10 reasons how Reading and Writing can help your child become better Problem Solvers and Decision Makers?

Here are 10 reasons why Reading and Writing can help your child's Social Skills as well as Emotional Skills.

By Team SpringUP | 10min read

The age of fast thinking

Technology enables children to learn and collaborate in never-before ways. But there is a catch. Habitual consumption of digital content can foster what psychologist Daniel Kahneman calls “fast thinking”. Fast thinking is emotional and instinctive. It makes light use of the brain. It helps with snap decisions and handling routine work with minimal fuss. But it also creates oversimplifications and biases. “Slow thinking”, on the other hand, makes deeper use of the brain. It leads to nuanced analysis, problem-solving, and decision-making - crucial leadership skills in any career. So, how can we ensure that children balance fast thinking with slow thinking to make full use of their ‘cognitive dividend’?

“ Slow thinking” makes deeper use of the brain. It leads to nuanced analysis, problem-solving, and decision-making - crucial leadership skills in any career. ”

Reading and writing encourage slow thinking

Encouraging children to read and write long-form pieces is helpful. Research shows fast thinking (reading and writing short format social media updates) uses more primitive parts of the brain that rely on instinct and reaction. However, slow thinking (reading books, long articles, and challenging blogs, and writing essays) involves the more advanced frontal lobe. This part of the brain enables humans to imagine, strategize, organize, self-monitor, and control one's responses to achieve a goal. In other words, consistent reading and writing can make a child fulfil their cognitive and emotional destiny as homo sapiens! Now, how does reading and writing achieve this?

1. Active cogitation: Integrating reflective reading and writing into a child’s activities and also storytelling and communication enables active cognition. The combination of these activities helps increase a child’s capacity for slow thinking in a culture that’s biased in favor of fast thinking. Learning to “slow think” from a young age will help restore the cognitive balance and prepare children to do the deep mind work that turns them into valued and irreplaceable knowledge workers of the 21st century.

2. Sense-making: When children read, they make sense of their own experience. This gives them reassurance. A child who reads about a boy having difficulties in school uses the story to understand his own school experiences better.

3. Knowledge: The writer Alain de Botton says reading is a great way to enrich our knowledge without having to go through the experience. All children may not get the chance to know how life is in Spain or interact with a person of color. But reading about these subjects has almost the same impact as creating new knowledge from real, lived experience.

4.Empathy: Reading expands our idea of what is “normal” and “human”. The child who reads about autistic or hypersensitive people, begins to understand that his reality is not the only reality. There are other valid ways of thinking and being. So, he broadens his emotional comfort zone.

5. Reflection and self-monitoring: The act of writing down one’s thoughts, feelings, and experiences has the remarkable effect of helping us understand ourselves more clearly. For instance, a child who is about to throw a tantrum may realize, through the process of writing, that he is not angry but merely afraid of losing a friend. So, writing creates a window into reflection and restraint.

6. Psychological distance: The child that writes 100 words a day must create psychological distance between himself and his experiences to write about it. This distance prevents the child from otherwise “merging” with his feelings and gives him objectivity. That can lead to better understanding of self and others, and mature decision-making.

7. Effective social regulation: With increased self-knowledge and empathy, the child manages to understand and anticipate other people’s behavior better. This enables him or her to be more effective in social situations. Research indicates readers/writers are more socially aware than others.

8. Self-esteem: The writer James Baldwin once said we suffer because we think our problems are unique. Then we read and discover we are not alone; others have the same problems. Children who read make the magical discovery that other people in other societies have been facing the very same problems as them. This makes them feel less “weird” and alone and increases their self-esteem and capacity for solidarity.

9. Analysis and opinion-forming: By activating the frontal lobe, reading and writing can strengthen a child’s ability to analyze a problem, form an original opinion, and strategize a plan of action. This is a rare and highly prized quality that separates leaders from followers.

10. Masterful communication: Last but not the least, reading and writing dramatically expands vocabulary. The linguist Norman Lewis says words are symbols of ideas. So, increasing word power increases the number of ideas in the brain. That enriches communication. The ability to communicate complex ideas in a simple and powerful way is one of the digital age’s most prized skills. The child that learns to do this can open many doors.

Encouraging our children to read and building regular journaling and reflective writing could one of the ways to facilitate deep thinking and encourage social emotional skills.

Sign Up Complete your profile

Log In

You may also be interested in