For many parents, the most important thing is that their kids grow up to be smart and successful people. Although it won’t always work out the way they want, many parents will do whatever they can to at least increase the odds for their kids. But what if there is a simple solution to all this? Well, reading to your kids can make the difference according to neuroscientists, and in addition to increasing their odds of success in life, it will also help them to read other people too and react better to their actions. However, this is something that will take time. But it will be a fun experience and who knows, it may be another great way to bond even more with your child. So, let’s get to the details.
Let’s start with the basics.
One thing to remember is that reading to your kids should be a common practice for you. It should be something that becomes a habit. It should start right from the youngest age because there is scientific evidence that shows that reading to your child right from the time he or she is an infant can help create a strong bond between the parent and the child. Eventually, as the child gets older, the benefits of reading become more predominant. The child learns how to communicate better and learns the very foundations of language.
Secondly, you need to read with your kids too. Although reading to your kids is important, it’s only a small part of the overall requirements. Reading with your child has many benefits, but most of all, it helps to build intellectual empathy.
Intellectual empathy in this sense should be understood as the ability for you as a parent to understand your child’s thought process. There’s a study that was done in New York that showed people who read literary fiction were able to better develop more intellectual empathy than those who didn’t. So how does this help the child? We return to the very meaning of intellectual empathy. This is basically an ability to know how your kid thinks and their thought process. But it’s more than that. It’s about feeling what the child is feeling and the overriding emotions that come with every thought.
This allows you to predict the actions of those kids and to better understand their potential and how you can nurture it. You also need to make reading a little bit more dramatic. Don’t just sit there and read loads of words. Try to add some dramatic effects so that the story is even more captivating. These techniques will help you achieve a lot with your kids. You will be bonding with them, and in the process, you will also be training them to become better readers in the future. Besides, you will also benefit from that relationship because you will also be able to develop intellectual empathy and relate better with people around you too.
