Want Your Kids to Succeed? Here's What to Do: Read to Them!

It is the desire of every parent to do everything that they can to ensure their kids will be successful in their lives. What would really amaze you is that there is a simple parenting thing or practice that can help your kids become successful in the future. Moreover, it will increase the possibility that they will learn to read other people and even predict their reactions.

Now, you also need to understand that while this simple parenting practice might be a bit more time-consuming than other techniques, it will deepen your bond with your kids and give you more time to spend with them.

The parenting technique we are talking about is reading to your kids. Yes, you heard that right. Read to kids especially when they are younger. Several neuroscience experts have said that reading to your kids and making it a daily bedtime ritual will prove to be more beneficial and effective.

In this post, let’s discuss how reading to your kids can help them become better persons and succeed in life.

Read to Your Kids

You need to start with the basics first. Neuroscientists and Pediatricians have repeatedly recommended parents read to their kids, especially from their early years. You need to start reading to even infants as well.

While your infants may not be able to decipher your words, the impact of your reading aloud to them is significant and is also considered to have at least two major benefits. One major benefit is you can bond over the verbal exchange with your kid and the other one is you can show how communication itself works.

As your kids grow older, the benefits of reading aloud to them become even more obvious and they continue to increase. When you start reading to your kids in their early years, their communication and language skills become stronger so much so that they can read properly once they reach kindergarten. The better they can read, the more likely they will get graduate from high school with good grades. 

Furthermore, they will be more likely to get a better higher education, develop positive and stronger relationships with their family, and achieve economic stability and security. Parents should not feel pressured to develop the habit of reading aloud to their kids. In fact, they should be more focused on understanding why it’s important and why it should be developed in their early years.  

Read with Your Kids

Reading to your kids is one thing and reading with them is another. It has been suggested by several neuroscientists that reading with your kids is more important than reading aloud to them.

Parents should realize that they should not turn reading to only a bedtime ritual. Some parents read to kids only to make them sleep. However, this practice shouldn’t be encouraged. Doing so is only equivalent to putting them in front of the television or any other digital gadget.

If you want to inculcate the habit of reading in your kid’s life, you need to do it right; start reading with them instead of only reading aloud to them. This will help them develop intellectual empathy.

Develop Intellectual Empathy

Several research studies have also shown that people who read literary fiction are more likely to develop better intellectual empathy. This means that they are better at understanding the thoughts, emotions, and motivations of other people.

While young kids may not be able to read literary fiction in the early years, they can begin by reading simple stories compromising of kids. They can start by reading children’s fiction stories. Books by Enid Blyton, Roald Dahl, and Jeff Kinney (the wonder behind the “Diary of a Wimpy Kid” series” are the best recommendations for kids. These books have helped kids develop strong reading and imagination skills because they encourage them to imagine themselves in the story. 

When kids develop intellectual empathy, they can perceive how others see and experience things even from a distance. On the other hand, emotional empathy helps them see and feel things the way others do.

Kids should have both intellectual and emotional empathy but in the long run, intellectual empathy is more useful and beneficial to them because it will help them perceive the reactions of others and help them generate new ideas that will inspire others.  

Let Kids Choose Their Adventures While Reading

If you want your kids to develop intellectual empathy, then instead of simply reading through a book with your kid, you need to interrupt the story in the middle of the pages, encourage your kid to put himself/herself into the shoes of the fictional characters and choose their own adventures.

By doing this, you can let your kid sort through the conflict or solve a problem before the fictional character does. This will improve your kid’s imaginative and problem-solving skills. This reading practice can lead to more fruitful benefits.

We are not saying that if you don’t read to your kids or read with them enough, they will lose everything in life and suffer a major disaster. But we are definitely stressing that not reading to them or with them will turn them into a less intellectually empathetic life, and of course, you wouldn’t want that to happen.

Encouraging your kids to read and developing the habit of reading along with them will help your kids become better readers as well as intellectually empathetic individuals. The more intellectually empathetic individuals are more likely to become better friends, employees, bosses, as well as negotiators.

Here’s how you can encourage your kids to read more: you can get them a library membership so the librarian can issue more books to them whenever they visit the library. If your kid is more into using digital devices, you can download free e-Books on their device so they have more material to read.

However, the downside to letting your kids read e-Books on their smartphones is that they can easily be distracted by several other things on the smartphones. It is better to install a monitoring app (for example, Mobistealth) on their smartphone so you can remotely monitor each activity taking place on it.

Mobistealth is the best cell phone spy app that helps you know what your kid is doing on their smartphone. Get your hands on it and start monitoring your kid.