Bedtime in many homes is often a trial by fire for families. Children have a hard time going to bed, they laze around, they take a while to brush their teeth. And the adults can't wait to enjoy some peaceful time without them. It is at that last hour of the day when reading the story before going to sleep is usually sacrificed. Sometimes, adults are sincere and admit that they are tired, but on other occasions, it is disguised as punishment when they see that children cannot sleep. But that is a baseless rebuke because it does not entail a teaching.
“The action has no relationship with the consequence,” says Arantxa Arroyo, positive discipline teacher at Magea Active School and teacher at the University of Education of Burgos. As she explains, reading before going to bed is an activity that relaxes children, but it is also useful to be able to talk about everything that has happened during the day. And, above all, the expert emphasizes, it is quality time that parents spend with their children. “To punish without story is to take away an opportunity to heal the disconnections that may have occurred during the day. To be reunited in a safe environment,” Arroyo continues. Because, as the teacher points out, this reading has something of an ancestral ritual: “From when stories were told around a bonfire and everyone listened attentively.”
A ceremonial act that children look forward to at the end of the day. “It's like making bread. You are waiting for it to cook, for it to come out of the oven, while it smells a lot and is feeding you before you eat it,” she explains as a metaphor. Pep Brunonarrator, writer and author of the informative book Count (At a good pace, 2019). A bedtime story not only nourishes that family time, but is also a fundamental part of children's growth. “It has been shown that children who are read to early at night clearly improve the subsequent development of both language and literacy,” explains the neuropediatrician. María José Masauthor of the book The brain in its labyrinth: neurodevelopmental disorders (Next Door Publisher, 2020). “Having an adult read to a child who does not yet know how to read at night, or at any time, helps him or her to perform better in school and acquire better vocabulary and use of language.”
He article Relationship between age of onset and frequency of reading and early language and literacy development in infants and toddlers, published in 2012 by Center for Early Literacy Learning (CELL), attached to the Office of Special Education Programs of the United States Department of Education, analyzes various research related to early reading, and states that “the more stories are read to children under one year old, the better their linguistic and literacy skills. “Leaving no story before bedtime is robbing the child of an essential part of her growth,” adds Bruno. And even more so nowadays, he points out, where minors are exposed to more visual stimuli. For this expert, the fiction of the story gets children to expand their field of imagination, while the fiction of the screens colonizes and limits: “If you have seen the McDonald's logo and they have linked it to an emotion, it is impossible for you to They talk to you about it and you don't see it in your head. You have it there because it is colonized. However, the fiction of the story, the emotion, is generated by the children themselves.”
Evaluate errors
But what can parents do so they don't arrive so tired at story time and don't have to punish their children without it? Arroyo explains that the essential thing is to evaluate what error is repeated every day to reach that point. “If a day has gotten out of hand and we have punished, it is best to reconsider and make amends by apologizing. And if it is a problem that becomes entrenched, we must evaluate what is happening at a structural level,” he says. It may be, as he explains, that before going to bed there is hyperstimulation, which is fixed by lowering the lights or sounds, or that there has been a change in schedules, but the important thing “is to verbalize the problem, listen to the child. and do it in a different way so that it does not end up being a daily conflict.” For her part, neuropediatrician María José Mas adds that it is essential to establish a clear sleep routine and that if parents see that their child is going to get angry, try to distract them because the worst thing is to go to bed angry.
The story is not something that should be played with as a reward or punishment. For Arroyo, it is essential to save those last minutes of the day to have a moment of calm, of connection, of sharing. “But it is also the best way to enter the world of dreams,” says Bruno. For this narrator, when an adult reads a story to a child, both are placed on the same level: “They are playing to imagine and are sharing a magical moment.” And that, for Bruno, is the best way for children to fall asleep, because their parents are present, accompanying them and sharing that journey.
You can follow Mamas & Papas on Facebook, x or sign up here to receive our biweekly newsletter.
#children #punished #bed