By Colleen Canney | Posted: June 26, 2014
Do you read to your baby? If you do, keep it up! While it might seem that your cutie is more interested in chewing on the book than in listening to your words (and even then she might only last a few short minutes before fussing!), reading sessions from infancy on prepare your child for lifelong success, according to a new policy statement released this week by the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) to be published in the August Pediatrics.
According to the AAP, kids who are read to during infancy and preschool have better language skills and are more interested in reading when they start school. What's more, sharing a book helps babies and parents create a closer bond – which is important for a child's cognitive and social-emotional development.
As part of this new policy, the AAP is partnering with Scholastic and Too Small to Fail to donate 500,000 books in January and June of next year through Reach Out and Read, a nonprofit of medical professionals who donate books to low-income families.
"When I started with Reach Out and Read years ago, efforts were focused on early literacy and school readiness," said Perri Klass, M.D., FAAP, national medical director of Reach Out and Read and contributing author to the policy statement. "Although those are still tremendously important, the bigger picture now is to help parents build interactions with their children into their everyday lives because this can create nurturing relationships, which promote early brain development, early literacy, language development and school readiness."
The 2011-2012 National Survey of Children's Health found that only 60 percent of kids from families with incomes 400 percent above the poverty level and 34 percent of kids from families below the poverty level are read to daily.
Indeed, hearing language is a powerful tool to improve babies' cognitive development – a fact borne out repeatedly in a number of studies. Recent research by Rice university found that kids from higher-income families are likely to hear 30 million more words over the course of four years than kids whose parents were on welfare – and in a follow-up study those children performed better on vocabulary, language development and reading comprehension measures. Another study last year by Stanford researchers found that children of lower-income, less-educated parents are more likely to hear fewer words in infancy than kids of more-educated parents. The result: these kids were found to be already several months behind in language proficiency by 18 months – and up to two years behind on standardized tests by age 5.
Exposing your little one to as many words as possible is essential for cognitive development – and reading to her is even more powerful than talking because you spend one-on-one time together cuddling and bonding (which has been shown in and of itself to boost kids' brain power). Experts say that while babies under 2 have a short attention span, munching on that book is your munchkin's way of exploring the world. "A parent shouldn't read a long story to an infant or young child and expect them to listen attentively," says Dr. Klass. She recommends making it fun: Parents of infants should point to pictures in books while those of older kids should ask questions or have say rhymes together.
"Books are a useful tool," says Pamela C. High, M.D., M.S., FAAP, lead author of Literacy Promotion: An Essential Component of Primary Care Pediatric Practice. "But we also want parents to understand that reading to their children is so powerful because children think their parents are the most important people in their world."
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