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Watering Your Young Child’s Mind
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by: Emma Rath
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Mary, Mary, quite contrary,
How does your garden grow?
With silver bells and cockle shells
And pretty maids all in a row.
It’s an everyday nursery rhyme, it’s simple to sing with your small child,
and apparently this nursery rhyme about a little child watering her garden
is watering your little child’s mind!
Early childhood educators have identified pre-reading skills that are
necessary for the learning of reading and the mastery of language. They
include phonological awareness, or the awareness of speech sounds and rhyme
similarities, vocabulary or knowing lots of words, and the more a child
loves the enjoyment and pleasure of using language, the more success they
will have in reading and writing and academic studies. Nursery rhymes, with
their words of imagery, rhymes and rhythm that children find so fun, have
all these qualities!
Let’s look at other ways that you are probably already simply,
instinctively and effectively watering your child’s mind, and what the
researchers are now saying about it.
Let’s look at songs and music, activities that lots of caregivers
instinctively share with their children. The National Network for Child
Care at http://www.nncc.org/Series/good.time.music.html explains why songs,
action songs, music and rhythm are important for children. They allow
children to express their emotions, channel their energy creatively, gain
confidence in themselves as they coordinate their minds and their bodies
together, learn new words and ideas, and learn about themselves as they
explore what they like, what they like when and what they can do. Learning
these physical and emotional controls, ways of expression and
self-knowledge are necessary for a happy life now in childhood and in their
future adulthood. This is the real reason why we let our toddlers take out
the pots, pans and wooden spoons and bang them, making a terrible
ruckus.
How about even simpler, even more unassuming activities, such as having fun
blowing a dandelion’s seeds into the air. The child development
psychologists Linda Acredolo and Susan Goodwyn in their book “Baby Minds:
Brain-Building Games Your Baby Will Love” explain that such a simple yet
fun and stimulating activity will stimulate your baby’s brain development.
The practical conclusion that these researchers draw from the latest
research is that “If your baby is not having fun, it’s probably not worth
doing”.
Thus, the conclusion we can draw is “If your small child is having fun,
then it’s probably stimulating your child’s physical and mental
development”. We already instinctively knew that, and so it’s wonderful to
have researchers and experts confirming and encouraging this. Whenever my
toddler pulls the toilet paper still on its roll and runs around the house
redecorating it in toilet paper, I just tell myself that this is a
fantastic activity for his brain, body and creative imagination.
Actually, small children are programmed to learn and to engage in
activities that will develop their minds and bodies. It probably has not
escaped your attention that kids will naturally invent a fun and
interesting game (fun and interesting to the child) out of absolutely
anything. The brain plasticity scientist Lise Eliot explains in “What’s
Going On In There? How the Brain and Mind Develop in the First Five Years
of Life” that there are way too many connections in the brain and
communications with the rest of the body – billions of neurons and a
quadrillion synapses at last count – for it to be preprogrammed in genetic
DNA material. Thus, babies and children are programmed to try things out
and to repetitively practise them for days and weeks and months, so that
brain circuitry will sprout in the first place and then solidify to become
permanent. Actually, this is my own layperson’s description. Lise Eliot
refers to it as neurogenesis, synaptogenesis and myelination. It’s the
reason why babies kick in the womb, so that the connection between the
leg-kicking part of the brain and the actual leg can be developed. It’s the
reason why my newly mobile son never tires of playing with the toilet brush
in the toilet bowl, developing and practising his hand-eye coordination and
his understanding of the physical world, in this visual, audio and tactile
activity of splashing water.
We all know that cuddling our babies and children is important for their
emotional and psychological development. Lise Eliot gives examples in the
chapter “The Importance of Touch” of how touch and physical contact
increases physical and brain development. Studies show that premature
babies that receive cuddling and massages thrive measurably more and do
better on visual baby tests. Children with various medical problems had
better clinical outcomes after receiving massage therapy. Perhaps you have
seen the famous “Rescuing Hug” (such as at
http://www.daurelia.com/spirit/rescue.htm or
http://www.snopes.com/glurge/hug.htm), where the physical touch of her baby
twin sister was responsible for the very survival of a premature baby.
Let’s talk about talking. The very experienced authority on early childhood
development Dr Burton White gives the following advice. Allow your newly
mobile child to explore your home. He’ll bring things back to show you and
will have a need to be fulfilled when doing that. Stop, quickly look and
see what that need is, and then respond to the need. Dr Burton White says
that the secret to teaching language, whether it be verbal language or sign
language, is to respond to that need with language and play on that need.
Dr White is the author of “First Three Years of Life” and “Raising a Happy
Unspoiled Child”, and you can see and hear him giving this advice in Joseph
Garcia’s “Sign with your Baby” video. And in my house, you can see me
having a conversation with a toddler about a wet toilet brush he has just
brought me.
How to increase your child’s mathematics ability? Studies have shown that
studying music statistically significantly increases children’s math skills
and spatial-temporal reasoning abilities. The question now is why. A
“Today’s Parent” article at
http://www.todaysparent.com/education/general/article.jsp?content=20030903_124111_1696&page=1
cites a brain-imaging “Mozart Effect” type of study that showed that the
same parts of the brain were active when listening to Mozart as when doing
puzzles and playing chess, suggesting that music is like warm-up exercises
for the brain. Another study cited in that article goes much further,
suggesting that music is more than just a cultural artifact; that our
brains are actually structured for music, just like our brains are
structured for speech and walking. Brain patterns were mapped and assigned
musical tones to mark changes in neural activity. When played back, instead
of sounding like a random sequence of notes, it almost sounded like a
melody of a recognizable style of music!
“No!” – We hear it from those terrible-twos toddlers. Well, Lise Eliot in
“What’s Going On In There?” presents a study about the effects of parents
saying “No”, “Don’t” and “Stop it” on the development of their children.
Research established that children that heard a larger proportion of this
type of negative feedback had poorer language skills than children whose
parents kept their negative responses to a minimum and instead gave
encouraging, positive and dialog-inducing responses. The online games at
www.KiddiesGames.com provide a fun model of this positive pattern of
interaction. When the child playing a game gets something right, the
friendly child character on the screen says “That’s right!” or
congratulates the player. When the child playing a game clicks on the wrong
thing, the upbeat child on the screen doesn’t actually say “No” or “Wrong”.
Instead, it explains in the same positive tone what the child playing just
did and what another possible (and correct) answer could have been. The
feedback is accurate and positively and cheeringly encouraging. As far as I
know, there have been no studies done on the effects that toddlers saying
“No” to their parents have on those parents...
Can you remember all this information next time you’re interacting with
your small child? Let’s summarize it all like the current Canadian CBS
Television campaign slogan – “1) Comfort, 2) play with and 3) teach your
child”, in that order. This is how you water your child’s mind, and you’re
probably already doing it. So follow your instinct, let your child lead the
way to play, go with the flow and enjoy playing with your small child.
While the results of recent studies may be news to you, the recommended
actions are just a reminder!
About the Author:
The author, Emma Rath, is the creator of free, fun, educational online
computer games for babies and preschoolers at http://www.KiddiesGames.com. These games encourage
caregivers to cuddle their children on their lap while participating in
games of open-ended exploration that never say “No”, except for one fun
game whose serious mission is to undo the instinctive child behavior of
hiding in the case of a house fire.
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