Thursday, April 23, 2009

Stimulating Brain Power in Children: Simple Things Parents Can Do

Before you want to stimulate your child's brain functions, you will need to know and understand a number of basic activities of brain. Brain is a mysterious organ that can play an important role in your child's success. Structure ad functioning of brain in an optimal manner is a necessity to lead a life of contentment and satisfaction. Your child's brain works based on some core principles that are too important for normal brain development. Some of these are:

  1. Your child's brain is in fact an efficient parallel processor of various nerve cells and neurons. It means that your child's brain can perform several functions at the same time.

  2. Learning is a life-long process for any human! In fact, learning involves the entire body not just mind alone!

  3. Plain information is actually useless while meaning of these bits of information is actually very important.

  4. Learning in your child always happens because of challenge and a willingness to learn. Learning may never happen if your child is under severe stress.

  5. Brain can store primary information in different forms in different places within the brain. Your child's brain can easily retrieve these stored information bits by using the complex network of nerve cells.

  6. Emotions in your child's life can play an important role in streamlining a number of basic functions like attention span, memory and memory recall.

The above-mentioned parameters are necessary, if you want to make your child smart and intelligent. Stimulating your child's brain is a complex process of training and streamlining combining these parameters and inducing them in your child with utmost care. No parameters are exclusive, but they are inclusive and complimentary. You will need to combine all these parameters to develop your child's brain functions.

Shower Love and Affection: Ensure that you shower utmost love and affection on your child. Appreciate them from time to time to spruce up their emotional platform. Ensure that you are setting up a caring, concerned and loving environment within your home. Make sure that you are inducing an encouraging environment in your home.

Result and Outcome:

  • Better and quick memory and recall

  • Efficient thinking, reasoning and problem solving skills

  • Better and proper behavior patterns

  • Better learning ability

Regular Breakfast and Nutritious Food: Breakfast is obviously the most important source of nutrients. Skipping breakfast is dangerous to your child's health; in fact, it can lead impaired memory and inferior academic performance. Among other effects of bad nutrition are decreased attention span and learning ability, lapsed concentration levels, reduced body energy levels, less enthusiasm and overall poor brain development. Better nutrition can easily provide a number of benefits; oatmeal is perhaps the best breakfast cereal with its amazing nutritional properties.

Result and Outcome:

  • Increased or enhanced ability to learn and understand

  • Better comprehension and understanding of issues

  • Superior cognitive abilities

  • Superior and sharp spatial memory

  • Enhanced logical abilities

Enough Sleep: Your children need adequate sleep to get the required amount of rest. Adequate sleep ensures memory enhancement, better performance in subjects like math and arts. Sleepless nights may result in tiredness and lethargy.

Result and Outcome:

  • Well controlled emotional management

  • Scholarly academic performance

  • Superior learning skills

  • Absence of behavioral problems

Creative Play: Creative playtime assists your children in learning and mastering a number of core academic skills and abilities that are so important for reading, comprehending writing, phonetics and problem solving. You can allow your children to engage themselves in a number of creative games and activities.

Result and Outcome:

  • Quick development of spatial and logical thinking

  • Acquisition of important hand to eye coordination

  • Better creativity and inquisitiveness

Culture and Arts: Music teaching, extra-curricular activities and painting are three of the most desirable activities that can develop your child's brain. Study of a foreign language is another activity that provides an opportunity to develop cultural relationship.

Result and Outcome:

  • Appreciable academic achievement

  • Enhanced spatial thinking and reasoning skills

  • Enhanced problem solving skills

Brain building in children is a specialized activity that needs lot of preparation and hard work from your side. As a responsible parent, you should allot enough time to educate your children in all aspects of brain development. Available research studies suggest us that we can easily influence our children's brain power, though the care and support we give, the games we play and activities we do with them, the nutrition we provide them and the sum of positive choices we make for them. Never ever, forget the importance of feeding the right type of brain foods like Omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids, green leafy vegetables, nuts and seeds and a range of other foods that help in the increased production of phospholipids, fatty acid molecules that lead to the development of brain's messaging network.

Tuesday, April 21, 2009

Stimulating Brain Power in Children

Most of our children are smart and intelligent by birth! It is just that, they are not using their natural talents and skills. Most probably, they did not get an opportunity to develop their brain functions in a normal manner. Of late, brain development in small children is gaining immense prominence among educators and parents.

Your children are undergoing a number of mental and physical changes every day. Brain develops at a very rapid rate in short cycles of bursts. These changes are very critical and play an important role in the overall development of brain.

Developing very critical brain functions in your children seem to be far more important than any other activities. As you touch, sing lullabies, hold, hug, rock and sing to your children, you can expect their brain functions to improve in a remarkable manner. These simple actions will help your children develop highly critical network of brain cells, neurons and nerve fibers. How quickly and efficiently these network connections occur can significantly influence the rate of efficiency with which the brain acts and functions.

You should be aware of early brain development in your children. However, it is also important that you should not worry too much about it. What you need to do is to follow very simple methods and guidelines to make your children's brain smarter and efficient. Just remember that your children are actually born smart and intelligent. It is just that they are yet to go through that elusive "brain-nurturing" process. Your children are yet to learn a number of skills, techniques and process in their childhood. As a parent, you can give a boost to those processes. Brain boosting is an intricate process of transforming an already equipped brain into a full-pledged and efficiently working system.

An ability to provide varied experiences and invaluable brain building activities to children is the hallmark of an influential parent. You may wish to work hard to provide these experiences to your child to make them brain smart. All the best!

Thought for today:
"If children grew up according to early indications, we should have nothing but geniuses." - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe