There are a lot of things that parents are supposed to do to help their children succeed. You have to feed them the right things, put them in the right kind of bed, and teach them everything they need to know before they go to school.
But there are a few more specialized key skills. And reading is one of them! Reading to your child at bedtime can help them to develop healthy sleep patterns as well as improve their skills in pretty much every area of their life.
What are the Best 5 Benefits of Bedtime Reading to Kids?
Kids thrive on routine and on healthy sleep. Their brains do really well when they wake up at the same time, go to sleep at the same time and have everything else going on in a pattern in between. Building a bedtime routine will instill good hygiene habits for your child by having them brush their teeth and hair before they go to bed.
It will also will help to train their brains to start producing melatonin when their routine starts. When you add reading to this routine, it helps in a lot of other ways that can set your child up for success in the future.
Increases Reading Comprehension
Young children learn to read with letter sounds and phonetic words. They make them feel successful and wanting to read more. The colorful pictures and rhyming patterns help your child to understand what they’re looking at better.
When you ask them to items in the book learn to associate that item with that word, and can then start learning more about the item.
By responding often and expressing a positive attitude, you will help them to learn more often and increase their reading skills in comprehension constantly. It also helps them to learn grammar, which is great for helping to counteract the baby talk that kids from adults.
Improves Language Development
The more often you read and speak to your child, the better off they will be when it comes to developing language – no matter what language that is. Reading to your children teaches speech and language skills and stimulate their imaginations to begin building worlds of their own.
Rhyming books in particular are helpful for speech patterns and pronunciation. When words are repeated often, and in different contexts, It helps kids to learn more about the word and what contexts it is appropriate in.
The more interested they are, the more words they will learn. Let your child pick the topic of the books they want to read in order to help them as best as you can. Talk to a librarian if you’re having trouble finding books that your child is interested in.
Improves Emotional and Social Development
By reading with enthusiasm, as well as pointing and touching the books while you read them, your child will start to learn social cues from your reading as early as infancy. The older they get, the more they will learn about the world around them by asking what something is that you’re reading about.
Kids who are read to learn to use their imagination to explore people, places and times beyond what they could experience in real life, allowing them to build empathy skills that are incredibly important to being a functional human being.
It also allows them to learn how to work out their feeling rather than through aggressive behaviors. No matter what their problem is, whether it’s a sibling rivalry or nightmares, reading to them about these topics allows them to see they are not the only one with that issue.
Encourages Them To Become Lifetime Readers
There are some essential skills for reading success and passion is one of them! When you show enthusiasm about reading and teach that to them at a young age, your child it’s much more likely to take that enthusiasm into their own adult lives.
Your enthusiasm for and love of reading is infectious, and this is one infection that you actually want your child to catch and spread around.
Get our free printable reading logs for children so they can keep track of what they’ve read and the number of pages they red daily! It is a great reading log template to print over and over. It is also wonderful for summer reading.
Spend Quality Time With Parent
Last but not least, reading to your child before bed means that you get to spend a lot of quality time with them on a regular basis. This is a great way for you to check in with your kid and figure out how they’re feeling in a relaxed setting, and build memories that they’ll remember with fondness when they have their own children.
It can help them to feel loved and appreciated and give you both some time to wind down from the stress of your days. It also helps them to feel that you care about what they think by having conversations about these books, and that you respect their thoughts, no matter how old they are.
If you follow Montessori education, then the Montessori at home reading game will be right up your alley! It is simple. You read only nonfiction books that only have real photographs of the topic that they are about. This gives children a more grounded approach to life and make more sense of the world around them.
There are truly no downsides to reading to your children, aside from a little bit less time for yourself before bedtime every night. That small sacrifice is more than worth it to set your child up for success for the rest of their life.
The more often you read to your child, the better their school readiness will be throughout their life. Soon, you’ll be struggling to get them to put the books down and go to sleep at night. But that’s a good problem to have.
Here are some great book lists to consider:
And some bedroom ideas:
Bedroom Cleaning Chart for Children (Free Printable included)
Designing a Baby Room to become a Toddler Room on a Budget
Guest Writer: Adam Kyle is a sleep expert at MattressReviews.net. A workaholic by nature, it wasn’t until his late twenties that he realized the importance of sleep for his health. At that point, he focused on learning everything he could about sleep. Now, Adam specializes in how his environment and his physical well-being affect his sleep. A San Francisco native, he finds the sounds of the city soothing and struggles to get to sleep in quieter environments.
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