How a 10-year-old is motivating kids to read more books

The rise of kid influencers is a growing trend in the digital age. Through a variety of internet venues, especially social media, young children, and teenagers are significantly increasingly using it to display their thoughts and views across. These young people communicate with their followers, discuss their experiences, and demonstrate their talents on their platforms.

Being a kid influencer offers excellent opportunities for learning and artistic expression. Many young influencers start with knowledge of digital marketing, storytelling, and content creation. They also develop skills in maintaining their personal brand, establishing alliances, and comprehending the business elements of their online endeavours.

The ideal illustration of this is 10-year-old Valeska Soni from Mumbai. Since she was younger than 2 years old, Valeska has always loved the stories her parents and grandmother told her. Because of her love of storytelling, her parents introduced her to picture audio books, that combine images with narration to bring text-based stories to life. Valeska is a devoted reader who consumes six to seven novels per week in a variety of genres and writing styles.

Slowly that helped her recognize works and start associating 'pronunciations' with the written works on the audio picture books and that led to her graduating to reading on her own as her knowledge of the alphabet and English vocabulary built up. All her friends approach her for book recommendations, so with help and guidance from her mom Rubeena, who is a digital marketing maven, they created an Instagram handle called valeskas_book_world, where she reviews books which help other kids to pick the right read.

Today, Valeska's Instagram handle (managed by her mother) has over 1700 organic followers with a high level of engagement.

Valeska has been able to grow a passion for reading books and letting her imagination run wild in this day and age when kids spend a lot of time-consuming content on screens. Her mother initially urged her to start making one-minute films at home which she would later upload as reels to Valeska's Instagram account.

The page has been growing quickly and Valeska is garnering a lot of appreciation and feedback, which she even enraptures. Currently, Valeska is a natural and enjoys the activity of creating these impromptu movies (one of her parents serves as the cameraman), and she looks forward to receiving comments from Instagram users who follow her handle.

The pace with which Valeska reads books determines how frequently she updates her Reels on Instagram.  Every week, on average, this budding talent posts two to three videos on her Instagram account. She aims to be able to discuss every book she enjoyed with her Instagram followers, including what she loved about it and whether she thought it was good or not.

Since she feels that reading books not only entertains but also educates, she wants to strongly continue this act and build a stronger community in her age group. Through her process of reading children’s books, she has personally learned a lot about Indian mythology, art, and civilization. She wants to spread as much of her book knowledge as she can and her dream job when she grows up is to be a publisher.