The Importance of Bedtime Reading

There can be few things as powerful as regularly reading to a young child. It has astonishing benefits for children: comfort and reassurance, confidence and security, relaxation, happiness and fun. Giving a child time and full attention when reading them a story tells them they matter. It builds self-esteem, vocabulary, feeds imagination and even improves their sleeping patterns. 

Most children cherish stories at bedtime. A study by the Kids and Family Reading Report showed that overall, 55% of children aged 0-5 years are read books aloud at home at least five days a week, with 37% read to daily. This percentage begins to decline dramatically with each additional year of age.

Of the children aged six to eleven years old, whose parents no longer read aloud to them, almost one-third said they had not wanted their parents to stop.

Bedtime stories allow you to introduce your child to more advanced books, encourage a love of fiction and expose them to vocabulary on different topics so they hear words or phrases they don’t normally encounter in their day to day lives. The more words they know, the better!

So, try and introduce your child to lots of different types of authors and book styles at bedtime. It’s a great way to introduce them to trickier books, a mix of genres and classic works of literature they may not be able to tackle on their own. Carry on even after they can read more fluently for themselves.

Once you’ve truly lit the spark of love for reading, they’ll soon be doing much more of it for themselves.

And you’ll find you miss those bedtime story sessions!