How To Exploit Your Brain's Unlimited Power
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“I like nonsense; it wakes up the brain cells.” - Dr. Seuss

Helping your child develop his/her brain starts in the womb. The baby’s body is not the only thing growing and developing in the womb, the brain is working away as well. That’s why special care must be taken from day one, to ensure that the child is born healthy, both physically and mentally. The mother needs to choose carefully her diet and her lifestyle, in order to give her baby the best chance in life.

The mother will tell you how tired she sometimes feels while she’s pregnant. This is because the baby’s brain is making a quarter of a million new neurons every minute, as well as new connections between those neurons. Now you know what hard work goes into making sure that the baby is healthy, mentally and physically.

Doctors have determined that newborn babies can recognize their mother’s voice, which shows that their memory was developing before their birth. Their little brain is only about one-fourth developed when they’re born. Their skulls and their brains will continue to grow until they reach adulthood. By the time the child is ten years old, his brains will have formed billions of new connections.

Is there a difference between boys’ brains, and girls’ brains? A male brain develops from the back to the front, which is developing the “doing” part before the “thinking” part. A female brain develops the other way around. The “thinking and language” part develops first, then the “doing” part.

Any parent will tell you how quickly a child grows in the first year of life. Every aspect of the child is involved - their behavior, understanding, and the way they interact with others in their family. At this point, the brain of that child may look like any adult’s brain, but the changes have only just begun. By the time that child is three years old, that little brain has made a thousand trillion connections—twice as many as an adult. That’s just the tip of the iceberg in their development. Their social, emotional, and intellectual development will undergo a mind-boggling surge of activity from this age to the age of ten. Believe it or not, their brain activity during this time is twice that of a grown adult.

The reason for so much activity? A child experiences more in a short time than an adult. They learn to crawl, walk, run and explore. Reasoning and behavior come next, as well as memory; and of course, the biggest experience of all that separates us from the animals - language!

The difference in the brains of children and adults has to do with the acquisition of language. An adult brain processes language in the left hemisphere of the brain. However, scientists have discovered that, until a year old, babies can respond to language with their entire brain. Then, as they grow older, it shifts to the left hemisphere.

Language is the area that parents, teachers, and child-care providers have always understood to be of primary importance in the first years of life. It encompasses more than just reading. It also involves story telling and singing, and even just the common everyday exchange between the adult and the child. Children love to converse with the adults in their lives, and the give and take conversations can have an enormous impact on the child’s language skills.

Working on the child’s language skills helps with more than just improving their intellect. It also helps the child with social and emotional skills. As the child begins to develop his/her brain as an infant, reading becomes the biggest and most important way to help wire your child’s brain for continued learning.

We’ve already determined that a child’s brain is a place of rapid activity to the age of ten, forming connections or synapses constantly. What causes their little brains to form these connections? Is it in their genes, or is it mostly environmental? Scientists have determined that genes have some control over this process, but what is crucial in the development of the brain’s ability to form connections has to do with the experiences they encounter in life. It’s true that having an adult read to the child, and other positive stimulations of this sort, have a profound impact on the child’s brain development. This helps to create new neural pathways, as well as fortifying existing pathways.

As the child moves on towards adulthood, the pathways that are used repeatedly become stronger, but those that are not used often enough are discarded. This happens at a rapid rate once the child enters adolescence. Don’t let this worry you as a parent; it’s all completely natural. It’s more of a pruning process, and is in fact advantageous to the human brain. By discarding unnecessary connections, the ones that remain can grow stronger and healthier. It actually creates space for the more useful and favorable synapses and makes the brain function more efficiently.

So, there’s a new way of thinking and training the brain of children. We know now that it’s not only the genes you’re born with that have to do with the brain’s development, but also the experiences you gather along the way. Scientists also know now that early childhood experiences have a huge impact on the brain’s development and your capacities as an adult.

The relationship between the child and the early childhood caregiver, that is besides the parents, the teachers, the babysitters, etc., have an enormous impact on the way that child’s brain becomes wired for learning. Scientists have also learned that it’s not just a steady flow of development from infancy to adulthood, but that there are prime times in the life of the child that’s best for them to acquire different kinds of knowledge and skills.

So, the good news is that while it’s no easy task to help your children develop their brains, there are many, many ways you can help them. Keep them stimulated, keep those synapses firing back and forth; and to do that, you must read to them, talk to them, and tell them stories and jokes. Positive interaction is essential to their intellectual growth.

That brings us to the bad news about training the brains of children. Studies show that at least one in four children under the age of six are growing up in impoverished situations. The nutrition or lack thereof for the expectant mothers, as well as that of the children, medical care, even the safety of the environments they have to live in, affect those tiny brains. Poverty can affect the stress levels of their parents, and constant working prevents those parents from the necessary interaction with the children. If all they do is work, they have no time to read and interact with the children.

Children raised in poverty situations have an increased chance of exposure to drugs, alcohol, violence and abuse. These conditions are not limited to only economically disadvantaged children, but are simply more likely to occur in those situations.

Researchers have noted more developmental delays and learning difficulties in such kids than in the more advantaged children, and that’s because these early negative experiences have a huge impact on brain development. They are proving conclusively that poverty definitely influences these early childhood experiences.

Given the right circumstances, how smart can we make our children? Scientists have determined that a mere ten minutes a day of brain stimulation can create a brain with a standard I.Q or Intelligence Quotient. What if we added more stimulation to a child’s day? Would an extra hour or two make a big difference? Could we, in effect, create children with super mental powers?

A prime example of the possibilities of this scenario would be the amazing life of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. His father, Leopold, was one of Europe’s leading musical teachers and was Wolfgang’s only teacher in the early years of his life. The result was that the young Mozart began learning to play the organ, violin, and the clavier when he was only three years old and was composing when he was five!

Prodigies, like Mozart, are not necessarily born smart or talented, but can be created by the parents and other caregivers. Stimulation every day causes the child to think more, thus producing more brain growth. Left on their own, children will find lots to do to entertain themselves, but more structured stimulation will produce more desired results. Young brains have been compared to small sponges, soaking up information all the time from all around them. Give them the desired information to produce the desired result.

How early is too early to learn to read? If the child is able to handle the spoken language, it’s a good time to start teaching him/her to read. A child’s brain is so ready and willing to tackle new skills, so able to handle all the new connections, that reading is actually amazingly easy for the young brain.

The parents are actually the ideal people to teach their children to read. It requires love, patience and determination, things parents already possess in abundance. They needn’t have a college degree to be qualified to teach their children this skill.

“If I appear to see further than others it is because I sit on the shoulders of giants,” said Baron Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibnitz

We can help our children stand on our shoulders and attain everything they want in life. Then we need to teach them to boost up their own children, and be the shoulders they stand upon.