Looking for more in Reading and Stories?

Why read to babies and young children?

Sharing books and stories with babies and young children is the first step in building a love of reading, and helps them develop early communication and language skills.

Even the youngest baby will love hearing a familiar voice and looking at bold, black and white pictures. It really is never too early to start sharing stories with your child – even before they are born.

Starting a journey

Sharing books can start children off on their reading journey. Spending time with a loved one, having fun, and being immersed in fictional worlds gets children excited about the power of stories and motivates them to learn to read themselves. They can also discover books about all the things they are interested in, which can open up new worlds for them. 

Developing Language

Language development actually starts before babies are even born! From inside the womb, babies can hear the rhythm and melody of the language in their surroundings. In this way, they begin to develop the ability to understand the things they hear and become familiar with the sounds and patterns of their native language(s) (Gervain et al., 2020).

After birth, books can help young children learn how to express themselves and understand what others are saying. Books contain a wide range of words that occur less often in everyday conversation. Encountering new words in stories can help children recognise them more easily, extending their vocabulary (Hsiao & Nation, 2018).

Through books, children learn about sentence structure, word order, and grammar. Reading together helps children develop other skills like attention and memory, and having conversations about the story helps with comprehension (understanding the story) and later language development (Weisleder & Fernald, 2013).

Bonding with your wee one

Bonding with your child is about developing those feelings of love, trust, and security which help you develop an emotional connection. Strong emotional bonds between children and their caregivers enable children to feel safe to go out and explore the world, helping them develop their social and emotional skills (Benoit, 2004). Reading together can help develop those bonds and it helps you get to know your child better and feel less stressed (Canfield et al., 2020).

Whether it’s a rhyming text, a story with few or even no words or a non-fiction book, sharing books with a child will give them the gifts of stories, reading, language and bonds that will last their lifetime.

References

  • Benoit, D. (2004). Infant-parent attachment: Definition, types, antecedents, measurement and outcome. Paediatrics & child health, 9(8), 541-545.

  • Canfield, C. F., Miller, E. B., Shaw, D. S., Morris, P., Alonso, A., & Mendelsohn, A. (2020). Beyond Language: Impacts of Shared Reading on Parenting Stress and Early Parent-Child Relational Health. Developmental psychology, 56(7), 1305.

  • Gervain, J., Christophe, A., & Mazuka, R. (2020). Prosodic bootstrapping in The Oxford Handbook of Language Prosody, Oxford Handbooks. Oxford Academic, 563–573

  • Hsiao, Y., & Nation, K. (2018). Semantic diversity, frequency and the development of lexical quality in children’s word reading. Journal of Memory and Language, 103, 114-126. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2018.08.005

  • Malin, J. L., Cabrera, N. J., & Rowe, M. L. (2014). Low-income minority mothers’ and fathers’ reading and children's interest: Longitudinal contributions to children's receptive vocabulary skills. Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 29(4), 425-432.

  • Weisleder, A., & Fernald, A. (2013). Talking to children matters: Early language experience strengthens processing and builds vocabulary. Psychological Science, 24(11), 2143–2152. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797613488145