Why Picture Books Are Perfect Bedtime Stories
It’s time to put the baby to bed. What are you doing? Put on an audiobook, read a bedtime story with funny pictures, or turn on cartoons? New research shows that the old version of the illustrated bedtime story is best for your children’s brain development.
The study, presented at the 2018 Pediatric Academic Meeting , was led by Dr. John Hutton, researcher and pediatrician at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital. To see how children’s brains respond to different forms of storytelling, Hutton asked 27 children, around the age of 4, to connect to an fMRI machine that monitored activity in different areas of the brain, as well as connections between those areas. Each of them was presented with stories by children’s writer Robert Munsch in three different forms: audio only, cartoon and illustrated pages with voice acting.
For stories containing only audio, language regions were activated in their brains, but there was not much connection between them. According to Hatton, the children felt like they were trying to figure out what they were hearing. But in the cartoon everything was exactly the opposite. The children’s brains were too active in the area of sound and visual perception, but still had no connection. Basically, there was a lot of information coming in, but they didn’t have to do any work. Plot understanding was the worst when it came to cartoons.
But when it came to the illustrated storybooks, Hutton said the conditions for neural activity and interaction were ideal, or what researchers call the “Goldilocks effect.” The activity in the linguistic region of the brain was less than in the “sound only” condition, and the same for the visual region compared to animation, but there was a connection between all the different neural networks. In the case of picture books, Hutton says children use illustrations as clues to piece together and understand the story they are hearing.
You may be tired of reading the same picture books every night, but you are actually helping your child’s brain develop (which will help him read on his own). In addition, research has shown that children are even more engaged when they are read while they are sitting with mom or dad, especially if the parent asks the child questions or indicates words. This closeness and interaction seems to make the story time even better.
New Research Shows How Children Use Screen Media | EurekaAlert via NPR