Why reading aloud is brilliant for your baby’s mental health!

Babies have mental health too…

Until recently, it’s a thing I’d never considered! What about you?

Infant mental health refers to your baby’s developing social and emotional skills.  It helps them form close and secure connections and relationships with you, their carers, other adults, and their peers. It helps them manage their experiences and express all their emotions. It also helps them to use their environment to explore and learn with the loving support of their family and community.

With “1 in 6 children and young people having a diagnosable mental health problem, and many continuing to have these problems into adulthood” it’s something that we need to take seriously as parents and as a society. Each of these struggling children were babies once too!

As with all things, building strong, firm foundations from the start helps us ensure that our children reach their full potential and become the happy, creative, dynamic, independent, successful and resilient members of society that we all want our children to become.

Now we know about it, how can we support our baby’s mental health?

By providing babies with a consistent, loving environment, building connections and using play to aid their development, we are providing our babies with a secure environment to develop their social and emotional skills.

Amazingly, the work of Dr Bruce Perry shows us the importance of the first 2 months of life specifically.

He writes:

“The basic finding is that the experiences of the first two months of life have a disproportionately important impact on your long-term health and development. This has to do with the remarkably rapid growth of the brain early in life, and the organization of those all-important core regulatory networks.”

It is the nurture and loving care that we provide during this time that helps our baby’s brains develop well.

When we as parents understand the learning our baby gains from the play we do with them, we develop a strong understanding of what our baby is going through - the struggles, the wonder, the challenges, and the successes. We begin to see things from the baby’s viewpoint, helping us to support our baby’s mental health development and gain a deeper understanding of their development.

Reading to your baby is a brilliant way to support their development both academically and emotionally and it starts from pregnancy.

When we read we tend to make ourselves comfortable, we sit or lie down. That helps us calm and breathe deeply, we become quiet and still. As you breathe deeply, you will flood your bump with lots of oxygen and surround them with a sense of calm.

If you read aloud, your baby will hear the comforting sound of your voice. Very often, we will find that as we read, we are also stroking our bump. As you do that, you give your baby a gentle, loving environment in which to bask for a while.  You will not only be surrounding your unborn baby with calm and love but also sounds and words that support their emotional and language development.

Due to give birth soon?

Add a black and white book to your hospital bag.

There is nothing more special than reading your brand-new baby their first bedtime story, and why shouldn’t that be on their very first night in the world?

I settled down with each of my three babies to read them their first story on their first night. It was warm, calming and comforting for both of us. As they lay snuggled in my arms and I lay back on the hospital bed, I was able to drink them in, and they too, were able to drink me in. My voice, my face, my smell, my love. In that moment we shared the wonders of black and white lines, I was engrossed in them and they in me and the book we were sharing. We built a connection. Something that is truly magical!

Here’s how to make your very own black-and-white book to share.

Once you’ve finished with it, don’t forget to keep it in their baby memory box, their first bedtime storybook written by mummy (or daddy!)!

Then there’s the joy of reading aloud to your older baby.

There’s something so special about settling down to share a book. It might be the silly voices that you put on (think wonky donkey or this fabulous reading session with dad and the resulting wonderful giggles or sharing for the umpteenth time the same book that you’ve read so many times you now don’t need to actually read the words!

Or it might be the delight of sharing some of the AMAZING books that are out there like Two shoes New Shoes by the wonderful Shirley Hughes and watching your child connect the written word to the brilliant images, the characters, the descriptions, and the storyline.

You are teaching as you are reading.

As they connect and you read aloud, you’re developing their concentration, their focus, their love of story, their quest for knowledge, and of course, as they snuggle into your arms as you read, you’re developing their mental health, their sense of security and therefore their resilience all such an important foundations to build for them!

Reading aloud to your baby supports and develops your baby’s mental health and what a wonderful way to do it!

What are you going to be reading aloud today?

What else can I do to support my baby’s development?

If you want to understand more about your baby's play and learning and have over 1000+ age-appropriate activities at your fingertips all written by teachers and education researchers, download the Oliiki app today.  Amazingly by just spending 10 minutes a day focused on supporting your baby’s development you will build their brains, support their learning for life and boost their mental health! What an outcome! And the Oliiki app supports you to success every day!

If you are already using the Oliiki app with your child, why not open it up again and choose another activity to boost their play today?

If you haven’t give the Oliiki app a try yet, why not download it today from the app store and have a play, the first 7 days are on us!