Picture This

"'They’re 4 years old, and their parents are getting them "Stuart Little,"' said Dara La Porte, the manager of the children’s department at the Politics and Prose bookstore in Washington. 'I see children pick up picture books, and then the parents say, "You can do better than this, you can do more than this." It’s a terrible pressure parents are feeling—that somehow, I shouldn’t let my child have this picture book because she won’t get into Harvard.'"

Julie Bosman in The New York Times reports on the decline of picture books.