It is no secret that we live in a time of total digitization when children’s attention is focused on gadgets. On digital platforms, there is an abundance of content for children, and its authors constantly fight for attention: they buy YouTube subscribers and invest in advertising to keep more young viewers on their resources. Plunging into society, children collide on the border of the virtual and real worlds, and books remain one of the best means of their development.
Why are books the best friends of a child?
Books have a greater impact on the psyche than cartoons because you can immerse yourself in the plot of the book, imagining the characters and events, experiencing with the hero all the good and bad emotions. Children live them much stronger, so they ask to repeat the same fairy tale several times to experience the same emotions again.
Reading to a child is a tremendous thought process and training for the proper development of mental processes. When you start reading a book to your child, his imagination begins to work. Together with the development of fantasy, the child develops his thinking: he learns to mull over the story, its plot, and the actions of the main characters. Some moments in the story may impress the child, so he will ask the adult inquisitive, clarifying questions, compare the characters with himself, his acquaintances, life situations, and all these activities develop the child’s mind.
Reading books or listening to fairy tales helps to develop verbal logical thinking faster. In everyday speech, children use a definite vocabulary, in a book a child encounters new words that are not used in the family, he clarifies their meaning and remembers them. In this way, the child’s vocabulary becomes more extensive.
By listening to fairy tales, children train their memory, because to understand them, it is necessary to keep a lot of information. When you read a story to your child, he listens intently and learns to pay attention to what you are saying.
Books are undoubtedly a source of information, from them the child receives information that he would not soon comprehend with their observations, such as animals, living on other continents, natural phenomena, astronomy, etc.
What effect do books leave on the subconscious?
Studies show that childhood favorite characters strongly influence the future fate of the child, his choice of profession, mate, and much more. The stories in the books have a powerful effect on the listener because our brain does not distinguish between reality and fiction. The child does not have critical thinking and that is one of the reasons why psychologists do not recommend reading stories connected with magic to preschool children. Nature has made sure that children take the world on faith, learn from it, and become part of our society.
All information creates neural pathways that the brain perceives as patterns of behavior and children will repeat them in the future. From birth, a child has an initial set of mirror neurons. They influence subconscious impulses that control 90% of our perceptions, reactions, emotions, and moods. Thus, children are very programmable beings that allow them to learn languages of any complexity simply by listening to them in the first years of life. But this ability contains a danger because of the negative influence of any media.
Popular content does not mean quality. Many authors have excellent marketing skills: know how to buy real YouTube subscribers, set up ads, and promote their channels to the top positions, but at the same time they broadcast tons of information contradicting each other and it, unfortunately, applies to children’s info products too, so parents can beware and should choose great books instead like the ones available on Free Kids Books.
To sum up, remember that by reading, the child becomes a fully developed person. Books contribute to the formation of the correct moral and aesthetic attitude to everything that happens. Therefore, it is critically important to monitor the information field of your child so that, down to his thoughts and feelings, he can only imitate the good, the true, the beautiful, and the wise. Do not let him sink into the abyss of chaotic information and rather instead give him the right and good example to follow.