Watering Your Young Child's Mind
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!
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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