Aquafresh have been doing some research into parent's habits when it comes to reading those all important bedtime stories to their children.
Encouragingly they found that parents appear to be reading to their children more frequently than their parents did when they were children with 70% telling bedtime stories more than five nights per week and 50% reading a story every single night.
The main reasons parents said they read to their children were bonding time, relaxing children before bed and helping to stimulate creativity.
Ever since Little Mr A was tiny we have read him a story before bed each night. As he gets older he will read a book to us or we will read one together before bed.
With Little Miss A it is not so easy! She doesn't have a particularly good bedtime routine at the moment (which is something we need to rectify soon!). She does however love books and we will often sit together in an afternoon reading book after book!
I think it is really important that we have that time together. I remember my Mum and Dad would read stories to us before bed every night and I would love the Little A's to have those memories too.
Aquafresh also found out that 1% of the parents surveyed told their children stories during toothbrushing. I thought this was really interesting. Although Little Mr A is brilliant at brushing his teeth, Little Miss A can be a nightmare, often running off spreading toothpaste everywhere, laughing her head off! I really don't want to make toothbrushing a stressful time for her by forcing her to sit still, however, her teeth need to be cleaned!
I hadn't considered telling her a story to distract her and keep her still whilst brushing her teeth but I think this is something that could really work for us and I will be giving it a try. With Aquafresh's great range of children's fun toothbrushes I am sure I can come up with a fun story to make toothbrushing less stressful for the both of us!
Disclaimer - In return for this post we were provided with the Aquafresh products as per the image above.
