In most homes with young children, bedtime story time is a non-negotiable routine. A few minutes of reading that not only relax the child but also help stimulate the imagination and strengthen reading and writing, one of the most important skills from an academic point of view. All advantages. Well, a study by the Spanish Association of Primary Care Pediatrics (AEPAP) published on the occasion of Book Day, which is celebrated this Tuesday, recommends that parents read aloud to their children long before they learn to do it on their own. themselves because it is an activity that stimulates their brain, cognitive and emotional development.
«Reading aloud from an early age, even from the first days of a baby's life, has numerous benefits for children. In addition to promoting the acquisition of language, which is a capacity that has a direct impact on their school performance, it also allows them to work on emotions and influences the child's development by giving them the opportunity to listen, feel, think, ask…”, he lists. Dr. Ana Garach, one of those responsible for the study and member of the Prevention Group in Childhood and Adolescence (PrevInfad). Another benefit of shared reading is that “it is a type of communication that promotes human contact and the emotional relationship of minors with their parents,” they add in the AEPAP.
Experts insist that reading stories aloud to children during their first three years of life “improves their early childhood development outcomes, regardless of the family's socioeconomic level. That is, the beneficial effect of this habit has nothing to do with the purchasing power of the parents, as occurs with other activities. In fact, the Spanish Association of Primary Care Pediatrics encourages all its members to promote among parents who come to their consultations the habit of reading aloud from the first weeks of the child's life.
Telling stories out loud also helps children “get into the mother tongue in a slow and respectful way, a way of getting started in the language that cannot be replaced by screens. In other words, a video or audio will never replace a story read by the mother or father, even if it is an audiovisual product adapted to the child's age,” says Dr. José Mengual, coordinator of the PrevInfad Group.
Even in neonates
The power of shared reading does not remain in the privacy of homes. The Neonatology Service of the 12 de Octubre University Hospital (Madrid) has for some time incorporated the storytelling activity as another tool to stimulate premature babies.
According to those responsible for the unit, this habit “significantly favors the brain development of the newborn. “Reading aloud especially benefits the language area in babies weighing less than 1,500 grams.”
Once upon a time…
The ideal age to start reading is six years old.
This is one of the most common controversies in education, at what age should children start reading? Until a few years ago, schools began this process in Early Childhood – between three and five years old – but now there is unanimity among experts: you should wait for the first year of Primary (six years).
“In the last ten or fifteen years, the improvement of neuroscientific research, based on magnetic resonance images of brain activity, has been able to demonstrate that many children up to the age of five or six are not cognitively prepared for the reading-writing process,” he points out. Asier Romero, professor at the Department of Language Teaching at the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU). Learning to read “is not a spontaneous act like speaking, in which other people serve as models and children act by imitation.
Reading requires specific educational practices, so prerequisites of neurological maturation must be met,” explains child psychotherapist Amalia Gordóvil. And without this maturation of the brain areas linked to the functions of language, memory and attention, they cannot face the reading challenge and run the risk of “generating frustration, lack of self-esteem and absence of motivation for learning,” warns Romero.
These scientific arguments motivated those responsible for education to decide to delay the process until the first year of Primary, although some schools still maintain it in Early Childhood as a hook. “There are centers that send messages guaranteeing that students will finish the Preschool stage knowing how to read perfectly, which attracts many parents, but machinery should not be forced when it is not ready,” insists Gordóvil, a teacher at the Open University of Catalonia. . In any case, experts insist that learning to read sooner or later has nothing to do with intelligence.
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