by Maria C Collins

Created on: May 28, 2008   Last Updated: August 30, 2009

Books affect children in many different ways. Early exposure to books and being read to from a very young age have been shown in countless educational research studies to lead to increased concentration in school, a wider vocabulary, an enquiring mind and a greater ability to learn. Children are imaginative creatures and stories feed this imagination which is essential to mental and emotional development. A good imagination is necessary for scientists, engineers, poets, authors, politicians, mathematicians, scientists, and any other career.

Books are the basis of all knowledge and a love of reading and the written word can lead both child and parent on wonderful voyages of discovery. For no parent can possibly know the answers to the myriad of diverse questions that children ask when learning about the world, but if you can read it is possible to find out anything you wish to know, whether at your local library or on the internet. I remember a young relative asking her mother why the sky was blue and their joint discovery of the answer to that question and the pleasure that the search gave to both mother and child.

I remember the safe comfortable feeling of being read to as a small child, and the triumph when I could read alone but even after that I did still enjoy being read to. A very talented teacher's reading of David Copperfield sparked an early interest in the books of Charles Dickens and I read about six of his novels one after the other.

I read voraciously as a child and my parents encouraged me to read a very wide range of books, both fiction and non-fiction, very few things were forbidden, except trashy love stories as I grew into my teens, only because my mother felt that they gave an unreal idea of the World and a poor view of women. I feel sure that this encouragement gave me, of course, a lifetime love of reading but more than that, the peripheral knowledge that one picks up in the course of reading even a novel can be very useful and also sometimes a snippet of something within a book can lead you off into the discovery of more about a particular subject.

Who can doubt the effects of books on children having seen the queues which greeted the release of each of J.K Rowling's Harry Potter books? Didn't the sight make your heart glad to realize that children still enjoy reading even with the modern distractions of computer games? I know youngsters who pestered their parents to take them to the bookshops at one minute past midnight on the issue date to get the newest story.

The books that I enjoyed would probably not be enjoyed by children today; Swiss Family Robinson, Biggles, Robinson Crusoe, Treasure Island, The Famous Five and Secret Seven Series, The Mallory Towers and Chalet School series, What Katy Did, Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights were just a few of an endless list..

I first read Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights at nine years old and although my understanding of the passions within the plot was limited at that age, I did know enough to know that it was a great novel and a jolly good read. I have read it many, many times since then and always find something new and satisfying in the story. There are also other books that I first read when I was a child and still read periodically.

The effect that books have on children is reflected in as many different ways as there are children, but they can be profound and last a lifetime.

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