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How bedtime stories synchronise your child’s brain with yours
At four months old, little Alba is remarkably content. Dressed in a white dress and black leggings, she gazes patiently around the lab as a technician places a pink cap on her head and painstakingly connects wires to the electrodes.
“She is super relaxed,” says her mother, Emily Reed, 35, as another hat of electrodes — this one dark red — is placed on her own head. “She has a very chilled temperament.”
A baby’s patience, however, can only last so long. Twenty minutes later, as the last of the wires is connected, Alba has decided enough is enough. Her face crumples, fists tighten into balls and fat tears roll down her cheeks.
It is time to deploy a weapon battle-tested in millions of children’s bedrooms. Emily begins to read Dear Zoo by Rod Campbell. “I wrote to the zoo to send me a pet,” she reads over the din of Alba’s wails. “They sent me an … elephant! He was too big so I sent him back.”
Almost immediately Alba’s cries grow quieter. As her mother continues to turn the pages, lifting flaps to reveal each animal received from the zoo, the screams gradually turn to coos.
Behind them on a large screen, two faces are displayed, moving closer together, then further apart, then closer again. Finally, as Alba calms down, her attention firmly on the pages, the pictured faces overlap.
Professor Sam Wass, a neuroscientist and director of the Institute for the Science of Early Years and Youth at the University of East London, explains what this means. “Their brains are literally falling into sync,” he says.
The synapses of our brains fire at different frequencies all the time, depending on our physiology, age and the tasks we do. But Wass’s research has found that when parents and babies read together, their brainwaves synchronise, falling into the same patterns. “Everything falls into rhythm when you read to a child — your breathing rate, heartbeat and your brain rhythm,” he says.
This is deeply comforting, helping babies and their parents form strong emotional bonds. But it goes further.
“When we talk to babies — and particularly when we read to them — a lot of the content has exaggerated speech rhythms,” Wass, 46, says. “Alba’s brain is tracking into that rhythm to help her with the early stages of understanding language.”
Reed’s speech patterns, he says, are helping “nudge” Alba’s brain pattern into a “strong, stable rhythmic activity”.
Wass’s research — in which Reed and Alba volunteered to participate — is contributing towards a growing picture of the importance of reading for a child’s development.
The Sunday Times, through its Get Britain Reading campaign, is trying to drive up reading rates among children and adults alike.
• Donate, volunteer, pledge: join the Get Britain Reading campaign
Reading, says Wass, is essential for the way our brains develop. “Babies’ brains are messy,” he says. “Their brain rhythms are naturally just all over the shop. Reading gives us increased regularity and predictability, both at the fine-grain scale in terms of language, but also because a child knows what is coming. You read a book at bedtime at the same time every day. So it helps a baby’s rhythms to become more stable and more adultlike.”
He says the same cannot be achieved by looking at a screen. “When reading a book, you’re continually slowing down the pacing and increasing the pacing depending on where the child is at. Screens just give you the pre-recorded content — you have to suck it up.”
The structure of a story also helps. “Stories by definition have a structure — with a beginning and a middle and an end,” Wass says. “Introducing predictability helps the developing brain to learn to anticipate and to prepare for change before it occurs, which promotes attention and learning, reduces stress and helps our brains and bodies function more efficiently.”
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Children who have an unstructured, unpredictable family life benefit in particular, he says. “They often struggle both to generate structured activities in their own play and to track structure in stories when they’re happening.” Reading, he says, can help introduce this.
Yet many parents, particularly those in deprived households, never read to their children. According to research by BookTrust, only 42 per cent of poorer families with children aged eight and under had a story as part of a bedtime routine.
Frank Cottrell-Boyce, the children’s laureate, has made wider access to reading a priority of his two years in the role. “If only 42 per cent of children are being read to, that means 58 per cent are arriving at school as second-class citizens. They are way back on the starting grid.”
He adds: “From an emotional point of view, life for a baby is overwhelming. A few weeks ago it was an aquatic creature, and the next thing it knows it’s in east London. It’s trying to make sense of everything, and life is coming at it very fast. When you read a book everything slows down. You are on that one page, looking at that one picture, for quite a while. It’s not 25 frames a second like a screen.”
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For older babies and toddlers, reading gives them control. “They can grab the page, turn it back, focus on one thing for a bit,” Cottrell-Boyce says. “You’re bringing a bit of dexterity and hand-eye co-ordination into the mix. And it’s collaborative. You say to your child, ‘turn the page’ or ‘lift the flap’, and then you both say ‘woah!’. These are really important basic skills.”
Cottrell-Boyce, 66, knows what he is talking about. He is an award-winning children’s author, as well as writing screenplays for Coronation Street and Brookside and co-writing the opening ceremony of the 2012 Olympics. Perhaps more importantly, he has seven children.
His advice for parents is simple. “Don’t be surprised if a child wants the same book over and over again. Just find ways of enjoying it. And if they want to read the pages in a different order, or are reading the wrong bit of the page, or want to skip pages, that’s fine too. The important thing is to let them lead.
“And be confident — no matter how good you think you are at reading. Your voice is more important than that of the greatest actor. You just want to build a happy place. And a book is a really cheap, accessible way to do that.”
