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Watering Your Young Child’s Mind
By Emma Rath
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 pre-programmed 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 behaviuor of hiding in the case of a house fire.
Article Source:
http://EzineArticles.com/
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