In recent years, especially as a result of the proliferation of the smartphone , parents have begun to read less to their children , as indicated by a survey carried out by Common Sense Media.
Many of these parents consider that reading to a baby who seems not to understand what is being read is meaningless. However, this is not the case .
The importance of reading
While parents read a story to their children (or simply explain a story), the baby is learning. Learn the language, its structure, its grammatical features. It is not enough to give children a tablet with a video on it to keep them entertained.
As Maryanne Wolf explains in her book Reader, Come Home :
For more than four decades, one of the main factors in the subsequent development of reading has been the frequency with which parents read to their children. There are currently a number of excellent initiatives around the world urging parents to do so, such as the successful American Reach Of & Read campaign, promoted by pediatricians Barry Zuckerman and Perri Klaus; the Italian project Nati per leggere, and the successful Bring Me A Book program that Judy Koch implemented in California and China.
These initiatives not only promote reading, but also the shared reading of physical books, because they consider that dialogic reading is the most fruitful, that is, reading in which father and son form a kind of interactive communication loop that builds language .
Hutton’s brain imaging data reveal the important effects this form of reading has on the development of language regions in early childhood.
Through reading, children not only imaginatively travel to faraway places, but become familiar with the important cognitive schemas of stories and tales that will reappear over and over again in their later years of school. Most importantly, however, these readings lay the foundation for learning words that children would never hear in another context .
Studies on the relationship between the recognition of phonemes by children and their subsequent reading success are well known; the same happens with respect to those who deal with vocabulary knowledge.