5 Benefits of Reading to Your Baby
Some parents of babies don't think that reading can benefit them because they don't really understand or comprehend the words and images yet. Believe it or not, it's actually recommended you start reading to your baby from an early age for a number of reasons. Check out just some of the many benefits of reading to your little one.
Benefits of Reading to Your Child
- Promotes life-long love of reading: as you snuggle and name pictures or read sweet rhyming verses from books, you are creating an enjoyable experience. Soon your child will be crawling into your lap for books, your toddler will be carrying books around the house and 'reading' to himself. Later your preschooler will love spending hours at the library and your grade school child will be caught past her bed time reading by flashlight. When you create positive experiences with books it leads to a positive attitude towards books.
- Increased intelligence: numerous studies show that children who are read to and have access to books tend to have greater intelligence. Reading to your baby provides exposure to vocabulary, sentence structure, speech sounds, and patterns. All of these skills lead to greater academic success and overall increased intelligence.
- Helps speech development: As you name pictures and read stories, your child is listening to your voice, hearing your sounds, watching how your mouth moves, and learning about speech. Repeated exposure to speech sounds fosters your baby's development of their speech. Pretty soon he will also begin 'reading' by babbling sounds as he pats the pictures. He will want to imitate the sounds you make. Soon he will be babbling a wide variety of consonants and vowels.
- Exposes baby to visuals: The foundation for early literacy: language is the cornerstone for reading development. When you read to your baby, you expose her to a world of words and word combinations. As you re-read stories again and again, she picks up on patterns and sentence structure. In the beginning she will only hear your words, but soon she will acknowledge the print and later want to know what word those printed letters spell.
- Expand your child's knowledge base about the world: books will offer glimpses into different countries, cultures, and languages. Books provide a means to see and learn about anything not in your child's daily life. For example, many children learn the names of farm animals from books, not from going to a farm. Books expose children to different ideas and experiences. Books provide opportunities for your child to think beyond their own first-hand experiences.
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