Pros and cons of Kindle for kids

You can still pick up a paper copy of nursery rhymes from a book store and read it to your toddler. But only a few parents are doing that now.  

Firstly, the pandemic has made it tougher than ever to access physical book stores. Secondly, we live in the era of ebooks, and we need to accept that. Children’s classics are now all available on Kindle. A lot of new books first go for a Kindle release, and then venture into the hard copy market according to demand. Besides, there are Virtual Reality ‘books’ where animated creatures flit around a delighted chid at the click of a button. But is this for better or worse? Let’s see what educators are saying.  

Reading to kids is important  
“Print books elicit a higher quality parent-toddler reading experience compared with e-books,” says Jenny Radesky, a developmental-behavioural paediatrician at the University of Michigan in a study published in the journal Pediatrics in 2020. The researchers talked to 37 parent-children pairs from mixed geographies and ethnicities. They found that kids and parents interacted with one another less when they were scrolling through ebooks than when they were turning pages of a physical book. And that gap in interaction is a key factor in how reading impacts child development. Shared reading promotes literacy by building vocabulary, making content more memorable and creating a parent-child bond through shared memory.  

Giving access to more books is also necessary 
Jeremy Scott Bruek, director of the Digital Text Initiative at the University of Akron, noted in a 2019 study that ebooks hone pre-schoolers’ fine motor skills and, teach them more words by giving them access to a huge library. Kids who tend to discard books entirely out of sheer boredom may embrace literature because e-readers are also cool gadgets.  

Besides, Kindle allows them to zoom in on unfamiliar words, click on links, and see the meaning immediately. So the accessibility factor has to be counted. There’s also the matter of space. Parents can now carry a whole library in their pocket. It saves space, and therefore, money.  

Our suggestion: Strike a balance between Kindle and a paperback, both are useful.