Why snuggle up with a book?
This week’s blog has been prompted by tweets I have seen about reading and ‘snuggling’ up with a book between @smithsmm and #RR_Chat.
I remember back to my childhood when we would visit the library every Saturday and take books out to read. I am absolutely horrified at the number of libraries which are being closed recently; it beggars belief.
How are children and adults supposed to access the wonders of reading? How will we teach the values of reading? How are children and adults supposed to ‘snuggle’ up with a book when statistics indicates that 3 out of 10 children do not own books. Books can be expensive. How will we teach children the warmth of reading?
In the evenings, as we crowded around a warm glowing fire, my father would read to us, whilst my mother would put hot water bottles in our beds. So, I’ve always associated reading with warmth and radiance. I remember visiting worlds beyond my wildest imagination and meeting characters I thought I’d never meet, in my lifetime. In fact, when I was in what was equivalent to Year 5, I remember reading 325 books in one year- torchlight in hand under the bed covers, I’d be told off for reading well into the early hours of the morning. As an adult I’m finding it difficult to keep up with the #52books2017 this year but I guess there are a million and one reasons for this.
The mention of ‘snuggling’ up with a book, prompted me to think about the emotions of reading and what it does to you as a reader and as someone being read to?
When reading a story we naturally develop feelings for the characters and storyline. When develop and feel emotions that we may not have felt before. It helps us to develop empathy.
As an adult it is more difficult to say what it does to me when I have something read to me. As a child, I felt warm, and safe and felt like I could trust my father. It was an opportunity to develop language and discuss language. There seems to be a basic human need/desire to develop language. In my limited experience as a teacher, I have noticed that all children love language and love playing with words. In addition to this developing language is a way of becoming emotionally more intelligent.
What about when someone else reads to you? From my limited experience, I have felt ‘relaxed’ when someone has read to me. It has made me feel special and yet again I have felt like I could trust the adult. I wonder why this is so.
Why is reading an emotional thing? Let’s consider breast-feeding and the emotional ties that develop. Is reading perhaps the only way to develop that closeness with someone other than the maternal figure?
We already know that newborns from being physically close to the nursing mother. You would hold a new-born safe in your arms, nourishing him/her whilst he/she gazes into your eyes. This is the confirmation that he/she is loved and protected and understands that he/she will be protected and provided for.
Breastfeeding also releases hormones in your body, which help you exhibit mothering types of behaviours. The emotional bond is as important as the nutrition he/she receives. Scientists now tell us that infants learn best in a context of emotional closeness with an adult. Breastfeeding promotes a growing attachment between mother and child. Does reading provide the same growing attachment but between another adult and a child?
Reading also promotes emotional closeness but does its process release hormones into your blood stream? Does it promote mothering behaviours? How do you feel when you snuggle up with your own child and read? If reading is about creating an emotional bond between the adult and the child, does that lead to better provision of nutrients for the child?
I have been reading a book called Reading in the Brain by Stanislas Dehaene. In it the author, who is a mathematician, psychologist and researcher of cognitive neuroscience of language and number processing in the human brain, has this to say about reading:
‘At first sight, reading seems close to magical: our gaze lands on a word and our brain effortlessly gives us access to its meaning and pronunciation.’
Even before we get to the stage of making meaning and feeling emotions from words simply written on a page, there are a complex series of process that have to happen first:
- Readers are two robots with cameras- two eyes and two retinas usually
- Words appear as fragments of light and dark
- Linguistic signs are unrecognisable until the visual information is recoded and understood
- Then we can access the correct sounds, words and meanings
- We have natural automatic character recognition software, which takes the pixels on a page as input and outputs them as words
There are many more processes that occur in the brain, even before the affective and cognitive processes taking place.
Dehaene, also explains that there are three areas of the brain that are involved when reading. That’s a lot of brain!
I haven’t finished reading the book yet and I intend to carry out more research into reading.
It has been suggested by the Literacy Trust that reading is an intrinsic thing. Children who are intrinsically motivated read for pleasure. However, there is a negative association with children who require extrinsic motivation. The depth of text comprehension is also affected by they type of motivation that leads to it.
You may argue that there are other ways of bonding emotionally such as: playing in the park, playing games, going on holiday etc…But there is something extra special about reading. Reading is a special activity that involves closeness between an adult and child. Is reading a way of developing an emotional bond towards adults who are not our mothers? We could compare the number of people who have not been breast-fed but who read for pleasure. Could there be a correlation between breast-feeding and how good you are at reading or how intrinsically motivated you are by reading? Or does the pleasure of reading only develop if you have been read to as a child?
Just musing…
http://www.literacytrust.org.uk/
Musings of a mughal 