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A new study published in the Journal of Psychological Medicine looked at early-initiated childhood reading for pleasure and its associations with better cognitive performance, mental well-being and brain structure in early teens.

“I and my co-authors wanted to understand the effects of reading for pleasure in young children on brain structure, cognition, school academic achievement and mental health,” study author Barbara J. Sahakian told us. “Some of the previously published literature suggested that there should be beneficial effects on cognition, but there had not been a very large scale study, with over 10,000 adolescents before on all these measures together.”

Our brains are still in development through late adolescence and early young adulthood, therefore adolescence is an important topic for study as we want to ensure that all adolescents have good brain health, cognition and wellbeing. Adolescence is the transition between being a child to becoming an adult and so interventions in childhood that are beneficial for cognition, school academic attainment and mental health are extremely important. Many mental health disorders begin in childhood or adolescence, so improving mental health during these developmental periods is crucial. 

“Reading for pleasure in childhood is a relatively low-cost intervention,” Sahakian told us. “With the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns in many countries including the UK, reading for pleasure might be a protective intervention for cognition and mental health.”

The research team looked at two groups of adolescents, one group had started reading for pleasure at an early age in childhood and the other group had never read for pleasure as a child or had stated reading late in childhood. The researchers studied the brain scans, cognitive test scores, academic performance and mental health symptoms, including anxiety and depression and behaviour, such as aggression and rule-breaking of these two groups of adolescents. The adolescents who had read for pleasure as children at an early age had beneficial effects in all these measure compared with the adolescents who had never read for pleasure or who had started reading for pleasure late in childhood.

“We were very pleased to see that such a relatively low-cost intervention of reading for pleasure as a young child could have positive effects in such a broad range of important areas measured, including as cognition, school attainment and mental health,” Sahakian told us. :We hope that parents, teachers and governments will focus on reading for pleasure in early childhood and use this intervention at home, in play groups and in primary schools. Not only is reading for pleasure enjoyable for young children, but it stimulates creative thinking , imagination and speech through discussion of the pictures and stories.”

The researchers also found that those adolescents who read for pleasure as children had less screen time and had better sleep.