As mothers, we are all about giving our children the best possible life we can provide for them. We seek to expose them to nature and educational apps, encourage them to play outside and prioritize their needs over ours. We want them to grow up being kind, intelligent, and happy human beings. Sometimes, however, between prepping the healthiest lunches for them and organizing their activity schedule, we can find ourselves not making time for one of the most important parts of our child’s day — reading time.

Reading does so much for children, which has been proven repeatedly by research. More than simply highlighting the usual benefits of reading to your child, such as academic excellence, the following points will shed light on other ways reading books can benefit your child. Hopefully, this will convince you to make more time for this peaceful ritual.

Less Gadget Time

You can still remember a time when the world functioned perfectly well without smartphones. Your child will never know a world devoid of smart technology. You will witness your child grow up in a world that expects people to always be ‘on.’ Exposing your child to books won’t make gadgets less interesting, but it will show your child that there are other forms of entertainment. These other forms can bring much-needed peace to their day by making the world turn quiet through reading.

Spark Their Imagination

Children’s imagination is already a brilliant one without books. You can only imagine how much stronger their imagination can become when exposed to books. Give your children the ability to believe in unlimited possibilities. Arm them for those years when they choose how they want to spend the rest of their lives. Having that sense of endless possibilities imbued in them from early on will help them to work and create the best life they can possibly imagine for themselves.

Teach Them to Search for Beauty

Someone once wrote that to slow down time, you have to search for beauty, and what easier way to seek beauty than in the arts, including books?! As with the first point, your child is set to grow up in a fast-paced world. Everything is instant and things are expected fast. Exposing children to reading will teach them to go in search of beauty every day. When they are exposed to the unfamiliar, only then will time feel like it has slowed down and given them the chance to process something new.

Create a Stronger Bond

Reading time is the part of the day when distractions are ignored. You and your child can focus on the story, where you interact and discuss. You don’t have to wait until your child is a little older to start doing this. Start reading aloud to your baby as early as you can. The tone of your voice changes when you are reading to your baby, which will help set the base for you to create a strong bond with your child.

The Valuable Exposure

There are only so many hours in the day, and you can never expose your child to everything firsthand, but by reading, you are giving your child a window to different cultures and ways of life. You are providing your child the chance to see how other people think and act. You expose them to rich language that will stay imbued in their minds without them even realizing it.

Don’t feel pressured to stick to what the media bombards you with when it comes to books. Read your children everything from classic stories written by Dickens and Twain to the latest stories found online. Read them excerpts from Shakespeare even if they are only six months old and simply babbling away. And don’t forget to read poetry as well. The more you read, the more they learn to love reading.