Analysis: reading with young children brings benefits beyond language and literacy skills
Some parents may wonder how young is too young to start reading with their new baby. They might correctly think that the baby won’t understand the words or the story being told. However, there are more benefits to reading with babies than just helping their future language or literacy skills. Recent Irish and international research suggests that it’s never too early to start reading, and babies benefit in multiple ways.
It has long been established that reading with young children has many benefits for the development of vocabulary, language and literacy. Reading is an important cultural skill and the foundations for reading are laid down by parents and caregivers in early childhood. Early shared reading with young children supports their preparation for starting school and has been linked to academic success in the longer term.
However, research also shows there are benefits not only for language and literacy skills, but also for other aspects of cognitive and socioemotional development. Research shows that reading with young children can support the development of numeracy and mathematics skills. Reading also supports the development of joint attention skills, which involves two people sharing a common focus on something, such as an object or person. Joint attention skills are facilitated while reading a book with a young child, as the child is encouraged to pay attention to what the parent is pointing to on the page.
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Reading a book with a young child also supports their socioemotional development by providing an opportunity for a shared experience with another person. This shared experience might be with a parent, but may also be with other family members such as grandparents or older siblings, or with other caregivers. Reading can support physical closeness and emotional ties between the parent and child, as the child sits on a parents lap for story time, or enjoys it as part of a bedtime routine.
In addition to the physical shared reading experience between the child and parent, reading a story can support socioemotional development in other ways too. Stories have the power to transport us to situations we have never experienced, and to worlds we have never imagined. For young children story time can help teach them about new and different social situations such as making friends, starting school, dealing with disappointments or taking risks.
While a lot of research on shared reading with young children has focused on toddlers and pre-schoolers, recent studies has explored the benefits of reading with children under 1 year of age. What these studies have found is a similar pattern of findings to reading with older children, with benefits not only for language and communication, but also for other aspects of psychological development. These benefits seem to be positively associated with development both in the first year of life, and in subsequent years.
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Research findings from the Growing Up in Ireland study showed that 9 month old infants who were read to had higher scores in communication skills than those who were not read to, highlighting the benefits of early reading for language and communication development. Additionally, these children also had higher scores for problem solving skills, demonstrating that the potential benefits of reading with infants extends to other areas of cognitive development. These findings held even after other family factors which are known to influence cognitive development were taken into account, such as the educational level of the mother or the income of the family.
Other Irish research has also indicated that there are benefits for multiple aspects of later development when infants are read to in the first year of life. When 6 month old infants were read to daily, they had higher levels of vocabulary, socioemotional and cognitive skills by 12 months of age, compared to infants that were not read to as regularly. Similarly, when the 9 month old infants in the Growing Up in Ireland Study were followed up at age 3, those that were read to at 9 months had stronger expressive vocabulary skills.
We know from the Growing Up in Ireland study that approximately 80% of 9 month old infants in Ireland are read to, but that suggests there are up to 20% of infants who are not read to. Unlike many other countries around the world, Ireland does not have a national book gifting scheme for babies. A number of local schemes exist in some counties - such as Books4Babies, Bookseed, Preparing for Life and the Dolly Parton Imagination Library - it is important these schemes are built upon and a national scheme is made available to support reading from the earliest age in all families.
Dr Suzanne Egan is a Lecturer and Researcher in Psychology at Mary Immaculate College Limerick. She is a former Irish Research Council awardee.
The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent or reflect the views of RTÉ
