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The practice of children reading school books with their parents at home is being widely advocated as a means of raising literacy standards in the UK. However, little is known about what parents actually do when listening to their children read. This paper describes a study in which 32 children (mean age 6 years 4 months) were observed reading with a parent at home and with their teacher at school. Three analyses are reported. The first analysis showed that parents were more likely to intervene in children's reading to support their decoding of the text, while teachers were more likely to read to the children or to discuss the text with them—an activity we termed ‘conversing’. This analysis also found large differences between parents in the amount of conversing in which they engaged. The second analysis described in more detail four main Junctions of conversing—responding to the text, labelling and identifying, making sense, and priming. The third analysis showed systematic differences in parents’ views on literacy according to their levels of conversing: parents in the high‐conversing group were more likely to regard reading as a valuable and enjoyable activity for its own sake, while parents in the low‐conversing group were more likely to see literacy in instrumental terms. These findings are discussed in terms of their relation to previous research and their implications for policy and practice.

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