Last weekend The Vancouver Sun newspaper published an interesting article entitled “What do kids love most? Their parents reading to them.” Nick Vinocur reported on the results from a recent study that surveyed 500 children aged three to eight in Britain and found that half of the children said story time was their favorite pastime with their parents! Almost two-thirds of the children polled said they wanted their parents to spend more time reading to them before bed and 82% said reading a story with their parents helped them to sleep better. Storytelling ranked higher than television or video game amongst pastimes for kids and the best storytellers, according to the children surveyed, were mothers who used funny voices to illustrate different characters or made their own special sound effects to keep the story moving.

Child psychologist Richard Woolfson led the study and says:

The results of our research confirm the traditional activity of storytelling continues to be a powerful learning and emotional resource in children’s lives. It can be very difficult for parents to find the time to read with their children, but these moments can help build strong bond and play a vital part in their child’s development.

Click here to read the entire article.

I had to include the photo of my husband reading to our son Evan as it is one of my favorites and I still find it hard to believe that my first-born is now 12 years old. How time flies! Such fond memories…

Speaking of photos, don’t forget to submit a photo of your child’s bookshelf for our Around the World in 100 Bookshelves project. You will be automatically entered in a drawing to win a selection of 5 age-appropriate books to add to your little one’s bookshelf! See the sidebar for more details.

All of us talk to our babies, from the first minute that we are together, even though those sounds are incomprehensible to an infant’s ear. Babies soon learn to associate those sounds with comfort, warmth and attention, and begin to respond with amazing speed. Reading to a baby does exactly the same thing, and babies whose parents read to them rapidly associate books with love and closeness. They become bibliophiles long before they can walk, with favorite books firmly established by the time they celebrate their first birthdays.

Parents can find this to be a mixed blessing. My mother, who is well over eighty, can still recite every word of a Little Golden Book called The New Baby and I myself have Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are firmly implanted in my memory. After being handed the same book for thirty nights in a row, even the most literate parent begins to dread the request, “Read this story, please.”

This is where “Books at Bedtime” comes in. Marjorie Coughlan, associate editor of PaperTigers and a passionate advocate of reading aloud to children, has long been offering suggestions for bedtime audiences of all ages, and she’s looking for comments from you. Which books do your children love? Which ones make them look for something else to do instead? Is there a particular illustrator that they can’t get enough of? Does one of Marjorie’s recommendations remind you of another book on a similar subject? Join her in her book group for parents, teachers, and caregivers who share the pleasure of reading aloud to children, and who are looking for the very best books for any time of day—including, of course, bedtime.