Why It Is So Important to Read to Your Child
Did you know that reading aloud to your child can help set them up for success in school? Yes, I’m being serious. Spending an extra 10-20 minutes each night reading a story to them can help them in more ways that you probably ever imagined. I will go over the academic benefits shortly, but for now let’s talk about the overall benefits:
Quality time with your kids - Everyone wants more quality time with their children, right?
Builds morals - Stories can do wonders for teaching life lessons to your children. Make sure to choose books together than fall in line with what you want them to learn.
Builds empathy - listening to a story from the character’s perspective is a great way to build empathy in your child.
Instills a love of reading - Get them started young and they won’t ever want to put the books down.
Now let’s talk about reading aloud to your child and how reading aloud to them can help lead them to more success in school:
It helps them to develop their vocabulary. When your child hears a variety of words at a younger age, it helps them to develop a stronger vocabulary than their peers. Spending this time reading to them each day is a great way to introduce new words on a constant basis to continue building their vocabulary, which is important for academic success.
It helps to teach them language patterns. When you read aloud to your child, it helps to introduce them to language patterns as they are young and strengthens these patterns as they grow up. This is important because having a strong knowledge of these language patterns is vital for their future communication and writing skills, both of which are important in school. Communication, however, is key to many things in life (family, friendships, school, work, etc) and helping your child develop a firm grasp of proper communication is a great way to give them a strong start in life.
Builds reading comprehension. As a toddler or early reader, reading comprehension is difficult, because they are still trying to learn the words themselves and that is where their focus lies as they read. When a parent reads aloud to them they are getting the benefit of listening to the story which helps them to understand and comprehend the reading that is done. This helps them to develop better comprehension as they learn to read themselves. Any parent of an elementary age child will tell you that reading comprehension is a huge part of their grade and a big part of what they work on in school. By reading aloud to them you are building a strength that they are going to use a lot during their school years, from kindergarten through college.
Love of reading. Yes, we covered this earlier, but when a child loves to read, it makes school easier for them. Much of what is done in school is reading so if they are opposed to reading in general, they will likely not do well in school. Whereas a child that already loves to read will be able to enjoy learning more.
As you can see, there are quite a few, very important reasons to read aloud to your child. We all want to give our children the best shot that we can for success, right?
I know you are busy, and even if you don’t have 10-20 minutes per day, reading to them for 10 minutes just three times per week can have significant benefits. So don’t feel bad if that is all you can do, it helps! It is also important to note that reading aloud to your kids doesn’t have to stop once your child learns to read by themselves. The benefits don’t go away just because they are growing up, they continue throughout childhood.
