I started reading to my daughter when she was still in the womb. In fairness I am an English and creative writing graduate and so it was fairly inevitable that I would impose my love of books on any offspring I produced! However, I had also read quite expansively about the benefits of reading to children, even those that might be chilling out in my tummy at the time!
The benefits of reading to babies In the womb
Babies begin responding to sound during pregnancy, with hearing developing substantially during the second half of pregnancy. By the third trimester, they can hear sounds from outside the womb, although they’re muffled. How cool is that?!
Reading really helps them to become familiar with your voice. It doesn’t matter if you’re banging out the complete works of The Wind In The Willows (my personal preference during pregnancy), or just reading the back of a soup packet!
Research suggests babies can also remember auditory patterns they were exposed to during late pregnancy. Studies have even found newborns responding differently to stories or speech patterns they’d heard repeatedly before birth.
So, while your unborn baby doesn’t understand that you’re performing your best version of The Gruffalo, their developing brain is capable of learning from those repeated sounds.
Reading to your womb squatter can also just be a really lovely way to bond. I loved just chatting away to my little girl whilst I gently rubbed my tummy, feeling her kick back.
The benefits of reading to babies and toddlers
It can feel totally pointless to read a book to a newborn because they can barely see let alone understand the story…right? Actually, the truth is quite the opposite.
Just like in the womb, every time you read, your baby hears words, sounds, sentence structures and rhythms.
Babies learn language through interaction with the people around them. Reading provides another rich opportunity for them to hear language, including words you might not naturally use during everyday conversation. Let’s face it you probably don’t discuss giraffes, enormous crocodiles, or bears eating marmalade sandwiches, particularly often while unloading the dishwasher! Books bring those words into their world.
Shared book reading has been associated with children’s language development, including vocabulary.
The interaction between the two of you as you read is also super important. Talking about the pictures, pointing things out, responding to your baby’s noises, copying sounds and eventually asking questions all turn reading into a two-way interaction.
Additionally, sitting and reading helps to develop attention skills. No-one is saying that by reading to babies early on, they are going to sit through War And Peace by the time that they are potty trained, but reading does help them to develop longer and longer periods of sitting and paying attention to something.
Another surprising benefit to reading early on is that is helps babies to work on those fine motor skills. Grabbing the book, patting pictures, lifting flaps and eventually learning to turn individual pages all involve increasingly controlled hand and finger movements.
Benefits of reading to toddlers
The benefits of reading just continue to grow as babies become toddlers too (it’s pretty damn awesome for us adults as well….just look at what you’re getting out of reading this article!!!).
Reading continues to help vocabulary at this age, it can help to explore emotions and start to understand the world, it encourages toddlers to talk and interact with you and it strengthens learning skills.
Picture books also provide context. For example, it you say “elephant” while pointing at an elephant, eventually your toddler makes the connection that that massive grey thing with the trunk is an elephant and so on and so forth.
However, I think my favourite thing about reading is that it unlocks the power of the imagination and encourages it’s use. There’s something so magical about a little mind whirring away creating all sorts of creating all sorts of places, characters and possibilities that don’t actually exist in front of them. One minute they’re sitting on your lap in the living room and the next they’re stomping through a deep, dark wood, flying through space, hunting for bears or wondering what on earth they’d actually do if a tiger turned up for tea.
Imagination isn’t just about making up wild and wonderful stories. It’s an important part of how children learn to think creatively, solve problems, explore ideas and make sense of the world around them.
Books can take toddlers to places they’ve never been, introduce them to people they’ve never met and help them experience situations they’ve never encountered. They can learn about dinosaurs and jungles and oceans, different families and cultures, big feelings, new babies, starting nursery, going to the dentist or even why sometimes we just feel really, really cross, all without leaving your lap.
So read the story, do the silly voices and make them SUPER silly coz that’s the best! Make the animal noises even though you feel like a numpty! Let them interrupt you seventeen times to point at the same dog. Read their favourite book for the 400th time even though you could now recite the entire thing in your sleep.
While it might feel like you’re simply reading a bedtime story, there’s actually an awful lot going on inside that little head and that’s pretty bloody magical.
What to read to newborns
To be fair, you could of course read whatever you like to unborn foetuses and newborns because they can’t move and henceforth can’t get away (**evil laugh!). However, there are some specific books out there that can really help to start your reading journey.
