5 Big Benefits of Reading to Your Children
Reading is a wonderful stress reliever. After a difficult day, you can escape into a book. Reading is well-known as an overall health booster, both mentally and physically. Even before your children can read for themselves, they can also benefit. Here are some amazing benefits your children experience when you read to them regularly.
📌 1 – Improved Cognitive Development
Your child’s cognitive development refers to their ability to understand things and to think. Reading to your child fires up the brain. Your child’s ability to process thoughts, remember things and solve problems, make decisions, and understand others is boosted when you read to them.
📌 2 – Better Concentration
If at all possible, read to your child at the same time and on a predictable schedule. This prepares your child’s brain for the activity. They find it easier to concentrate if they know an activity will take place that requires their concentration.
Even if you don’t read to your child on a particular schedule, he has to concentrate on following the storyline. You can boost those concentration skills even further by asking questions about a story or book after you’ve read it.
📌 3 – Better Language and Communication Skills
You can’t start too early when reading to your children is concerned. Time magazine reports that reading to infants gets their language acquisition and communications skills started very early. This is important since the American Academy of Pediatrics reports that one in three children in the US start kindergarten without the skills necessary to learn to read.
📌 4 – Success in School
Expose your children to reading at a young age, and you give them a better start when they go to school. PBS (the Public Broadcasting Station) stresses that reading to your children makes them better prepared to read independently. They report that the better your children can read, the more likely they are to graduate from high school. Plenty of other bodies of research show that children exposed to regular reading before preschool do better than average academically.
📌 5 – Improved Discipline
You lead by example. Children, especially at a very young age, learn by watching. It takes a lot of discipline to sit and read to your children. They notice. It also takes discipline for them to sit still and pay attention. Teaching discipline to a child before they enter school is important because school success requires daily discipline.
Read to your children. Get them engaged in the story. Ask them what they think about what you’re reading. Get them involved. There’s really no end to the wonderful health and wellness benefits children receive when you read to them.
