Encouraging our Children to Read

Reading is widely labeled as a very important factor to reach fruition in education. The rising question is whether we should encourage our children to read whatever appeals to them. Personally, I firmly believe the good impact of reading to the children’s taste.

To begin with, reading whatever they like help children feel more relaxed, fascinated and much more confident with reading - a most educated form of entertainments that is dying with the prevalence of other new mass media such as cable televisions, internets and so on. Reading has been proved to be very useful for children’s good performance at school and especially their life later as throughout the process of active reading their mother tongue language capacity in general is much more improved especially the communicative skills and social interaction manner.

Secondly, if the children are encouraged to read whatever appeals to them, they are self motivated to read much more. Consequently, the more they read, the more they can widen their own knowledge about the world around them in an easy way and then the more perfect their personalities can be. For example, with children who spend lots of time reading interesting fairy tales, fables or history legends the moral lessons can be instilled naturally into their minds and will be remembered much longer as they are not as dry and dull as sentences like you should do this or you are not allowed to do that uttered by their parents day by day.

Furthermore, being read to their likings can arouse the children’s sense of aspiration and exploration. The children’s imagination and creativity is lifted to a higher level as some children take their time reading exciting non-fiction books, detective stories or colorful cartoons. More tellingly, in this way both emotional thinking and logical thinking of the children are intensely provoked. And maybe in the future they will be excellent painters, imaginative writers or radical journalists.

However, it is argued that if the children are free to choose what they read satisfying their curiosity it will be very dangerous. That is to say, children are obviously allowed or encouraged to approach bad source of information such as violence, sex and so on. Admittedly, by nature children are likely to be absorbed and imitated by things that are strange and attractive to them.