Reading to your baby can increase your baby’s IQ

If someone told you to study 100 families with newborns and asked you to identify which babies would score highest on an IQ test at age three, what would you look for?…Birth weight? Income level? The IQ of the parents? Parent education?

When a group of researchers did this exercise, they found that what mattered most was the number of conversations directed at the baby. Talking, reading talk, exclamations, observations, narratives, and conversations all contributed to higher IQ scores.

There is evidence that talking to your baby helps organize his brain. As your baby learns to understand and produce words and sentences, the brain becomes more specialized in language processing. Before the growth spurts in vocabulary that occur around 18 months, the brain shows increased activity in the areas responsible for language processing. This suggests that the child who is spoken to in language rich in descriptions and explanations will often speak well, read well, and write well, which means they will be a good communicator, a better information processor, a better performer in school. . and a good problem solver.

Reading aloud is a particularly powerful way to talk to your baby. Reading provides a much more structured and organized form of communication than casual speech, helping your baby notice where logical breaks occur in language and leading to understanding.

the grammatical structure of the language. This is particularly true for rhyming books. Rhymes, by definition, have a natural cadence that further highlights breaks in language and makes it even easier for your baby to understand what she is hearing. That’s why rhyming books, especially those with bright, simple illustrations, make the best baby books.

Although some of the benefits of reading to your baby may not begin until after three months of age, we recommend that you start reading to your child as soon as possible – it helps set a great precedent, gives them a nice time to bond together and get him in the habit of reading aloud to you. Many of us have fond memories of that favorite bedtime story Mom and Dad read to us; and that alone is an excellent reason to continue the tradition.