Reading is an essential skill for anyone to have—without it, you wouldn’t be able to understand what this blog post says! While you probably understand the importance of reading and encouraging your kids to read, you may not know how valuable it is for you to read with them.
Reading with your kids helps them learn many skills beyond just reading. It unlocks their imagination and positively affects their brain, eyesight, empathy, mental health, and so much more!
This March, for National Reading Month, we sat down with Leanne Luehrs-Purcell, Executive Director of the Children’s Reading Foundation of the Mid-Columbia, to learn more about the power of reading with your kids and how you can help them become better readers.
How early should you start reading with your kids?
Leanne Luehrs-Purcell: The Children’s Reading Foundation’s tagline is “Read together 20 minutes every day,” and that should start from birth. Reading is one of the easiest things we can do at home to create lasting effects in our kids. Research says that a child’s brain is about 90% developed by the time they reach age five, so if parents or caregivers wait until their children enter kindergarten at five years old for them to start learning, they’ve missed out on five critical years.
It may be difficult to read with newborns since infants don’t have great eyesight when they’re born, but over the course of the first year, their sight becomes more refined. In the beginning months, they’re just seeing contrast, so you can hold up a baby board book that’s in black and white or really high-contrast colors, and those babies’ eyes are drawn to the page. Along with eyesight, babies’ fine motor skills and hand-eye coordination benefit when you show them books starting from birth.
What benefits can kids can gain from reading?
LLP: Children who are read to develop language and reading skills faster than those who aren’t read to for 20 minutes a day. Children who are read to also have more brain density by the time they reach age five. By reading to your children, you’re helping their brains connect neurons and create synapses. These connections enable the brain to process information and are crucial for learning and memory.
Children who are read to also have better communication skills and increased general knowledge. Reading exposes children to words and syntax structures they don’t come across in their everyday conversations and vocabulary lessons. If you’re reading out loud to your children 20 minutes a day for a year, they can be exposed to 1.8 million words during that year, opening them up to a huge world of language and a lexicon they wouldn’t get otherwise.
Additionally, there have been some interesting studies about how kids can gain higher levels of empathy and compassion through reading. Books introduce kids to concepts, storylines, and characters they wouldn’t otherwise have access to, so by reading, they’re also learning more about the world and how to interact with different people in different scenarios.
Should you still read with your kids once they can read on their own?
LLP: Yes, reading together builds nurturing bonds and positive attachments between children and their caregivers, which has lifelong positive emotional effects. We’re in front of our screens so much, but reading together gives us an opportunity to put our phones and laptops away and show our children that we love and care about them by giving them all of our attention.
If you’re interacting with your children while you’re reading, you’re also teaching them to be curious and ask questions about the book, which means they learn reading comprehension skills and how to think critically about the text. As they get older and go off to elementary and middle school, the level of the text is going to change and get harder, but your children will be able to take what they’ve learned about how to interact with a text and apply it anywhere.
For example, I have a son in fifth grade, and when he brings home his math homework, I’m always astonished at how much language is on the page. Math is so full of language, and these students have to read paragraphs about math. If you don’t have reading comprehension, you can’t comprehend math, science, or any other subject in school.
Why should you read for 20 minutes a day?
LLP: Reading for 20 minutes actually gives us the chance to take a break mentally from what we were doing before. With 20 minutes, kids can immerse themselves in the story and just focus on their imagination, the language, and the pictures. It’s a break from all the stimuli around us.
Studies show that reading for 20 minutes can boost your mental health and relieve stress. Five minutes isn’t long enough. It doesn’t give our bodies enough time to become immersed in a different task. The hope is that as our kids get older, they’ll want to keep reading, and 20 minutes will turn into 30 minutes, which will turn into reading an entire book because they want to know what happens next.
What does reading together look like for different age groups?
LLP: With an infant, reading is going to be a lot about physical touch and them just hearing your voice. As they watch their parent or caregiver read and turn the pages, they also start learning concepts of print. Concepts of print is the understanding of how written language works, including knowing that, in the United States, text is read from left to right and pages are turned from right to left.
When you have toddlers who are starting to talk, you can read to them and talk about the book. Try to think of questions that engage their brain beyond what’s in the book. You can incorporate comprehension questions or just simple things like asking who their favorite character is.
As they get older, you can include more thoughtful discussion questions that will help them stay engaged, such as, “If you were that character, how would you have handled the situation?” When your children start reading on their own a little bit more, you can take turns reading so you have a child reading one page and you’re reading the next.
At some point, as children grow up—and it’s different for every child—they realize they can read faster in their heads than you can read out loud, which means reading out loud can become less fun for them. When they reach that stage, you can sit next to them and each read on your own for 20 minutes, and that’s perfectly fine. What’s important is being present with them.
How can you encourage your kids to read more?
LLP: It’s important to keep it fun because kids don’t want to do something that’s not fun. If 20 minutes is too long, you can break it down into smaller blocks. Younger kids like to be really active, so you can try setting a timer and reading for five or ten minutes and then doing three minutes of something else, like dancing or having the family act out the story like a play, before going back to the book.
For older kids especially, it’s important for them to be able to choose their own books. Take them to the library and let them discover topics that interest them. Graphic novels can also be a great bridge between picture books and chapter books. A lot of graphic novels are very long and have a lot of content, but they still have pictures, so they’re not as overwhelming for some kids.
If you can give your kids the experience of getting lost in a book, they’ll see they can get such a different joy and satisfaction in that. It’s a good feeling to sit down with a good book. For kids who might not want to sit down and read on their own, you can try to remind them how they felt last time. Remind them of a story they liked or a cliffhanger you left off on. The goal is for them to eventually be motivated enough to read on their own.
*This interview was slightly edited and paraphrased for readers with permission from Leanne Luehrs-Purcell. We hope this interview and information helped you understand the importance and benefits of reading with your kids every day.
