Introduction

Parents’ reading aloud since early years, as cognitive and affective encouragement, has many benefits for children.

It favors language acquisition, directly influencing school performance, which will help the child in getting a good social inclusion.

It influences child’s cognitive development by offering the opportunity of listening, thinking, feeling, asking, answering, linking …, that is, making ready the mind’s capacity.

Reading aloud permits working the emotions because it produces intimacy moments between the readers and the listeners, creates and reinforces affective links and helps expressing and sharing emotions. This practice of reading aloud, of shared reading, can therefore favor that children had less probabilities of socioemotional problems.

Reaching all these benefits of reading becomes promoted if it is accomplished since the very early years of life, in the home setting, before attending nursery school, even since the first days of life. But this practice is not carried out in the same way in all homes because it is influenced by the environment in which children develop, getting therefore huge disparities in their learning and health trajectories.

Pediatricians can include shared reading since birth in healthy habits’ promotion in the primary care office.

PrevInfad recommendations

Evidence on effectiveness of the pediatrician counseling in primary care, as the unique intervention to promote reading aloud, has not been found. But there is evidence on the benefits of shared reading for children. Furthermore, no potential adverse reactions have been found. So that:

Primary care counseling on reading aloud in the first years of life is suggested.

• Quality of the evidence: low.
• Strength of the recommendation: weak for