Most adults look back fondly on their childhoods and remember the time they spent with their parents.
One of the things many lovingly remember? Being read to by their parents, grandparents, and siblings.
Now, if this is something you remember — your parents reading to you — you probably remember it happening when you were 5 or 10 years old.
But new scientific research says that parents should read to their kids as early as 6 months after they're born!
You might be wondering how it could make a difference to read to your child even when they can't possibly understand it. At 6 months old, how much can a baby truly understand?
Well, that's a good question. In order to examine it more closely, researchers followed more than 250 families from when the babies were 6 months old to when they were 4-and-a-half. Read on to see what they found.
[H/T Huffington Post]
To examine the effects of reading to young babies, researchers asked the parents to keep track of how often they read to their children and how involved that reading time was.
From this research, they were able to come to a stunning conclusion.
Involved reading in this case meant that, in addition to just reading the words on the page to the kids, parents also engaged them in conversation about the pictures and story.
Researchers found that children whose parents read to them more and were more involved with the reading had measurable differences in literacy skills and early reading.
When it comes to early reading, the study explained, both the quality and quantity of reading matter.
By the time the children were 4-and-a-half, the absence or presence of early reading had a clear impact on their literacy skills.
The lead researcher, Carolyn Cates of NYU School of Medicine, told the Huffington Post that it's not just the reading that's important — it's the conversations parents have with their kids while reading that impacts their brains.
Carolyn said, "I think book reading is a really important context for these language-rich interactions to be happening."
And reading to your children before they're 6 months old is important, too!
The American Academy of Pediatrics actually encourages all parents to read to their children from birth through kindergarten — and even beyond.
So even if you've read the book to your kid a million times, they're still learning from it and gaining new language knowledge.
If you love reading to your kids or grandkids, please SHARE this article with your friends and family!
