As you prepare for your kids, you need to provide for them and support them both with physical provisions and also mental support. Physical provisions like clothes, Kids Leather Shoes, food, school supplies and even toys. When it comes to mental support there are so many things you need to do and the many ways you can support them and one of those ways is by reading to them. Reading to your kids gives enormous benefits to them some of which we will discuss below.
Reading to Your Kids Facilitates Important Conversations
When you read to your kids, it often leads to conversations- especially when they are older. A good book can facilitate important conversations with kids about values, morals, and important issues and life lessons. When you read good books to them, you end up having conversations that you wouldn’t otherwise have. You can use this opportunity to teach them important heroic lessons and instill values of selflessness, courage, kindness. It is your chance to fill their heart with all the goodness and good values that they need to be good humans. Just as C.S. Lewis wrote:
“Since it is so likely that they will meet cruel enemies, let [children] at least have heard of brave knights and heroic courage. Otherwise you are making their destiny not brighter but darker.” C.S. Lewis
Reading to Your Kids
Improves their Test Scores
Studies have shown that when you read to your kids when they are little, it leads to them having better test scores when they are older as opposed to kids who weren’t read to. And continuing to read to them will help maintain their high test scores. If a kid is doing badly in school, starting to read to them helps them improve significantly.
It is important to know that test scores are not the all and be all in the measurement of a child’s intelligence but they are a good metric to have. There are kids whose brilliance and intelligence cannot be measured but the current school system and structure (that has little room for creativity). Reading to your kids can help you identify the unique intelligence of your kids.
Reading to Your Kids
Builds their Empathy
As I mentioned above, if you take care of your kids, you are going to provide both physical and emotional support that will help their cognitive development. One of those is empathy. Reading stories to your kids will help them develop a sense of empathy and understanding of the need of kindness to other humans. It is easy to get stuck in a bubble and thinking your own narrative is the only one that exists.
Reading to your kids from an early age helps build their awareness and sense of self so they know that there are different people all over the world and helps them be open an empathic to humans from all walks of life. When they care about the world around them, they are much more likely to grow up with the intention of making the world a better place.
As the quote says, “Any book that helps a child to form a habit of reading, to make reading one of his deep and continuing needs, is good for him.”
Reading to Your Kids
Makes them Love Reading
When your child grows up surrounded by books and the love of reading, it sticks with them throughout their lives. As the quote by Franz Kafka says:
“I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we’re reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief.” Franz Kafka
The love of books delights and excites and that excitement for books formed is a kid stays on even is an adult. I speak of this from experience. I grew up reading lots of children’s books from Goldilocks and the Three Bears, to Little Red Riding Hood, and Snow White and almost every other fairy tale story out there. This led me to be an adult that loves books and cannot go without having a good book in my bag to read at every opportunity. As your kids grow up is adults who love reading, they will instill it in their own kids and so on and so on thus making the world a more enlightened place.
Reading to Your Kids is a Good
Way to Spend time with them
When you read to your kids, you end up spending quality time with them. When you’ve both had a long day with you at work and them in school, spending a little time in the evening to read to them is a good way to be together. You can also engage them in the book selection and buying process so it feels less than a chore and more of an activity you do together. Rather than making reading simply another assignment, or forcing your kids to sit calmly while you read to them and explain the story, work to create a book club culture in your home where everyone is involved.