How Reading Every Day Can Enhance Your Child’s Mental Health?

According to a research conducted in 2017 by the NHS, one in every eight children suffer from mental health disorders, especially the emotional ones. As a parent, these numbers can be very disturbing. Looking after your young one needs special attention to both physical and mental health. Pressure and emotional distress not just affect the adults but children as well.

Inculcating the habit of reading every day is a very good way to improve your child’s mental health. Reading can help your child to understand different emotions and the ways to deal with them. Children at a young age are like soft clay, it is up to the parents how to mould the clay into a strong person. Books can be of any choice, fiction, storybooks, science fiction, fun and facts, anything that interests your child. The main motive is getting into the habit of reading every day.

How Reading Every Day Can Help Improve Mental Health

Several research and studies have proven the fact that reading every day has a positive impact on the development of a child and its mental health. While reading a storybook, the imagination of the child improves, when he imagines and relates to the characters. It enhances the capability of understanding the situations, dealing with emotions and also improves the vocabulary.

According to research conducted by Book Trust, reading every day not only improves the literacy skills of children but also facilitates interaction between adults and children, builds confidence for social interaction, encourages the child to observe and learn from the world around them. The research also stated that the habit of reading every day can be a very good source of knowledge and information, building a solid base for the future of the child.

Here are a few reasons how reading every day can help enhance your child’s mental health.

1.     Helps In Cognitive Development:

Cognitive development refers to the way we perceive and think about our world with reference to our intelligence, reasoning, language development and information processing. By reading to your child every day, you ensure that you are introducing them to a deep understanding of the world around them and adding knowledge to their learnings. The kids later use the knowledge to make sense of what they see, hear and read, which promotes their cognitive development.

2.     Improves Literacy Skills:

Reading of course improves your child’s literacy skills. They become familiar with new words and phrases and this improves their vocabulary. It’s like speaking to your child in their mother tongue. The child learns to speak in the language you interact with him in. You do not have to put in extra effort to teach your child the mother tongue. Similarly, starting from infancy, reading can improve your child’s language acquisition skills, communication skills and literacy skills.

3.     Improves Creativity and Imagination:

According to a study, it was reported that reading to your child from an early age is strongly correlated with the activation of brain areas related to visual imagery and language understanding. It also helps in grooming your child to think creatively and critically.

4.     Helps In Developing Emotions:

Emotions are raw to young children, they do not know how to deal with them. Reading is a very good way to introduce different emotions to your child and teach them how to deal with them. When you read a storybook, the child imagines the character and relates with them and their world. This helps the child to build empathy and this further helps them to deal with the emotions in the real world. Learning to be empathetic and dealing with emotions also builds their social development skills. 8 Tips How Students Can Deal with Exam Stress

5.     Improves Concentration Power:

According to a recent study, it was also found that reading every day also helps in improving a child’s concentration power. When the child is engrossed in reading, it builds the habit of concentrating and sitting in one place for a long period of time. This habit helps them in future academic growth.

Reading Program At Kumon

The English Program at Kumon is designed carefully to develop the reading ability of your child. Our reading program helps your child to build reading and word recognition skills. It improves their grammatical knowledge, sentence structure, comprehension building, analysing the passage and summarizing. We encourage the self-learning method at Kumon, which helps the children to learn at their own pace. And the worksheets help them and the parents to analyse the progress.

At Kumon, we also provide a wide range of different books, which helps the children to select according to their interests and facilitates advanced learning leading to higher confidence and a better academic future. Download our enrolment booklet for more information on the Kumon Method of Learning, programmes, enrolment information and study flow.