Early Childhood

How to Help Your Child Love Reading (Video)

By Lisa Stark — March 18, 2019 1 min read
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Start reading to your children from the time they’re born.

That’s the advice from the American Academy of Pediatrics, and a new study indicates more parents are doing just that. It makes a difference. By age 2, children who are regularly read to have a bigger vocabulary and better language comprehension.

Literacy experts say there’s no wrong way to read to a child, but there are better ways to engage your little one with books.

It’s called active reading - making sure you’re reading with your child, not just to them.

“I do not want them to open a book. This is the first page. This is the last page. We’re done. I want them to to look into the child’s eyes. I want them to see engagement,” says Susan Neuman, professor of childhood and literacy development at New York University.

We caught up with Neuman and New York-area librarians to get their advice for parents on how best to read to your child. They’re experimenting with reading to children in laundromats, partly to help model active reading techniques for parents. (The laundromat effort is a joint project of the Coin Laundry Assocation, public libraries, the Clinton Foundation’s “Too Small To Fail” iniatitive and Libraries Without Borders.)

Should you spend 20 minutes a day with a book in hand and your child by your side? What’s the best way to best way to improve a child’s vocabulary, language skills, and reading comprehension?

Here are some tips to help make reading to children a pleasure - for both parent and child.


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A version of this news article first appeared in the Early Years blog.