High-contrast black and white board books, or soft baby high contrast books are awesome. When babies are born, they can’t see the world with the same clarity or range of colour that adults can. Their vision is blurry, they see best at relatively close range, and strong contrasts are much easier for them to distinguish than subtle colours and detailed pictures. That’s why a simple black shape against a white background can be far more interesting to a newborn than a beautifully illustrated pastel picture.
Looking at high-contrast images can:
- Capture their attention because the bold patterns are easier to see.
- Encourage visual tracking as their eyes begin following shapes and images.
- Give their developing visual system something clear to focus on.
- Encourage tummy time and interaction; placing an open contrast book nearby can give them something interesting to look at.
- Introduce books from the very beginning, even though they’re obviously nowhere near understanding the story yet.
Don’t feel that you can’t read stories though. Some of our favourites during this time were “Happiness is a Rainbow,” and “Goodnight Pooh.”
Books for 3-6 months
Once you start to get into the 3-6 months range, babies will start to be a little more mobile and receptive to sensory books. They want to grab everything!
Our particular favourites were the “That’s not my…” series, “Don’t Tickle The……” series and the “Where’s Mr/ Mrs….” series. Oh god the nostalgia I feel writing about these! We used to buy one of these books every time we found a book shop and my daughter loved them. Where did that time go?!
Books for 6-12 months (the flap and slide era!)
So, the “Where’s Mr/Mrs…” books gave my daughter her first taste of flap books, but once we hit the 6–12 month stage, we really entered our flap-book era.
Where’s Spot? Was, and actually still is, a firm favourite. I mean, come on, can you even have a childhood without a Spot book?! Lifting the flaps to discover who is hiding underneath is such a simple concept, but babies absolutely love it. It also gives them a chance to get involved with the book rather than just sitting and listening.
Dear Zoo was another big hit and an absolute classic if you ask me! We also loved Noisy Farm. Anything that involved lifting, touching, discovering or making a ridiculous animal noise was pretty much guaranteed to go down well in our house.
This is also a brilliant age to introduce slider books. Moving the pieces backwards and forwards makes the story much more interactive, while all that grabbing, pushing and pulling is giving those little hands and fingers plenty of practice too. We had the slider versions of The Gruffalo and Room on the Broom, as well as books from the Peekaboo series, and they were brilliant.
At this age, I think that’s really the key – books aren’t just something babies simply sit and listen to. Let them lift the flaps, push the sliders, point at things, make noises, turn three pages at once and generally get stuck in.
Books for 12 months+
At 12 months plus toddlers are more likely to start sitting and enjoying a story (albeit short ones).
We love “We’re Going on a bear hunt,” “The Very Hungry Caterpillar,” Percy’s Park “The Gruffalo,” and we’ve started to read some short Disney stories too.
Repetition is key at this age, which is convenient because your toddler will almost certainly choose one book and demand that you read it approximately 6,742 times.
As mind-numbing as that can occasionally feel for us, hearing the same stories over and over helps toddlers become familiar with words, sounds and patterns. Eventually, they’ll start anticipating what comes next, joining in with familiar phrases, making the noises and pointing out their favourite characters.
Don’t feel under pressure!
I think this is really important to say because (once again) social media has a lot to answer for when it comes to our expectations of wholesome family reading time. Reading with a baby or toddler doesn’t necessarily mean sitting beautifully together in a rocking chair while they gaze lovingly at every page.
In fact, my friend, that’s pretty highly unlikely to happen!
Sometimes they will sit nicely, sometimes they’ll get up halfway through and wander off, a lot of the time they’ll turn four pages at once, they’ll insist on going backwards and interrupting every sentence. Sometimes they’ll spend the entire story pointing at one tiny dog in the corner of every page. There’s also a large possibility that they’ll just try to eat the book, especially during those horrible teething episodes.
It all still counts.
You don’t even necessarily have to finish the story. Talk about the pictures, hell….make up your own story. Let them choose the book, ask questions, turn the pages and follow whatever has caught their attention.
Reading with little ones is supposed to be interactive and fun, that’s the whole point. There isn’t a magic number of books you need to get through or a perfect amount of time you need to spend reading every day. You certainly don’t need an enormous Pinterest-worthy children’s library.
Reading is one of our favourite things to do as a family. Books aren’t just teaching my daughter words, they’re becoming part of her childhood and hopefully, one day, she’ll love them every bit as much as I do.