study
Kita staff would like better reading conditions
A woman reads from a book to children. Photo: Arno Burgi / dpa-Zentralbild / dpa
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Many parents do not have time to read something to their children – reading aloud is extremely important for development. The hope: that there will be readings in the day care center. But does it work?
Reading is extremely important for children’s development. Nevertheless, a third of the children at home receive little or no stimulus from their parents through reading aloud and telling stories.
Many parents who rarely or never read aloud claim that the children “have already been read enough elsewhere, for example in daycare”.
Those were the results of the reading study from 2020. But is there actually enough reading to the children in the daycare centers? This was examined in the current reading study by the Reading Foundation, the weekly newspaper “Die Zeit” and the Deutsche Bahn Foundation, which was presented online on Wednesday.
According to this, in 91 percent of the daycare centers, children receive impulses through stories at least once a day. However, it “didn’t matter whether someone reads it or whether the child is leafing through a picture book, listening to an audio book or someone tells him something”.
“Time and personnel keys are the hurdles for many skilled workers to read as intensively as they would like,” said Prof. Simone Ehmig from the Reading Foundation. For the study, 507 educational professionals from institutions across Germany that are representative of daycare centers in Germany were surveyed.
In 41 percent of the daycare centers, skilled workers notice an above-average number of children who lack impulses from their parents reading aloud at home. One of the reasons for this is that 95 percent of the educators suspect that “digital media or television are primarily used at home”.
Well over two thirds (78 percent) state that their parents have too little time to read or do not feel like reading aloud. Parents with a different language of origin also had no stories available in their language (54 percent) or could not read as well themselves (51 percent).
A clear majority of respondents (63 percent) see books in their native languages as a way of motivating parents. Almost all educators (92 percent) would like more time, more money and more staff to support their parenting work.
“The survey of the skilled workers shows that reading aloud is a basic need of children,” said “Zeit” managing director Rainer Esser. At the same time, reading aloud is an important cornerstone for child development and the development of good reading skills. “We have to do everything we can to support day-care centers with good stories through the comprehensive equipment.”
According to the Association of Education and Upbringing (VBE), not reading aloud by parents increases the challenge for educational professionals to make up for these failures in the best possible way. “Only if day-care centers are adequately supported and promoted by politics can children be adequately supported and promoted,” said the federal chairman Udo Beckmann, board member of the Reading Foundation. Above all, the blatant shortage of staff at daycare centers and the associated workload and overloading of the pedagogical staff should be tackled more consistently by politicians.