“A lot of parents assume that once kids begin to read independently, that now that is the best thing for them to do,” said Maggie McGuire, the vice president for a website for parents operated by Scholastic.

But reading aloud through elementary school seemed to be connected to a love of reading generally. According to the report, 41 percent of frequent readers ages 6 to 10 were read aloud to at home, while only 13 percent of infrequent readers were being read to.

Scholastic, which operates book fairs in schools and publishes popular children’s books including the Harry Potter and Captain Underpants series, has been commissioning the “Kids and Family Reading Report” since 2006. For the first time this year, the report, conducted by YouGov, a market research firm, looked at predictors that children of different ages would be frequent readers, defined as children who read books for fun five or more days a week.

Kristen Harmeling, a partner at YouGov who worked on the report, said that children in the survey frequently cited reading aloud as a special bonding time with their parents. As children age, “I don’t think that parents know how important that time and the role that it plays in children’s lives,” she said.

Of course, children who love to read are generally immersed in households with lots of books and parents who like to read. So while parents who read to their children later in elementary school may encourage those children to become frequent readers on their own, such behavior can also result from “a whole constellation of other things that goes on in those families,” said Timothy Shanahan, professor emeritus of urban education at the University of Illinois at Chicago and a past president of the International Reading Association.