We all remember the crusty octogenarian librarian of our youth, hunched over our upturned childish faces, peering down from ancient eyeglasses as she extolled the benefits of reading. As she droned on and on about some dude named Dewey Decimal and the dusty standardized tests of the distant future, your eight-year-old eyes drifted to the sun shining outside, and you prayed with all you might for boisterous recess and the moment you could get out of this musty book mausoleum.
Now however, you’re a parent, and you want to help your children enjoy reading, Luckily, there are benefits to reading beyond being the Scholastic pizza parties of your youth, from fun new reading games to increased self-esteem. So if you’re struggling to turn your wriggling youngster onto the joys of the written word, here are some awesome benefits of reading for a little incentive.
13) Reading helps you cope with stress and anxiety
Reading provides positive escapism from the real world, which can help detract from the stress of daily life. Remember, kids have stress too, and they need their own heroes, villains, and fantastical creatures to help them take their mind off the present. Young or old, there’s nothing like a good afternoon of peaceful page-turning to make you feel relaxed and at ease.
12) Reading helps boost vocabulary
Certainly you can learn vocabulary words through conversation, but reading is definitely a helpful supplement. Young readers will remember the classic moment when Ramona Quimby, literary heroine, walks up to her sister Beezus and comments on the “Dawnzer…which is glowing a lee light.” Her tragic butchering of “The dawn’s early light” of course sends Beezus into hysterics, and causes her little sister Ramona to become mortified with shame. Help your little reader master correct pronunciation and word mechanics through reading the words on a page, so they get the proper use of vocabulary and avoid embarrassing tongue-slips in the future.
11)Reading teaches tolerance
Reading is often one of the first fundamental building blocks that teach kids about a life unlike their own. In fact, those are often the books most popular with children! Whether they deal directly with stories of race and gender, like Huck Finn, or simply chronicle an unusual or zany lifestyle, like Eloise, who lived in a hotel, books teach kids to imagine a life beyond their own and embrace a more accepting, curious worldview.
10) Reading teaches morals
While other mediums such as songs and videos certainly can teach morals, many children’s book go above and beyond to meet this ideal in imaginative and impressive ways. For example, there are few morality tales as stark as the fairytales of youth, which teach against greed, laziness, talking to strangers and more. The beauty of these tales is that they are as lively and imaginative as they are moral, so they provide perfect pneumatic devices for playful young minds.
9) Reading helps children become engaged learners, rather than passive learners
Books force kids to use their imagination to paint the picture, rather than having it passively communicated to them through the picture on a television screen. This helps kids get the wheels turning in their minds, imagining scrappy heroines, honey-loving bears and mustache-twirling villains. Once you see those little foreheads scrunch, or watch your children stare dreamily into the distance while twirling their soup at dinner, you’ll know they’ve been bitten by the reading bug.
8 ) Is there anything more bonding than a bedtime story?
Reading together provides an unmatched magical experience between parent and child. After the bath and before the bed, you will always remember those cozy moments cuddled up together absorbed in a story. Whether you take turns reading together or you just read out loud, you will notice the change in your child as they go from sleepy reluctant listener to ramrod straight, suspicious book monitor who never fails to shout, “Mom, you skipped a page!” Oops, caught read-handed.
7) Reading is a good springboard for open conversation
Stories can be great conversation-starters. By casually asking your child how they felt about a particular character’s moral quagmire or quandary, you gain insight into your child’s character and circumstances, often more successfully than through direct probing. Use storytime as a catalyst to talk openly with your child, using magical tales to “break the spells” that are burdening your wee ones.
6) Reading enables you to become an expert Jeopardy contestant
Contrary to the blockbuster hit movie SlumDog Millionaire, you don’t have to be a slumdog from Mumbai to be a competent trivia player-although that is an awesome story. By cracking open a book, a child’s mind naturally absorbs all sorts of little trivia and information, and the impact of the story helps ‘set’ those facts in the mind, making them easier to remember later-like when there’s $20,000 riding on knowing that Myanmar was formerly Burma (thank Amy Tan, Saving Fish from Drowning.) And in the mean time, your young’un can smugly regale their siblings with their random bits of knowledge, until such time as they can be sold, err entered, into trivia shows and pay you back for all those Harry Potter hardbacks.
5) Reading provides kids protection and autonomy
It’s an unfortunate fact that people aren’t as respectful to the personal space and polite barriers of children as they are with adults. As such kids are often the unfortunate victim of the yammering grandma on the bus or the well-meaning receptionist at the dentist office. By opening a book, kids finally have a way to politely but clearly shut the door of communication and disappear into their own private world at will. Reading gives them a way to filter communication with the same dignity and sense of personal choice adults enjoy.
4) Reading can get you a date
Not that you are ready for your little ones to find a mate, but when they do, wouldn’t it be cool if they met through mutual imaginary literary friends? Thanks to Penguin Dating http://penguin.match.com/matchuk/cp.aspx?cpp=en-uk/landing/penguin/index.html service, you can now get matched up via reading preferences, so you will never again date someone who prefers Brothers K the David James Duncan version when you are Brothers K Dostoevsky fan. This is of course the reading equivalent of irreconcilable differences. Rather than preparing your children for a future of smoky bars and awkward blind dates, set your little one up to find their future bookend by inspiring a voracious love of reading early on.
3) Indulge your child’s inner elephant
Most kids have a mind like a steel trap, displaying an eerie propensity for memorizing everything from commercial jingles to the exact time and date you accidentally let a four-letter word slip in the car. As such, the idea of being able to expand their memories will certainly appeal to them. This is where reading comes in. According to scientists http://www.oprah.com/article/omagazine/200806_omag_reading
, reading is more neurobiologically demanding than processing images or speech. As you’re absorbing, say, this article, “parts of the brain that have evolved for other functions—such as vision, language, and associative learning—connect in a specific neural circuit for reading, which is very challenging,” says Ken Pugh, PhD, president and director of research of Haskins Laboratories, which is devoted to the science of language and affiliated with Yale. “A sentence is shorthand for a lot of information that must be inferred by the brain.” In general, your intelligence is called to action, as is greater concentration.” In a nutshell, reading takes a lot more brain-scrunching than your average image-processing, resulting in better memory and cognitive skills.
So to indulge your child’s inner elephant, be sure to make time for regular intervals of reading!
2) Reading can help you lose weight
I know what you are thinking. How can becoming a lazy latte-slurping bookworm possibly help you lose weight? Well according to a study http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1847340,00.html at Duke University, 31 overweight girls who read the book Lake Rescue http://www.amazon.com/Lake-Rescue-Beacon-Street-Girls/dp/0975851136, a motivational story with themes of a girl conquering her obesity problem, lost more weight than girls who read another book. This ties back to issues of self-esteem and confidence, which good reading skills consequently instill.
Certainly, if a child sits around reading and never goes out and exercises, they probably won’t lose weight. But if an inspiring book provides a tactful way to encourage your child on a very sensitive subject, get thee to a Barnes and Noble!
1)There’s more than one way to learn to spell “cat”
Best of all, there are so many new modern ways to learn to read, kids can find a way that feels “cool” and inspiring to them. If they fear burying their nose in a book at recess will cause them to lose playground cred, there are plenty of cool new online reading games http://SabiGames.com to help them learn to read in style. Best of all, many of these games incite the same sort of imagination, memory, and self-esteem boosting as the best children’s book. And unlike books, some of these reading games offer endless replay value, no dogeared pages needed. For a playful, paper-cut-free way to help your child learn to read, consider new reading games to help instill a lifelong love of reading in your child.
