How to Nurture Your Child’s Growing Brain

Between the ages of birth and three years, your child’s brain is developing more rapidly than at any other time throughout their lifetime. It’s essential to focus on early developmental skills, as well as provide a firm foundation for learning, during this critical time. Four essential areas to be addressed are language, social skills, math and science, and managing stress.

Language skills develop naturally just through talking to your baby and reading to them well before he or she can understand you. Reading to children stimulates connections in the brain that help them absorb and develop better communication skills, spark imagination, build problem-solving skills, enhance creativity, and perform better academically. This also can be encouraged through listening to music, playing rhyming games, and learning a foreign language. Using different tones and facial expressions, as well as rhymes and songs, provide social skill cues and fun ways to introduce key concepts.

Toddlers need to be offered frequent mental, physical, and social stimulation, as well as positive praise, encouragement, and firm boundaries during their early development. With these items in place, parents are providing a firm base upon which their children’s future mental, emotional, social, and academic development can grow.

Filed under: Parenting