When most of us look back at our school days, free time meant curling up on a couch with a cozy blanket, a hot cup of Horlicks and milk, and a good book! Right from reading Tagore’s beautiful love stories to such wondrous, fine, fantastic tales of dragons, gypsies, queens, and whales, and treasure isles, and distant shores where smugglers rowed with muffled oars, one half our lives was reading books! The shelves held books galore, and in the bedroom, by the bed, more books were waiting to be read!
Most parents keep their children aloof from this fantastic world of books because they don’t see the need for their child to read more than academic books.
Smartphone – the villain of our story!
With the omnipresent smartphones replacing the pile of books on the nightstand, technology has concealed their brain with a thick sheet of social media, preventing them to think on their own feet.
A lack of concentration when learning is one of the major contributors to having a poor memory in the first place. A typical five-minute period is divided between, talking online scrolling through social media, and talking with friends. Alternatively, a student may be half-listening to an online lecture while leafing through notes, checking for WhatsApps, and chatting with a neighbor. Does this sound familiar? Children no longer are able to study or work without being distracted; instead, they are constantly bombarded. When reading a book, one has to remember the characters, their stories, ambitions, history, and quirks, as well as various sub-plots woven into the story’s twist. This enables them to not only imagine creatively, sharply increasing their grasping power but also boosts their memory manifold.
Cut Throat Competition
The only thing that is constant today is change. With today’s high-paced lifestyle and cutthroat competition, one must have a defining quality to stand out. With most children consuming below-par entertainment content on social media, reading books gives the reader an upper hand, it increases their vocabulary, increases their reading speed, and also helps their comprehension skills. These skills might not seem significant now, but at a later stage, these skills become vital, especially in competitive exams.
While academic books only force-feed children with facts, non-academic books hold their hands and escort them to fictional worlds where children meet new characters, and live different lives, this helps them to relax and unwind. In fact, a 2009 study at the University of Sussex found that reading for only 6 minutes can reduce stress levels by up to 68%.
Reading helps children learn new words and makes them more articulate. People who are articulate perform better in the workplace because they can speak confidently to their superiors. Because those with a large vocabulary and volumes of general knowledge stored in their brains can hold conversations with people from all walks of life, sharing the latest facts and figures in literature, scientific breakthroughs, and global events.
These factors might feel too far-fetched now, or even insignificant to some but in these formative years, children are extremely impressionable, they learn and adapt more quickly than ever and hence what a child does in these years plays a major role in determining their personalities in the future. All children need is a little nudge from their parents, a little encouragement, and once they’re introduced to books, to quote from Roald Dahl’s most celebrated poem,
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