Importance of Kids' Magazines in developing Communication Skills of Children - Dipesh Dulal

Communication skills have been regarded as key set of skills that are required in the 21st century. However, your child might be deprived of real world opportunities to learn and practice it because of many circumstances. For example, the global COVID19 pandemic prevented people mingle with each other.

"4 kids reading" by A dynamic education NGO working across Nepal is licensed under CC BY 2.0

Parents might be looking for options to engage your child with the real world and learn communication skills at the same time. We are here to suggest you that kids' magazines are of great help to keep up with communication skills and overall development of school aged kids.

All you need is to help them with proper planning. You can assume various roles to compensate the availability of limited people for person to person interactions. You can be co-reader, co-communicator, teacher, or perhaps authoritative guardians at different situations.

Here, I have listed some key points of importance of kids magazines in developing communication skills of children.

1. First, and foremost is language. You child learns the use of language in real world situations (far away from textbook situations).
2. Secondly, they will gradually become aware of subjective views (and subjects themselves - be them real or part of fiction). Subjective understanding is key to development of communication skills.
3. Kids' Magazines should not be limited to one way transfer of content via reading; they can also transcend beyond the one way communication. Readers' columns, spaces of artwork and/or other creation of kids, letters to editor and his/her reply are ways to transform a traditional kids magazine to an important additive in child development.
4. Having put forward an argument of a positive relations between kids magazines development of the communication skills, I always reckon the importance of such magazines in increment in the cognition of young ones.

Though the contemporary world has everything digital, paper magazines are of great importance because these provide more embodied experience in learning and developing/transforming oneself. I believe that kids' Magazines should keep on publishing in paper form, at least to be supplied in libraries and educational institutions.