A school-age Indian boy outdoors holding a yellow book

Is It Okay to Let My Child Read Story Books During Exam Season?

Half-yearly exams are underway in most CBSE schools this month, and the storybook on your child's nightstand suddenly feels like an indulgence you can't quite justify. Every evening spent with a novel feels like an evening not spent on the syllabus. That guilt is common right now — and worth examining before you put the story books away until results are out.

The core finding

A 2023 study led by Barbara Sahakian and Jianfeng Feng, published in Psychological Medicine, followed 10,243 adolescents in the US Adolescent Brain and Cognitive Development (ABCD) study. Children who had started reading for pleasure between ages 2 and 9 showed better performance on cognitive tests of verbal learning and memory, along with fewer signs of stress and better attention, compared with peers who hadn't. Pleasure reading and academic performance weren't shown to compete with each other — in this dataset, they moved together.

The bigger picture — and one real nuance

The same study found a ceiling: benefits were strongest up to around 12 hours of reading a week, after which they plateaued, likely because time spent reading was crowding out other useful things like sleep, sport, and friends. And in a separate, large UK study — Hei Wan Mak and Daisy Fancourt's 2020 analysis of 11,180 children in the Millennium Cohort Study (Preventive Medicine) — some of the health and behaviour associations linked to reading frequency shrank once the researchers accounted for family background and other factors. Reading for pleasure is genuinely associated with good outcomes; it isn't a guaranteed fix for exam-season stress on its own.

One more figure worth naming honestly: you may have seen the claim that six minutes of reading cuts stress by 68%. That number traces back to a 2009 study commissioned by Mindlab International at the University of Sussex, led by neuropsychologist David Lewis — a real, oft-cited measurement of heart rate and muscle tension, but an industry-commissioned study rather than an independently peer-reviewed one. Worth knowing where the number actually comes from before repeating it.

What this means this week

  • Tonight, 15–20 minutes of a book your child chooses, framed as a break — not something they've earned only after finishing revision.
  • Keep it a physical book if bedtime is close by; it won't compete with sleep the way a screen can.
  • Don't swap the storybook for "productive" reading like comprehension worksheets during this stretch. Right now the job of pleasure reading is rest, not extra academic content.
  • If the guilt creeps in, remember what the data actually shows: reading during a demanding week isn't time stolen from studying.

Sources

  • Sahakian, B. J., Feng, J., et al. (2023). Early-initiated childhood reading for pleasure: Associations with better cognitive performance, mental well-being and brain structure in young adolescence. Psychological Medicine.
  • Mak, H. W., & Fancourt, D. (2020). Reading for pleasure in childhood and adolescent healthy behaviours: Longitudinal associations using the Millennium Cohort Study. Preventive Medicine, 130.
  • Lewis, D. (2009). Reading and stress reduction (commissioned research for Mindlab International, University of Sussex).

Related reading

Find your 9-year-old a story book worth the exam-season break — take the 2-minute reading assessment

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