Growth & Skill Development
Benefits of reading to your child
Reading is a great way to bring you, your baby, and older children together for a few quiet moments. Plus, reading to your offspring encourages them to become lifelong readers.
Why read?
- Reading helps develop your baby's language skills. Helping your little one recognize pictures and then the words those pictures represent creates a natural foundation for learning. Likewise, pointing to each word as you read it says to your baby, "Each of these words has a meaning all its own."
Still, don’t try to transform your efforts into formal lessons intended to produce an early reader. Many educators believe encouraging very young children to work on reading skills can result in burnout and anxiety later on.
- Reading is a great way to have fun together. If you enjoy reading a good book, wouldn’t the same be true for your baby? And when the two of you are enjoying the baby book together, what could be better?
- Reading helps little ones wind down before bedtime. That doesn’t mean you should limit reading only to that hour. But if your toddler is busy during the day learning to walk and moving blocks from one pile to another, reading may become an unwelcome interruption. Reading baby books at the end of the day makes sense.
