Remember the reasons to read

“If you want your children to be smart, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be smarter, read them more fairy tales” (Albert Einstein).

Reading helps the brain retain information and also trains cognitive skills: it improves attentional skills and concentration. Nowadays, the speed with which technology-related stimuli reach our brains, the numerous inputs even in parallel, the absence of the concept and the ability to wait at the expense of immediacy, are going to erode our attentional skills, which are drastically reducing and adapting to the increasingly smart environment we live in. Reading can be an activity that helps to counteract or contain this process. In an age when we are increasingly “forgetful” as we delegate all our memories and everything we should not forget to our cell phones, reading helps to foster memory-related processes, to remember and recall content we have acquired through reading and to learn new vocabulary.

Reading also improves our emotional intelligence: it helps to understand that there is another who is different from us and develops or increases the ability to empathize with the other and to understand that there is more than just one’s own point of view. The reader then activates a mentalization process that leads him or her to understand the intentions, goals, emotions, and other mental states of the characters being narrated in the story. In effect, a narrated story is a set of representations of events and characters. Reading is also an activity that also enriches language property and narrative construction.

So many authors agree that reading for and with children is a fundamental practice not only for development but also for sharing emotions with parents, opinions, mutual interchange and teaching: it fosters the creation of an affective bond or its reinforcement. It does not mean that digital should be eliminated from the lives of children and adolescents, it means that inputs from technology activate different neural networks and therefore, in a world where technological development can no longer be ignored, we need to create a balance between the two. We should not forget that reading also trains brain functions that stimulate critical and reflective thinking and thus fosters autonomy from a psychological point of view.

One must also educate about reading

For these reasons, it is essential to educate about reading by getting children to experience the magic hidden in reading a book. One must read in the classroom, gradually bringing them to do so not out of school obligation but out of pleasure also of sharing with adults and peers. To stimulate adolescents, on the other hand, it is important to intrigue them, they love to read and this is demonstrated for example by the virality that books-and often the respective streaming series-acquire in which they see themselves and recognize themselves.

The problem is that today even many adults no longer set a good example because they relegate reading to a more marginal or secondary activity compared to all their other commitments: there is too much of a hurry and too little time to devote to a book, forgetting that for children the example of words is more important.