By Shaina Vasundhara Bhatia
Reading is beneficial to all of us. But growing up children benefit particularly more from reading. Reading done as an activity they enjoy by themselves or in groups and with parents, all have a different impact on them, each helps the child grow and blossom in a unique way.
As a Psychotherapist and Counselling Psychologist, I use a lot of bibliotherapy in my work. That would essentially entail using literature to help children, adolescents and young adults navigate through their life narratives, recognising and picking on their life themes and getting further perspective.
Some of the reasons why I think that reading is extremely helpful, beneficial and healthy for children are:
1. Through reading children develop a deeper sense of empathy: Reading a diverse nature of books allows children to expand their emotional bandwidth and get in touch with emotions. When children read a story with several characters, they understand and experience how different people think and make choices. This experience of seeing other people as agentic beings on a spectrum, of seeing people for who they are; helps them in understanding others’ feelings and their feelings in regards with others’ feelings. This constant interaction helps them develop and strengthen their sense of empathy.
2. Reading helps children access different/difficult/new emotions and feelings: When life gets really difficult and children experience some emotions for the first time, they might not have the language to express it, they may not even have access to those emotions and feelings. I often have seen this to be the case in times of death, dealing with terminal illnesses, experiencing and making sense of grief/loss, mourning, divorce, difficult pregnancies, extremely difficult family dynamics, coming to terms with their own sexuality and understanding gender and mental health. Reading helps them in seeing that they’re not alone in feeling what they’re feeling and that the big ‘unknown feelings’ which can make it a ‘scary feelings’/ emotions that they have, actually do have names and words for them. Being able to name a feeling is empowering for children since it provides them with language that they can then use to communicate with the adults around them.
3. Reading helps them normalise their feelings: Having a language to be able to share with the adults around them is a healthy step in the expression of emotions. In this space, I would like to also highlight the importance of why parents should consciously make an effort to keep some time as reading time with their children. In doing so, it allows you to spend quality family time, but in addition, it also gives the parents access to the same language as the child. So the parent can feel on the ‘same page’, literally, as the child. It’ll help the parent also gain an understanding and perspective into the internal world of the child.
4. Reading helps facilitate having a deeper bond with your child: Children have a vivid and wild imagination. They want to explore all the new possibilities. For them, there are a few joys as being able to share this new, crazy world with their parents. Children have a multitude of development needs, all of which can be supported by spending enough healthy time with their parents in forging stronger bonds. Having a unique and common language to each other also helps parents to be able to talk to children about difficult themes in life. Reading can be a very helpful tool in being able to support a lot of emotional work done in the form of groups within families. Reading together, along with parents or adults and carers they love and trust, promotes optimal interpersonal, developmental and educational functioning in later life.
5. Reading helps children develop language skills: Listening to others speak and also speaking themselves helps children develop their communication skills through language and vocabulary and also improves their enunciation. The more children read, the further fluent they get with the language, the more extensive the vocabulary grows. Reading plays a critical role in making children articulate individuals.
6. Reading helps improve concentration: In an age and day where we’re all, children included, bombarded with information from all fronts, the actual act of sitting away from your phone/ tablet/ laptop/ TV with a book in your hand and just reading, really helps children improve their concentration levels. Because their life is surrounded by constant overexposure to information, taking some time out from that overload will actually help them focus on what they are doing in the ‘here and now’. The simple act of sitting and focusing on one task helps the growth and formations of new neurons in the brain.
7. Reading helps improve memory and is a great way to exercise the brain and the minds: While reading, the child comes across many characters, situations, sceneries etc. throughout the storyline. Keeping up with all details helps them improve their memory, through the honing of their ability to retain and recall information. It really helps children develop into critical thinkers since they’re constantly placed in different situations.
8. Reading helps children learn about the world: The world is a huge place. Through reading, children learn about the places, people, animals and events in the world. What they learn through reading is outside of their personal experiences. They get exposed to different cultures, traditions and rituals. They learn about lives other than their own and often starkly different than their own. Seeing the world through several lenses helps them grow into sensitive human beings who appreciate and value diversity. They’re now open to beliefs other than their own which further helps them open and develop their own mind to other alternative forms of realities. It is in and through books and stories that they can learn that which no school or formal education can teach them.
About the Author: Shaina holds a Bachelors Degree in Psychology, which she pursued from Indraprastha College for Women, Delhi University. She went on to complete her Masters from Ambedkar University, Delhi in Psychosocial Clinical Studies. She holds an MPhil degree in Development Practice from Ambedkar University, Delhi.
She has been extensively involved in the field of Sexuality, Gender and the LGBTQIA community through postgraduate academia. She specializes in and is a professional in the field of Mental Health. Her therapeutic expertise is in Psychodynamic Psychotherapy, with Psychoanalysis at the core of her work. Her therapy mode is essentially Psychodynamic in nature and her style is eclectic, customized to the personal best fit to her clients. Her diverse education and training has helped her build an interdisciplinary, intersectional and multi-disciplinary lens to understand people and their life narratives. She works with her clients to help them understand themselves and their psyches in a nuanced manner, which leads towards holistic well-being and an enhanced insight about oneself.
She works with individuals from all walks of life, across all age groups. She’s now been practising for six years. She has her Private Practice set- up in Gurgaon and she also works as a School Counsellor with The Shree Ram School, Aravali Gurgaon. One of the major intentions of her life is to help ‘normalise’ the idea/ concept and practice of therapy.
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Excerpts from this article were taken by Penguin Random Publication House for their campaign.
