July 16, 2010

Raising Brainy Babies


 
At birth most of your baby's organs are structurally complete. Their development is as it should be and they are already performing their duties. As babies grow into children and older, their organs will simply increase in size by the process of cell-division. There is one exception however, and that is of course, the amazing brain. 

What is really interesting is that your baby's brain has got it's full repertoire of cells long before birth. The number of brain cells will not increase after birth, but the interconnections between the brain's cells will increase manifold. And here's the best part. The degree to which these connections increase is very much determined by what your baby's brain is exposed to. Or put another way, what your baby's brain is taught.

These interconnections go through a phenomenal growth spurt during your child's first two years of life. At birth your baby's brain will weigh approximately 25% of it's adult weight. By the age of 2-and-a-half, the brain weighs 75% of it's adult weight. What an awesome responsibility we have as parents to feed our baby's brain and we do this by offering them a rich palette of multi-sensory experiences. 

I recently read and can highly recommend Tony Buzan's book, Brain Child. In it he speaks of the four essential "brain foods". They are Oxygen, Nutrition, Love and Information. All are essential, without which our baby simply cannot survive.

Brain child makes for worthwhile and fascinating reading. Tony Buzan not only explains how the brain works (in a very easy to understand way) but also provides lots of wonderful ideas for stimulating and feeding your baby and child's brain. Stay tuned, I'll be sharing some more insights from this book in up and coming posts.

1 comment:

Elise said...

This sounds like a must have book. Thank you so much for sharing this resource. I am going to be adding it to our book shelves.

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