Library 

Lucie Hill

Library Technician

How Reading Helps a Child’s Emotional Development

Reading is one of the easiest ways to encourage a healthy growth pattern with children. As your child reads more books or is read to, their whole world changes. They start to develop a stronger and more stable intellectual, emotional and social being. Today I want to share a few ways reading helps a child’s emotional development. For children and adults to develop emotional awareness, it involves learning what feelings and emotions are, understanding how and why they happen and recognizing your own feelings and those of others around you. It is important for children to learn effective ways of managing their emotions in a healthy way.

Reading Can Teach About Life Experiences

Children will grow to be different emotionally throughout their entire childhood. One child may start off fairly shy while the other is more outgoing and then as they reach adolescence it flips. Reading allows a child to learn about various life experiences. As your child continues to read a variety of books, they learn about what other people may experience in life, and they start to think about these life experiences and what they feel about those situations. Books can help your child with understanding a variety of life circumstances and experiences.

Reading Develops Empathy and Imagination

Reading aloud with your child is such a wonderful bonding time. Your child will enjoy hearing stories read by you and seeing the world open up through books you share. Books help children to feel and think. Many books offer a variety of situations, problems and solutions. As your child reads a book and they encounter a problem that the character must work to resolve, your child is naturally working on emotional development. As the book continues, the child reads on and starts to feel a variety of emotions. Depending on the book, reading is something that helps a child think about how they feel for the character, about the situation and how they would respond if ever in this type of scenario.

Safe for Emotional Expression

Reading is a safe way for children to learn how to express and think about their emotions. It also opens the doors to new ways to cope with emotional responses to change. There are books about new siblings, bullying and other experiences that your child may be experiencing and reading will help your child to express their emotions. They’ll develop a higher self-confidence in sharing feelings and emotions.

Reading can spark your child’s imagination and stimulate their curiosity. While books also help your child’s brain, social skills and communication skills develop throughout their life.