What role do parents play in a baby's brain development?

Parents are another important part of the developmental equation. Infants prefer human stimuli--your face, voice, touch, and even smell--over everything else. They innately orient to people's faces and would rather listen to a speech or singing than any other kind of sound.

Just as newborn babies are born with a set of very useful instincts for surviving and orienting to their new environment, parents are equally programmed to love and respond to our babies' cues. Most adults (and children) find infants irresistible, and instinctively want to nurture and protect them. It is certainly no accident that the affection most parents feel towards their babies and the kind of attention we most want to shower them with—touching, holding, comforting, rocking, singing and talking to—provide precisely the best kind of stimulation for their growing brains. Because brain development is so heavily dependent on early experience, most babies will receive the right kind of nurturing from their earliest days, through our loving urges and parenting instincts.

In spite of all the recent hype about "making your baby smarter," scientists have not discovered any special tricks for enhancing the natural wiring phase in children's brain development. Normal, loving, responsive caregiving seems to provide babies with the ideal environment for encouraging their own exploration, which is always the best route to learning.

The one form of stimulation that has been proven to make a difference is language: infants and children who are conversed with, read to, and otherwise engaged in lots of verbal interaction show somewhat more advanced linguistic skills than children who are not as verbally engaged by their caregivers. Because language is fundamental to most of the rest of cognitive development, this simple action—talking and listening to your child—is one of the best ways to make the most of his or her critical brain-building years.

[Sam's remark: Parents should spend more time talking to and playing with their baby every day. When parents are at work, they can arrange their baby to join the Gifted Babies program at Le Beaumont, once, twice, three, four or five times a week. We create a rich language environment that models on the Scandinavian countries where people are especially gifted in languages because of their early exposure to a greater variety of languages.

Our observation in the past 5 years is that babies joing our program once or twice a week is perceivably more responsive to babies who have not joined the program. At the same time, babies joining the program 4 or 5 times a week are perceivably more responsive and intelligent than babies joining the program once or twice a week. Wiring of brain synapses takes place at a rate of up to 30,000 units per minute during the sensitive early years. The frequency of visits to the centre directly affects the memory size in the brain that is built up over a period of 2 to 3 years

Le Beaumont has invested $40M in R & D and in building up an international team of high quality graduate teachers from all over the world for our baby program. We believe that the stimulation and development that your baby receives in the foundation years is critical to future development and is much more important than the kindergarten or primary school years.]

Zero to Three
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