1995). Further research indicates that it is not just the quantity of parent-child book-reading which is important, but also how parents engage with their children during the interaction (Mol et al., 2008; Dexter and Stacks, 2014).  This reminds us, as we have known for some time, that home literacy environments are shaped by individual family structures as well as cultural and community factors (Minns, 1997; Heath, 1983; Kleek et al.).

Together this indicates that factors surrounding why parents may be motivated or discouraged from reading with their children are highly complex.  Given this complexity it is important to design research that allows parents to talk in-depth about their family lives and personal relationships with reading as well as their current home reading practices. Much of the existing research exploring barriers to shared reading has taken the form of questionnaires whereby parents have been restricted to selecting from a set of fixed response choices (Harris et al, 2007; Lin et al, 2015). Yet these may not measure the things that are most relevant to parents, thus failing to understand the complexity of the issue.  What is more, previous research that has attempted to understand the relationship between parents’ own literacy practices and their child’s reading has tended to use quantitative measures to assess the relationship between individual parent reading activity and child language scores (Senechal et al, 1996; Rashid et al, 2005). Consequently there appears to be very little research, if any, that has talked to parents to understand the ways in which their own experiences and relationships with reading influence if, and how they read with their own children. Yet this is important if we are to create interventions and reading programmes that support parents in reading with their children.

The research presented here draws on in-depth interviews with 30 parents of pre-school children to understand home reading practices within a socio-economically and culturally mixed sample, exploring the motivations and barriers that exist to engaging in shared reading. This paper answers the research question - 'What are the links between parents’ own relationships with reading and the shared reading activity they carry out with their own pre-school children?'

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