My Focus on Family Life and Parenting

Secure and loving relationship with parents tend to be smarter (1)

Creating a stimulating environment

There are many ways parents can provide a rich environments that will stimulate their children mentally.  Singing lullabies to your infant stimulates the development  of brain connections, particularly during the first three years of life.  Wordplay games in the form of rhymes or songs that you make up with your child encourage language development.  So does using complex, multiclass sentences, such as “I’m going to the grocery store because we need cereal for breakfast.” As opposed to the simple, single-clause declaration “drink your milk.”

At least once a week, take your children to the library to read on their own or attend a storytelling allowances for shows that are positive and educational.

Introduce music and rhythm

Children should be given opportunities for the constructive pursuit of things they show an interest in.  If music is one of these, encourage it.  The younger your kids, the better.  Research with preschoolers shows that enrolling them in keyboard and group-signing instruction enhances their spatial-temporal reasoning—a skill that helps with puzzles, geometry, fractions and ratios.  Instruction in music also helps children develop in other areas, such as math and complex reasoning.