While reading books to your toddler and playing “pretend” may not seem like super exciting activities to most parents, new research published in the journal Pediatrics clearly shows that engaging in these activities when your kids are little can lead to huge, surprising payoffs when they enter school. And we’re not just talking literacy here.
For the study, titled “Reading Aloud, Play, and Social-Emotional Development,” researchers videotaped one group of families? interactions while reading and playing with their young children?babies, toddlers and preschoolers. Then, the researchers reviewed the videos and provided positive feedback and reinforcement on the interactions. The other group didn?t get any instruction or reinforcement on how to interact with their kids. When the researchers followed up with the kids a year-and-a-half after the study, they found that the kids in the intervention group were less hyperactive and had better social skills than the kids in the other group.
?This study showed that when parents read and play and talk and teach their children, even during the first three years, there are long-standing and large effects that include improved behaviour when they enter school,? says Alan Mendelsohn, associate professor of pediatrics and population at the New York University School of Medicine. ?This includes better attention, better capacity to sit still and better capacity to engage their peers and t...