Reading a book seems like a simple way to stimulate your child’s imagination and support their literacy skills. Indeed it is, and it’s an enjoyable way to bond with your child too. Some of your most memorable times as a child probably involved snuggling into bed with your mom, dad, or another family member and reading your favourite book. You likely didn’t feel like you were learning something, that certainly wasn’t what motivated you to read, it was just fun to look at pictures, giggle at goofy characters, and anticipate what might happen next.
Now as a parent, watching your child grow, you might be surprised to discover that books are much more than tools for helping your child learn to read. It’s true that developing your child’s pre-literacy skills (behaviours associated with learning to read) contributes significantly to their readiness for formal schooling, but the rich learning experiences that arise from a simple book are almost too many to name.
Some of the more obvious benefits of daily book reading are:
- Concentrate on a specific task.
- Develop logical and abstract thinking.
- Identify different objects, colours, and shapes.
- Recognize letters and words, and attach sounds to them.
- Explore imagined or theoretical cause and effect relationships.
- Understand and cope with new or frightening situations and transitions.
Most of those developments are cognitive skills; they’re like the hard skills of early learning. While reading is a mental task, books offer far more holistic learning experiences––or what we might consider soft skills––than merely decoding words on a page. But those soft skills are what build character, help us manage all of life’s little challenges, and give us the tools we need to make sense of the world. Some of the best lessons are alive in books, as are some of the most pleasurable escapes from the doldrums of everyday life. Let’s take a look at what your child can learn just by reading a book with you every day.
How Does Book Reading Help Your Child Develop?
Increases Independence
What happens before the age of three can have lifelong consequences. As a parent, you want to give your child the absolute best start so they’ll grow to be confident, trusting, and well-equipped to flourish in our changing world. Reading the right books can help you do that.
According to Erik Erikson’s psychosocial stages of development, the central conflict in toddlerhood is autonomy versus shame. What this means is that your toddler is struggling for independence and control, a say in what happens to them. They have newfound mobility, self-help skills, and an innate, almost reflexive desire to follow their curiosity about everything they see. As we know, that can lead them to potentially dangerous situations, or simply ones that are frustrating for you as a parent.
Luckily, there are many ways that you can allow your child to explore the limits of their abilities, encouraging them to take safe, reasonable risks, and tolerate failure without shame. By supporting their development of independence, your child will gain self-confidence and security as they grow.
Book reading is an excellent way to support their
budding autonomy:
- Allow your child to choose the book they want to read, even if that means reading the same story over and over and over.
- Give your child the choice of where they would like to read the book together.
- Suggest that they hold the book or turn the pages, giving them cues if necessary.
- Encourage them to sound out words, and create their own story based on the pictures and then “read” it to you.
Sparks Imagination and Curiosity
Your child is hard-wired to want to know––we’re all born curious, and when allowed to follow our curiosity, we naturally develop a love of learning.
Although brain research is continuously evolving, we know that up to the age of seven, synapses, which are structures in the brain that allow learning to occur, are firing rapidly as the brain is exposed to new stimuli every day. As your child grows, the body eliminates unused
synapses, a process scientists refer to as “synaptic pruning”, to increase the brain’s efficiency so your child can handle more complex information. Although this process is a natural and necessary part of human development, our innate desire to know suggests that we are biologically wired to hang on to as many of those synapses as possible. That’s why nurturing your child’s curiosity is so essential for their developing brain and what researchers say predicts their creative capacity.
Books are the ultimate vessel by which to ignite your child’s curiosity and explore what fascinates them. Stories give your child plenty of opportunities to wonder, predict, question, infer, and engage with a variety of concepts, situations, and events. As you read together, ask your child thought-provoking questions and encourage them to do the same. For example, before you even open the book, ask your child to imagine what the story might be about based on the cover.
Nurtures Emotional Growth
Do you remember how you felt reading the beloved book, Charlotte’s Web, and how you felt when the literate and clever spider Charlotte attempted to save Wilbur from a terrible fate? So many emotions bubbled up: fear that Wilbur would perish, anticipation and hope that Charlotte would protect him, love and admiration for the unexpected bond between these two creatures, and more throughout the story.
Books present children with infinite real-life scenarios that help them identify and label emotions and then express and respond to them in constructive ways. Through exposure to different story characters that reflect a simplified version of the real world, they learn to accept and appreciate for diversity. And when children see themselves reflected in different books, they can relate to the characters’ experience of emotions, stimulating the growth of empathy and compassion in real-life relationships.
Choose books that deal with the difficult emotions your child is learning to work through: anger, fear, disappointment, frustration, sadness, etc. But balance them out with books that also inspire joy and hope, and celebrate “kookiness.” We don’t want to make book reading too serious!
Supports Communication skills
When your child explores and interacts with books, they learn about language structures (how words are put together to form sentences), and how to pronounce certain letter combinations and words, two key skills that contribute to the quality of their speech. But more than that, books provide them with examples of how to articulate their thoughts and ideas with other people in the real world. Such development requires the guidance of an adult to ask meaningful questions to extend their thinking beyond what they are currently capable of (a process called scaffolding). When your child is old enough to read independently, you can extend the complexity of those questions.
For example, ask your child open-ended questions about the story that encourage them to identify problems, feelings, and solutions:
“How do you think Owen the Owl is feeling?” and, “why do you think he’s feeling that way?”
“How would you feel if someone said that to you? What would you do?”
“How do you think they’ll cross the river?”
“What would you do if a mud puddle kept chasing you too?”
Builds Moral Character
One of the things your child’s early childhood teacher loves most are books that model prosocial skills. They are an excellent way to directly teach positive ways of interacting with others, and they are a wonderful point of reference when guiding behaviour. As a parent, you can use these books the same way. Most children’s books, even the simplest ones, have a moral lesson, a conflict between right and wrong that requires resolution. By studying the characters and story events, your child learns to analyze their behaviour in similar situations, how to communicate their feelings respectfully, and how to constructively resolve the conflict.
As complex as this might sound, it’s actually quite basic. For example, consider a story in which Monte the mouse took his friend’s sandwich without asking and ate the whole thing. Such a situation can prompt a discussion about asking permission, offering to share, or saying please and thank you.
Those are the skills that determine your child’s degree of confidence as part of a social group, how effectively and sensitively they interact with other people, how they build friendships and behave with kindness and compassion for the people around them. As your child learns how to behave morally and to show care and concern for others, they also learn how to care for and assert themselves in tricky social situations where the easiest thing to do is cower and run away.
What You Can Do as a Parent to Foster a Love of Reading
Surprising, isn’t it, the incredible learning experiences hiding between the pages of simple picture books for young children? Stories that build morals and manners. Books that foster healthy relationships. Tales that enhance language and communication. But it’s not just
about the books you choose. Remember these three necessary accompaniments for every book reading experience you have with your child, whether it’s once or five times a day (the more, the better!):
- INTERACTION
Encourage your child to engage with the story by stopping to discuss story events. Ask questions, make comments, and inspire your child to do the same.
- REPETITION
Read the same favourite book again and again, as long as your child keeps asking for it. Your child learns by having the opportunity to practice until mastery occurs.
- CONNECTION
Foster a secure, encouraging, fun, loving space in which to read books with your child. They will begin to associate joy and other positive feelings with book reading––the ultimate motivation to read.
