Please indulge me this seemingly off-topic post.  I assure you it has everything to do with reading to babies.

Sound…

…was the first and all pervading element in the universe. Not sound, per se, but vibrations. Rishis( ancient sages) in deep meditation absorbed and experienced that omnipresent vibration otherwise known as the Supreme Creation, Creator, God, Genesis etc…it doesn’t matter what we call it or how we have come to know it. What matters is that whatever it was/is/will be, manifested itself as a universal, eternal vibration…or sound, in the simplest sense.

In ancient India there was a practice founded on this primary source of knowledge, centred around teaching and learning using Sound. Emphasis was placed on imparting education through sound and repetition, often on a one-to-one basis. No writing was involved.  Just listening, absorbing, assimilating, repeating what was learned, memorizing and going back to listening some more.

Fast forward a few thousand years. There may be a lot of different opinions on parenting, but if there’s one thing modern day parenting gurus and books agree on, it’s this -  babies begin to learn by listening.  It’s the very first sense they develop, when they’re still in the womb. In the epic Mahabharata, Arjuna’s son Abhimanyu demonstrated it. Modern research proves it. You and I experience it.

Naturally, there’s more to reading to your baby from an early stage than first meets the eye.

If sound has such a powerful and far-reaching impact on young ones, even those in the womb, imagine the kind of influence that reading to your baby from early on, every day is likely to have. To listen and learn. It’s as if that’s exactly what babies are designed for. Most babies don’t begin to see clearly and differentiate colors, shapes and forms until they’re a few weeks old but they can hear from within the womb. They can identify and distinguish voices and familiar sounds even before they’re born.

Reading to your baby is about putting this fundamental truth to work …you’re tapping into the inborn potential of your child, her ability to hear, by reading to her. The way learning happened in ancient times. Millions of words, thousands of texts, poetry and prose on subjects ranging from trigonometry to philosophy have been transmitted for generations using the oral tradition. Not a single tree cut, not one forest wasted to store these gazillions of terabytes of knowledge for many, many generations.

The power of sound and the capacity to learn by listening are probably why your child can repeat  a tune, a jingle or a phrase in a flash or identify a voice over the phone,  memorize facts faster when repeated aloud…and…why she can ‘read’ a book from memory well before she can actually sound out letters or identify them.

Reading to babies has a positive impact on their emotions, memory retention, vocabulary, language skills, communication skills, confidence levels – not to mention their intelligence.

Reading to your baby may be one of those aspects of early childhood that shapes her personality, interests, self esteem, world view, comprehension power and just about everything else that matters.  The beauty and power of reading to a child lies not in sounding out words or in making sense of them, but in the fact that you’re going back to the very beginning – is it surprising then, that this experience holds the key to the life that follows?

I leave you with a message I need to remind myself of ever so often -

Read lovingly,
read often,
read what matters,
read something inspiring,
read to your child. Every day.