How to Enhance Your Baby's
Learning
You can enhance your baby's early learning by doing a few things
that (mostly) come naturally:
Let go of inhibitions
Silliness and spontaneity enrich the dance of social connection.
"In those early interactions with your baby, you may make
sounds and feel sensations that are completely new to you, and
that intimacy with your baby is healthy," says Ramey.
As often as possible, keep your baby
close
Even when you're not interacting, carrying or wearing her
(rather than parking her in a baby seat) allows her to observe you
at close range, stimulates her sense of physical contact, and
helps satisfy her motion-hungry vestibular system.
Learn the difference between awake and
alert
Though overall sleep time per day doesn't fluctuate much in
the first three months, what does change is how much of the time
your baby is alert — not just awake but ready to learn.
This will gradually increase. So learn his signals for "Show
me something new!" and "I want to quit."
Avoid over stimulation
Just like grown-ups, babies need some downtime, time to
process and consolidate all the extraordinary sensations they're
absorbing.
As for concern that you should acquire the flash cards, baby
software, and other props of some learning regimen in order to do
right by your child: "My intuition is that babies have so
much to learn about people and ordinary objects that all these new
activities may take time away from the normal social interaction
we know they need," says Meltzoff.
As impressive as a baby's brain may seem, in many ways we are
born knowing a lot less than other animals. "Mountain goats
can get up an hour after birth and climb a mountain," says
Meltzoff. "Spiders are born knowing how to weave a web."
Ironically, human babies' far greater dependency on their
parents is an evolutionary coup of sorts. That openness to
learning has enabled our species to live in a greater variety of
social groups, eat a wider range of foods, practice more diverse
customs, even occupy more ecological niches, than any other
species on earth. We are born to learn, and what we are born to
learn is how to be (in so many delightfully different ways) human. |
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