What weighs only 3 pounds, looks like a gray, unshelled walnut and is the most complex structure in our body? It's the brain.

How that little walnut shape is stimulated is as important to your normal baby as fastening his car seat and providing him with good nutrition. A lack of baby brain development during these early baby development stages, from birth to three years, can make a big difference in the readiness of your beginning kindergartener.

Here are 10 ways you can help your child, and they’re all free: 

  1. Interact with your child. Your consistent long-term attention actually increases your child’s capacity to learn. Simply rocking him can stimulate brain growth. By providing positive, responsive caregiving, you can insure that your baby will have the best opportunity for healthy brain development. So get in there and smile, coo, play and hug. Build those connections!
  2. Touch your baby. Holding and cuddling do more than comfort your baby; they aid in brain growth. Gently touching your infant will make her feel secure and safe. In turn, it helps her to become confident and eventually independent. Research has shown us that gently massaging premature babies three times per day for 15 minutes helped them to gain weight, to be more alert and to cry less. 
  3. Provide a stable relationship for infants. A strong, secure attachment to a nurturing adult can help a young child to withstand the stresses of daily life. Researchers tell us that children who receive warm, responsive, responsible caregiving get along better with other children and perform better in school than children who are less securely attached.Early education experts agree that if beginning tomorrow, we did nothing more than protect children from destructive experiences closely linked to some kind of abandonment, we would have an emotionally healthier, brighter generation 20 years from now. Stress impedes brain development! 
  4. Insure a safe and healthy environment. This means a safe place for baby to explore. Making sure your baby’s toys and play area are soft and safe can help him in exercising small muscles and have a positive effect on the motor areas of the brain. Laying a safe foundation for your child’s moving and learning experiences can help build a child’s capacity to recognize unsafe situations.
  5. Build your child's self-esteem. Self-esteem grows with respect, encouragement, and positive role models from the beginning. Babies have a biological need for love. Providing unconditional love, even when patience is wearing thin, creates strong self-esteem and wires the brain for success..A child who feels good about herself is more apt to try new things, and with more experiences, the brain makes even more connections.
  6. Provide quality child care. Quality child care with trained teachers or family care providers can make a huge difference for your child. Harry Chugani, a pediatric neurologist at Wayne State University in Detroit, believes there is no excuse for ignoring the environment’s power to remodel the brain. “We may not do much to change what happens before birth, but we can change what happens after a baby is born,” Chugani said. Loving attachments help babies to develop trust. Daycare should be more than a service. It is a place where children build their brains! 
  7. Play with your baby. Play helps your child explore and discover how the world works. What babies see and smell causes brain connections to be made, especially if the experience happens in a loving, consistent, predictable manner. The play experiences a baby has now will give him a frame of reference for information learned in school later. All children learn. What they learn depends on appropriate, well-planned playtime. 
  8. Talk to your baby. Talking to your baby builds verbal skills needed to succeed in school and later in life. According to Dr. Patricia K. Kuhl, Professor and Chair of the Department of Speech and Hearing Sciences at the University of Washington, “When we speak to our children, we provide them with a kind of mental exercise. The experience we give them, the mental exercises we provide, causes the brain to change.” Her work has determined that when parents speak, newborns listen intently and what they hear helps to hard-wire their brain for future learning. Infants whose parents talk to them more frequently and use bigger “adult” words will develop better language skills. So communicate often to your little one with a kind voice, a wide range of vocabulary, and a lot of expression. 
  9. Play music. Music expands your child’s world, teaches new skills, and offers a fun way for the two of you to be together. Early music experiences increase and enhance spatial-temporal reasoning and the learning of mathematical concepts. Repetition is the key to establishing stronger pathways. Although all kinds of music can help to stimulate the brain, loud noises can be stressful, so choose your music experiences carefully. 
  10. Read to your child. Reading to your child not only stimulates brain activity, but also creates a lifelong love of books. The National Commission on Reading reports that reading aloud to children is the single most important intervention for developing a child’s literacy skills. Most pediatricians prescribe daily reading to children from 6 months of age. So be sure to include it in your braintraining program.

Helping babies to organize their world takes time, patience and warmth, but these efforts form the building blocks to positive human reactions later on. Braintraining not only builds a child’s brain for learning but also for getting along with others.

Will your kindergartener be ready?


 

Barbara L. Cairns is a freelance writer in Homosassa, Florida.