Read Your Children a Story—and Boost Their Brainpower

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Reading aloud to infants and toddlers is beneficial in many ways, from hearing spoken language to feeling a heartbeat next to theirs. Literacy experts say that young children interact with books and reading in different ways at different ages. Here is a guide to your child's reading habits from birth to age two and beyond.

As I read to my son over the first two years of his life, I often wondered how he interpreted the words, the pictures, and my tone of voice. When he lay on my lap at eight weeks, gazing at a bathrobe and a sandbox in Lucy Cousins' Maisy's Colors, how did he process these images? When he chose Richard Scarry's Humperdink's Busy Day over DK Publishing's My First Body Board Book at 20 months, what attracted him to one and not the other?

Literacy experts do not understand everything about how very young children's brains interact with books, but they do know that babies and toddlers respond to different elements of the reading experience. Here's a guide into what might be going on in your little one's brain as you read Jamberry one more time.

Young Babies: It's About Attitude

For newborns, reading primarily fosters relationships with caregivers and creates positive attitudes toward books. In the first half of the first year, adults are laying a foundation for the baby to associate reading with happiness and connection.

"Newborns really are not so much interested in the books as they're interested in the comfort and closeness of being held and the rhythm and the intonation of their adults' voices," says Dr. Ann Barbour, PhD, professor of early childhood education at California State University, Los Angeles. To promote this closeness, parents can read lullabies or nursery rhymes while holding babies in a comfortable position, Dr. Barbour says.