Top 10 Benefits of Reading Books to Your Child

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Apart from keeping your children safe and healthy, one other important thing parents can do for their kids is to read to and them. This means that parents need to start reading to their children when they are born and even when they are unable to talk. This reading should continue until they are able to read by themselves. Different studies have shown that reading to children early helps them to bond with parents, interact, read and speak early themselves. When your child can speak, reading with him or she will make them get close to caretakers, families, friends, and know the world they are living in. It will also make them become sympathetic citizens of the world.

Now, I am sure we all know that it is important to read to our children. But, did you know that reading to toddlers and preschoolers every day comes with many benefits and advantages? This does not only help your child know how to read and write and improve your child’s vocabulary, but it also helps them comprehend different topics in school, the world at large, and in everyday life. We have several benefits of reading to your child, and this is why parents must make reading to their children a priority.

10 Benefits of Reading Books to Your Child

1. Reading Improves Your Child’s Attentiveness and Focus

To most parents, reading to a child or a toddler seems useless because all that a baby will like to do is to swap books, turn pages, throw the books around and go outside to play with their counterparts. However, reading to your child at this age is very important. Once you make reading to your child a habit, they will learn to focus and improve on their ability to sit down learning for longer periods. This will help improve their attentiveness and focus when they grow up and started going to school because they will be used to it already.

2. Reading to Children Teaches Them About Different Topics

Children will learn about different topics when you read to them at a tender age. Children will learn a lot of information when they read to the different topics from different types of books. For bilingual kids, reading different languages will help them when they grow up and started schooling. You can get them different books with information on objects, places, and animals. There are also different important books that will teach kids critical life skills like diversity, being kind, and sharing; and some of them will make great gifts. All these books will help teach your kids about different topics which will be helpful for them when they grow up.

3. Books Are Like Entertainment

With the rate at which technology is increasing these days, it is very hard for children to control themselves off these technologies. Some of these technologies that are common among children include smartphones, TV, Video apps, and games. However, your child will find so much interest in books once you started reading them to your child and it will be entertaining to them.

The best way to prevent your child from the negative effects of the screen is to choose an interesting book; you either read it to them, read it together or let them flick through pages as they like. One of the main reasons why it is important to read to your child is that your child will be able to read books for pleasure later in life over other activities when they are tired. With this, your child will not have the negative effects of these technologies like eye effects and addiction to games and smartphones.

4. Reading to Your Child Increased Concentration and Discipline

This is another benefit of reading together with your child. By incorporating this into your child’s schedule, you will not only strengthen the bond between the two of you, but you will also increase discipline and concentration in the child. Young children mostly found it difficult to sit down for a long time, and they sometimes find it difficult to focus. However, the introduction of reading to them in their schedule will help improve their focus. This way, you will be able to observe the changes you see in them.

Young babies may initially squirm, find no joy in it and they may become distracted when reading to them, but they will get used to it with time. Reading to children will provide stronger self-discipline, better memory retention, and a longer attention span and all these will help improve your child when he or she enters school.

5. Improved Language Skills

Starting in infancy, reading to your child daily will help them with literacy skills and language acquisition. When you read to your children at a tender age, it will help to improve the growth of the part of the brain that helps children in understanding the meaning of language. This, in turn, helps them build key language, social skills, and literacy. According to recent research, reading to your children at home from an early age help to activate the brain areas connected with optical imagery and the understanding of the meaning of language.

This is also linked to the ability to read proficiently before they finish the third grade. Children will be able to incorporate what they hear around into their auditory learning, and this provides a lot of benefits. Kids are able to use more formal grammatical structures when they are read to from an early age.

6. Reading Creates a Special Bond with Your Child

According to a saying, reading to your child daily helps to build a stronger connection with them. One way to improve the bond between your child and yourself is to spend enough time with them. When reading with your child, you will set up an opportunity to spending time together, and your child will build the trust that you will surely be there for them. Trust cannot be overstated especially with children. Your children will not only bond with you when you read to them, but they will also have a sense of well-being and intimacy. This intimate feeling will help them get close to you. The feeling of attention and love will inspire positive development and growth.

