Everybody loves a good book

Halifax loves books: every newborn receives a bag of books when they leave the hospital, and we celebrated the opening of a new library with so much fanfare that it quickly became the hippest spot in town. We know reading is fun and parents are encouraged to start early with children, but is reading to babies really necessary in the first year?

Shelly Juurlink, and her husband Perry, love books and they want to pass that along to their children. They started reading to their daughter at birth and now two-and-a-half-year-old Lilah loves books. When their son Lennon was born last spring they included him in the family reading times. As Lennon got older, however, Juurlink says, “his attention span for books became much different than his sister’s at the same age. He wants to go-go-go and often doesn’t have time to sit and read.”

Literacy doesn’t always start by sitting down with a book, says Lesley Dunn, executive director of the Dartmouth Literacy Network; it often starts with talking to your child about the printed words around them. She suggests: “Have plenty of reading material around the home. Talk about things on boxes, packages, flyers, anything where there are printed words. While books are viewed as important, rhyming, finger play and nonsense words help build vocabulary. If we could stress one thing we would say talk to your child.”

The Halifax Public Library’s Baby’s First Books program has been running for over 15 years and is open to babies from 0 to 18 months. Minna Harjupanula, a youth services programmer at the Sackville branch, says it has been carefully designed to teach pre-reading skills through wordplay, songs, and stories, with a side benefit of building a social and support network for parents. Harjupanula stresses that an important part of the pre-reading process is bonding and building language into daily activities: “Parents often don’t realize that they are teaching their child pre-reading skills through rhymes and songs. Playing with babies and reading with them from the safe, loving place of a parent’s lap is where they begin to associate books with happiness. This is building a love of reading.”

It’s important to provide the right books for a child’s developmental level, says Harjupanula. She recommends “books with faces, bright colours, nursery rhymes, and cloth books” that they can play with or chew on. Dunn agrees to let babies explore books in their own way and she suggests parents choose “board books, soft covers, something baby can grab on to. We are looking for books that have lots of simple pictures and few words. The words in the book are not as important as the conversation a parent has with their child about what they are looking at”.

Lennon is now eight months old and Juurlink says he is enjoying books with baby faces, trucks, and textures: “We are learning that each child is very different and we are still trying to establish a good reading routine with Lennon.” They know they’re making progress towards raising another reader though when he responds to books with “smiles, and looking back at us with pure elation while we read.”