How To Develop Book Reading Habit In Children

The present generation children in India are gradually losing the habit of book reading. They are no more interested in reading books. Such a lack of interest in book reading affects their academic performance as well.

It is time to inculcate the habit of book reading in children and help them develop it. The present generation parents need to be little more patient while handling their young ones. There are too many distortions these days like continuous viewing of TV or playing games in the i pads, smart phones and the like or even too much addiction to video games. Children make too many excuses when they are asked to read even a line or two from the book / text book. If parents keep telling the children continuously, some children do read but with disinterest in the subject. While the difficult ones / aggressive / stubborn children get irritated and become fussy when parents keep forcing them to read.

Reading is a skill which has to be developed in the children. It is very useful in enhancing their knowledge and vocabulary. Parents need to spend some extra time with their children and try to create interest in reading in the child.

Children mostly imitate their parents and elders. If they find their parents doing something interesting, they imitate the same. Parents need to be exemplary. Parents should read books in front of their children instead of dedicating their time to smartphones. When children see their parents reading books, they imitate and involve themselves in reading. Parents need to create interest in their child in book reading.

• As children / toddlers are fascinated towards colorful things / pictures, so as a first step give them books with colorful and interesting pictures and less of text, So that this would attraction their attention towards books. In the beginning stages you need to sit with your child and either you read the book for him / her or make him / her read.
• While you read books to them let this be done in a play way method with actions, songs and dances if necessary so that this will create much interest in them in reading and they start enjoying it too.
• Most of the children / toddlers generally try to imitate the actions of their parents, so you can take advantage of this and show much interest in reading children's books so that they too will start showing interest in reading books.
• As parents you should slowly discourage your child from viewing TVs or playing video games for which you need to set an example to them by showing your disinterest in watching TV. As a parent if you are much addicted to TV, then naturally the children too imitate their parents and get glued to TV shows. So fist you need to have a control over your viewing TV and thereby you can slowly reduce the TV viewing of your child.
• In addition to these, slowly tell the importance and benefits of book reading to your child and keep appreciating their work even if they happen to read a book for 5 minutes. In the beginning even if they read books hardly for few minutes, do not shout at them but keep appreciating and encourage them to read more and more.
• Appreciation even for small things really works wonders with kids. They feel very happy when they get such appreciations from their parents and thus they are prompted to do more such activities to get much more appreciation from their parents.
• If necessary you just sit with your child for sometime and keep encouraging him / her to read and in case your child comes across certain difficult word, immediately help him / her and explain the meaning of the word with good number of examples that they come across in their day to day life.
• And slowly teach them the use of dictionary as well to find out the meanings of difficult words of their own

By following these simple techniques, your child will slowly develop interest in reading books and once he / she is habituated to reading, then you can see that your child improves a lot in his / her school curriculum and also improves his / her communication and writing skills in English. However, you need to remember that this cannot be achieved overnight but it is a long journey and takes some time. The only thing you need to do is to spend some of your precious time with your kids, have a lot of patience and be positive in your thinking.