Top Reasons why you Should Continue Reading
Knowledge is the greatest wealth that we can give our children. And one of the best ways to share knowledge is by reading. It is a fact that successful people are also voracious readers. While it really does not matter what genre of books you read – be it self-help books, books on business, fiction or nonfiction – all of them are filled with information that helps build your knowledge base.
However, reading books is not limited to just gaining knowledge. Reading along with or helping children read storybooks also helps build life skills. How does reading a storybook help develop core skills? read on to know more.
Reading Helps Understand Different Perspectives
Stories have the power to bridge the mind of the writer, character, and reader. A good story immerses you completely into the mind of the characters and you start looking at the world through the characters’ eyes. Good stories delve deep into philosophy and psychology allowing you to see and understand perspectives that you have never thought of before. It is an exploratory and uncovers paradigm. A good story embraces you and you become one with the character – allowing you to experience emotions and situations that otherwise would never have been possible. It helps you understand that there are many ways to look at a situation and allows you to develop your skills in different ways to tackle them fitfully.
Reading Helps to Understand Change
The world around us is constantly evolving – everything and everyone evolves and changes with time. Stories are a great way to understand this change; this evolution. Laura Holman Byrne, author of Tater Tot (https://mrtatertot.com/), says that books can give your children good tools to use to resolve conflict and get along with others. All stories have a beginning, middle, and an end – and characters and events unfold as the story moves along. What was at the beginning of the story is very different from what comes out at the end. This is evolution and it is important on multiple levels. Stories have expedited timelines – it just takes a few hours to read about a few generations. This allows you to observe an extended time frame which helps you to understand the process of change and the reasons thereof.
On an individual level, stories unfold the cause and result of each characters’ action. This helps the reader to understand how characters evolve over time due to the results of their actions. In real life, we see our world in pieces, from one day to another. The extended timelines, which would be difficult to comprehend otherwise, become condensed – thus allowing the reader to understand how the various pieces fit together.
Benefits of Reading
Reading allows us the opportunity to see the world from a different and third-person perspective. It allows us to see things evolving, but in a much shorter time span. It highlights things that are important and allows us to see the consequences of various actions – something that could take years in real-life situations. This helps build core skills to deal with similar situations in real life.
As Ernest Hemmingway once said, “All good books have one thing in common — they are truer than if they had really happened, and after you’ve read one of them you will feel that all that happened, happened to you and then it belongs to you forever: the happiness and unhappiness, good and evil, ecstasy and sorrow, the food, wine, beds, people, and the weather.”
