Children of the Book: Parents, Bedtime, and Jewish Identity

This article offers a conceptual framework for assessing PJ Library programming grounded in the relevant scholarly literature and illustrated by way of conversations with PJ Library parents. It is built around three themes concerning how parents view their role as facilitators in their child's religious and cultural identity formation through the reading of bedtime stories: (a) how the reading of stories nurtures affective development, (b) can be a crucial tool in mediating the development of cultural and religious identity, and (c) affects the bidirectionality of the parent/child relationship in identity formation.