The Benefits of Reading the Old-Fashioned Way; and Splosh!

I found this article about the benefits of reading to children at a young age on Mental Floss a little while ago: April, I think. Anyway I’ve just refound it and it delights me to know that a 2018 study has discovered that:

The simple act of reading to your kids can influence their behavior in surprising ways.

As The New York Times reports, researchers looked at young children from 675 low-income families. Of that group, 225 families were enrolled in a parent-education program called the Video Interaction Project, or VIP, with the remaining families serving as the control.

They found that 3-year-olds taking part in the study had a much lower chance of being aggressive or hyperactive than children in the control group of the same age. The researchers wondered if these same effects would still be visible after the program ended, so they revisited the children 18 months later when the kids were approaching grade-school age. Sure enough, the study subjects showed fewer behavioral problems and better focus than their peers who didn’t receive the same intervention.

Reading to kids isn’t just a way to get them excited about books at a young age — it’s also a positive form of social interaction, which is crucial at the early stages of social and emotional development.

Also, new research suggests that:

Not every type of book has the same impact. Reading out loud from physical print books, as opposed to reading words off a screen, leads to richer interactions between parents and children The New York Times reports.

And this 2018 report suggests that ebook sales are no longer greater than the sales of print books. A statistic that makes my heart sing (and it’s a rare statistic that does that).

And the thing I’d love to have invented in a parallel universe where time is infinite so all things are possible is Splosh! They supply cleaning products, but they do it in the most eco-friendly, non-plastic-proliferating, single-use plastic way. Here’s what they say:

Plastic waste is messing up our oceans and littering our land. Every plastic bottle you buy in a supermarket makes the problem worse. We have a fix.

Their fix is that you only ever use one plastic bottle per product: Splosh sells refills that fit through your letterbox so you don’t have to be in when they come, and they recycle the refill pouches. Read more here.