Can Bedtime Reading Improve a Child’s Imagination?

Our imaginations are a wonderful thing – we can create any world or scenario in our minds, and envisage ourselves in a variety of places or positions. Oh to be a child again!

Imagination can take you anywhere you wish, and it’s more often than not what sparks our dreams while we’re snoozing. However, in today’s highly digital world, with children, in particular, spending more time than ever gazing at screens, you can’t help but wonder about the effects of our devices before bedtime.

The bedtime story often falls prey to our busy schedules and long working hours, but there’s something very special about a bedtime story being read out loud. A bedtime story doesn’t require children to focus on the mechanics of learning to read but on the enjoyment of the story and the idea of being transported to other worlds before drifting into dreaming about them.

Are bedtime stories beneficial?

A good way of boosting your imagination is reading. However, nowadays it can seem like books are overlooked at bedtime in favour of TVs, smartphones and tablets.

But books open up whole new worlds to children, both real and imagined, and sharing a bedtime story will take them to places they’d never have dreamed of.

Books can teach your child about the world while also opening their imagination. Reading fiction provides specific information gaps that your child can fill with their own imagination, and this guesswork and decision-making stimulate the mental patterns that are fundamental to creativity.

Reading to your child will also expand their emotional vocabulary, giving them words for what they are feeling. This can make them better able to express themselves, and less prone to the emotional meltdowns that can happen when they’re wrestling with feelings that they don’t know how to talk about.

Alongside this, it can also improve mental wellbeing by helping children foster coping skills and in building self-confidence. The perfect way to wind down before an important night of rest.

So we’re not saying to completely stop using your smartphone – but in terms of your sleep routine, it might be worthwhile looking at alternative ways to spend that last hour before the lights go out!

Did you have a favourite book to read as a child? Let us know over on our social channels and tag us using @Sleepeezee