How daily shared reading builds an emotional memory of books

Affective memory, that capacity to retain not specific facts but the overall emotions associated with certain lived experiences, develops very early in toddlers, long before the explicit memory of precise events becomes fully functional.

This early affective memory plays a decisive role in building the preferences and emotional associations that will accompany the child throughout their life, even if the conscious and detailed memories of the experiences that built this memory remain largely inaccessible in adulthood.

Every moment of shared reading with the felt book, with the warmth of parental presence, the softness of physical contact, and the sensory pleasure of manipulation, contributes to progressively building an overall positive affective memory associated with this specific object, and more broadly with the activity of reading itself.

This daily accumulation of small positive moments, although each of them is not necessarily remembered individually in a conscious way, produces a powerful cumulative effect on an emotional level, a lasting imprint that will continue to influence the child's relationship with books long after these specific memories have faded.

This construction of a positive affective memory relies largely on the emotional quality of the shared moment rather than its precise content: it is not so much what the page of the felt book contains that matters for this construction, but rather the warmth and availability offered by the parent during this particular moment.

Parents thus play an irreplaceable role in this construction, as their attentive and caring presence during the shared reading moment constitutes the essential ingredient that transforms a simple manipulation of an object into a truly positive and lasting affective experience.

It is this often-neglected dimension of shared reading, that of the silent but powerful construction of a positive affective memory, which largely explains why the first moments spent with a book, even a simple one like the felt book, leave such a lasting imprint on the child's future relationship with reading.