The Real Benefits of Reading For the Young and For All

Around half of children and young people still read printed fiction, helping children to develop important literacy and language skills, but also their emotional empathy, wellbeing and self-confidence. Clearly, recreational reading is an invaluable resource for our children to develop aptitude for adapting and thriving in this big wide world.

So what are the key advantages of reading for children?

Clearly, reading plays an important role in the academic journey of children. Early reading habits are profoundly linked to better performance at school, frequent readers achieve higher qualifications, and even show improved brain structures. Helping to support readiness for school, avid readers exhibit the most successful capability of progressing in term-time and beyond.

Well aware that proficiency at school is not solely dependent on academic work, I turn to the important social skills that books help children to develop. Through reading different perspectives threaded in different chapters and points of view within a book, children develop well grounded empathy skills. Singing for itself, it is immensely important for children to be able to identify and understand different perspectives and emotions. This also beckons a serious knock on effect for the child’s own self-regard. Promoting better mental wellbeing and self-esteem, books seem the most crucial cornerstone for children to grow happily amongst peers while also intellectually.

Not limited to improving the confidence and academic abilities of a reader, reading also encourages children to think outside the box. Spurring creativity and inciting the imagination, readers are often much more capable of generating new ideas and exploring new worlds through creative intervention. Similarly, reading provides an intimate bonding experience for parents with children. Even just six minutes of reading a day can reduce stress levels by up to 68%. This serves a life-long practical function. Strong reading skills, while enabling confidence, independence and a therapeutic, positive experience expand the gateway of opportunities for children. Supporting the preparedness for the future and potential careers, the benefits of reading for our younger generations support crucial long-term goals while also nurturing their wellbeing.

This begs the question of what the current readingscape looks like today for children. As the statistics demonstrate, unfortunately children' s reading engagement is in decline, with only 1 in 5 children claiming that they read daily in their free time. This is the lowest recording of enjoyment of reading in two decades, yet the benefits of reading illustrate an overwhelmingly advantageous picture for their development. Learning to identify what motivates children to engage in reading serves as an important entry point to remedying this decline. And so how can we encourage our younger generations to open up their worlds to the colourful and fantastical realm of books? It is now our job now to help bring the pages of possibility to our youth.

Encouraging reading, how do we do it?

Multimodal learning emerges as a key domain to support the impending resurgence of reading. Expanding reading resources across the digital, audio and visual will help to advance opportunities for children and young people to read.

There are a number of strategies that purport to encourage young readers as listed by the National Literacy Trust. From suggesting books associated with TV shows and films to enabling readers the freedom to choose what they read, the creative variety of books, relative to children’s lives, remains important.

The environment within which children read also plays a pivotal role in successfully entering books into their attention orbit. It has been said that engendering a reading routine is an effective way to establish a daily enjoyable reading time that structures reading as a recreational habit.

Cultivating collective, social space for reading also provides a positive environment conducive to reading. Reading together amongst peers and caregivers encourages children to have fun with books through active engagement such as reading outloud, creating a dynamic and shared experience.

'Print As Preference': How Print Offers the Most Valuable Reading Experience.

With the myriad of reading resources readily available, where does that leave print? Reading in print offers the most favourable option if you want to reap the broad range of benefits while simply flicking through a good book on the sofa.

Studies now show that selecting printed materials actually engage in more intentional reading – this is because readers of printed books often return to pages, whereas digital readers do not. This encourages a closer engagement with the text, with more outstanding and rewarding benefits.

Consequently, the reader’s comprehension and recall of the text improves with such closer involvement to the text. Research suggests that this leads to better memory retention of information, allowing for a more acute and accurate embedding of the text content in the brain. With a heightened synthesis of the information, a more comprehensive summary and critical view of the text can be developed.

Moreover, reading print can be celebrated as a foundational way to develop critical thinking, and a deeper, more meaningful engagement with the world and its literary constitution.

References

https://literacytrust.org.uk/reading-for-pleasure/

https://literacytrust.org.uk/research-services/research-themes/reading/

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