Although when reading to babies, they may not be able to understand what you are saying but reading to them aloud will provide them with a level of reassurance and invaluable nurturing. They love hearing familiar voices, and you will create a strong connection when you read to them. When you read to your child, you will create a scene to talk about something, and this will later support their reading and writing skills (in relation to reading comprehension and the vocabulary aspect). This will help to create a constant thing that they will always look forward to. You can read together with your child to discuss different issues.

7. Supported Cognitive Development

It has been proved that when you read to your child, you will help them boost the process of cognitive development. When talking about cognitive development, we mean the growth of their ability to understand and think. Cognitive development is the building of thought processes like problem-solving, decision-making, and remembering from baby through teenage years to adulthood. It also means the way a person thinks about the world through different areas like language development, intelligence, reasoning, information processing, and memory.

When reading to your child, they will begin to understand the background knowledge of their young world. This will help them make effective use of what they hear, see and read. According to an educator, he said that what bridges the story to the kids’ lives is the sound that surrounds the reading rather than just vocalizing the words. The conversations that are reading to your child will help your child make them smart in their lives from a young age. The more you read to your child, the larger his vocabularies grow and the more they understand and know about the world around them, thereby helping in their cognitive development and perception.

8. Cultivate A Lasting Love of Reading

Kids cultivate the habit of reading once we read to them on a daily basis from a young age. Every time parents read to their children; they are sending pleasure messages to the brain of the child – according to researchers. This can even be called sending books and print to the child’s brain with pleasure. For a child to be successful in life, there must be a great bond between reading and pleasure in the child. The minimum requirement for success for any child in any field is learning.

The key to lifelong learning is reading, and the only way to instill this into your child is to start reading to him or her at an early age. A commitment to lifetime learning should then follow this. Once you are reading to your child, your child will value books and will be motivated to read on his or her own and such a child will continue reading for the rest of his or her life. There are several benefits of reading to a child apart from getting a bond with them. It will also help to build skills important for reading success, and your child will carry this on throughout his or her life.

9. Reading to Your Child Will Set Him Up for Success

Reading to your child is very important for the success of your child later in life. The more you are reading to your child at the early stage of their life, the more they absorb knowledge, and the more they absorb knowledge, the higher the chances of being successful. Knowledge is very important in life. Reading to your child, according to several types of research, gives them the urge to prepare them for school as they grow up. Reading to your child helps to improve the skills they will need to read themselves later in life.

Reading to children will help them to follow the flow of words from left to right of the page and be able to turn pages which are effective for reading and learning. This will help them become great readers as they continue their education in life. Children who love reading are not only better in literacy and language subjects, but they are good in all subjects as well.

10. Reading to Your Child Prepare Him for Academic Success

One true opportunity for parents to communicate with their child and for a child to communicate with their parents. According to recent research, the more the words in your child’s language, the more easily they will learn with stronger language skills when they are in kindergarten, and they will be more prepared to read and learn. Kids that are exposed to reading at an early age are more likely to do well in school and throughout their formal education period.

The five early reading skills your children need to learn for perfect development include vocabulary (words for effective communication); phonics (ability to connect letters); phonemic awareness (ability to identify, hear, and play with word sounds); fluency (ability to read quickly and accurately – oral reading); and reading comprehension (ability to understand the meaning of what they have read).

A child will be able to improve on these skills only if they have been read to during their early years. Although they may not be able to get the phonics or practice fluency at that stage, they will be introduced to reading comprehension, vocabulary, and phonemic awareness. All of these will help them when they grow up and start chatting with those around them.

Conclusion

With the above importance of reading to your child, you are sure to raise the best child ever. If you have not started with this habit, it is not too late as you can start now.