Speaking of early parenting, I'm really ashamed. Because of his busy work and lack of cognition in his early years, he paid little attention to his diet and daily life before his son was 3 years old. Even every six months, I will send him back to his hometown to take care of his parents for a period of time. At that time, I didn't know that infancy was the most important period of human brain development. Many parenting details in life are affecting children's brain development.
Fortunately, the elderly at home have been trying their best to care for their children's growth, which makes up for the lack of mother's role to some extent. But my son's introversion and lack of self-confidence have something to do with my early wrong parenting style. Recently, I read "The Golden Five Years of Brain Development" written by American neurobiologist Dr. Liz Elliot, which was quite touching. I want to share with you some of my gains from reading this book. I hope it can inspire your early upbringing.
Many people are familiar with the word "prenatal education", but many people will think it is pseudoscience. How can a child with a belly, in a closed environment, perceive the outside world before his IQ has been developed? Let alone education.
It's normal to have such an idea. After all, many parents are not familiar with the concept of "parent-child" before the child is born. I used to be one of thousands of doubters.
But the book "The Golden Five Years of Brain Development" tells us through a lot of experiments and arguments that prenatal education is useful.
From the third month of pregnancy, all the sounds that children hear will have an impact on the construction of the auditory system in the brain. After seven months of pregnancy, the fetus has developed real hearing. Before birth, the development of children's auditory system has been basically perfect.
A large number of studies show that newborns know how to distinguish their mother's voice, and even can distinguish different languages, different music and different stories. A soothing lullaby can soothe a crying and nervous newborn. Music often heard in the fetal period can make babies more sensitive.
More interestingly, low-frequency sound is easier to penetrate the uterus than high-frequency sound, so that the baby can hear it. So from this perspective, it is more useful for a father to hold his mother's belly and talk to his baby than for his mother.
Listening is the most important feeling of intellectual growth, and it also plays a vital role in emotional development. Therefore, stimulating children's auditory development through prenatal education will have a positive impact on their acquired intellectual development.
1982, an Israeli study confirmed that the mother's mood will affect the fetus. The researchers put headphones on pregnant women to listen to all kinds of music, while monitoring fetal activity under ultrasound. It was found that when the mother heard her favorite music, the fetal reaction was very active. When the mother has no feeling for a piece of music, the fetal reaction will be relatively dull. Mother wears headphones, and the fetus can't hear music. Therefore, the researchers believe that it is the mother's mood that affects the baby.
Later studies show that emotional stimulation can promote the secretion of hypothalamic regulatory hormones. Some maternal stress will make the mother secrete too many hormones such as cortisol and catecholamine, which can directly cross the placenta and affect the neural development and physical health of the fetus. Even if the pregnant mother is under slight pressure, the fetal heart rate will change obviously and the activity will be obviously more active.
Therefore, we often say that listening to music for prenatal education actually has a greater impact on the mother's peaceful and comfortable mood.
Many pregnant mothers will choose caesarean section. The reason is that medical technology has greatly increased the safety factor of caesarean section. On the contrary, natural delivery not only makes the mother experience severe pain, but also makes the child experience a series of situations such as birth canal extrusion, hypoxia and strain. On the contrary, it makes Bao Ma feel unsafe. But scientists tell us that normal, full-term labor stimulation is more beneficial to children's brain development.
Uterine contraction during delivery, even prenatal pseudo-contraction stimulation, can promote the refinement of fetal synaptic connections and the formation of myelin sheath. By the time of formal delivery, the high level of catecholamine in the baby will stimulate the nervous system more powerfully.
In addition, anesthetics during production will have an impact on the nerves of the fetus. Although these effects can be controlled within a safe range, neonatal tests have found that there are still differences in alertness and mobility.
The newborn baby is very weak, and many novice parents feel very nervous when holding the baby, for fear of hurting the baby. Some parenting books also say, don't always hold your child, or sleep with your child. One is to develop the habit of children falling asleep naturally. Secondly, it is easy to damage the immature brain by shaking the child frequently.
But the book "The Golden Five Years of Brain Development" tells us that every baby likes to be shaken, which can stimulate the development of the baby's vestibular system. Newborns will become more obedient in gentle shaking, which is more effective than simple soothing behavior. Babies of 6-8 months may even have self-stimulation's phenomenon, such as swinging, jumping, shaking their heads and shaking their bodies.
Moving also includes touching the newborn. Touching has unimaginable benefits for the baby's brain development. In fact, in all mammals, the mother licking or stroking the cubs will be beneficial to the development of their stress system.
A research institute immediately tested the memory and sensory discrimination after a short massage for 8 minutes for a 4-month-old baby. It was found that this group of infants who received massage were more sensitive to audio-visual and new things than those who only played with toys.
Of course, the benefits of touching go far beyond infancy. It can also assist in the treatment of many childhood diseases, such as asthma, autism, skin diseases, arthritis, eating disorders and so on. Children who are touched by their parents every day will greatly reduce their anxiety and stress, their emotions will become more and more stable and their attention will become more and more concentrated.
From the second trimester to two years after birth, the synapses of neurons grow in large numbers and are further myelinated, which makes the baby's brain have a very high demand for the types and quality of nutrients. For example, the lack of trace elements such as iodine, iron and vitamin B 12 will cause permanent damage to the brain and cognitive development of infants.
In the brain, the myelin sheath, which ensures the smooth flow of brain information, is composed of 80% lipid and 20% protein. This feature makes parents try to ensure a high-fat and high-protein diet before their children are 2 years old, otherwise it will permanently slow down the progress of brain development. For this reason, all pediatricians do not recommend pregnant and lactating mothers to go on a diet.
Many studies have proved that breast milk is beneficial to the growth and development of babies, including the brain development. Whether it is the intelligence development test before the age of 2 or the intelligence test before entering school, breast-fed children perform better than formula-fed children. Even in school-age children's school exams, breast-fed children will perform better overall.
While ensuring nutrition, we should also avoid the harm of harmful food to our baby. We have learned a lot about common harmful substances. Here I particularly emphasize the influence of additives on babies.
With the increasing use of food additives, many parents have accepted this fact and even think that these additives are within the safe range. Nevertheless, we should reduce the baby's intake of additives as much as possible. Because the precipitation of additives in the baby will be more obvious, it will have a greater impact on the development of the baby's nervous system. Take a simple example in the book. A child of 13 kg eats a bowl of instant noodles, and the concentration of glutamic acid is much higher than that of an adult of 70 kg. This case has given me a great alarm. I used to have the mentality that it doesn't matter if I eat less. Now think about it, some injuries are hidden in things that are not perceived and not recognized enough.
The concept of early education has been very popular, but there are still many parents who feel that early education is useless because they can't see obvious effects.
Talking about the importance of early education, we should start from the course of brain development.
Before the age of 6, it is the fastest period for the baby's brain nerve to develop. Newborn babies' brains weigh only 25% of those of adults. With the explosive increase of synapses, the baby's brain will reach 50% of the adult's brain weight at 1 year, 75% at 2 years old and 80-90% at 3 years old.
The process of brain development is accompanied by the development of children's vision, hearing, language and movement. Brain science research shows that before the child is 4 years old, all the critical periods of intellectual development have begun, that is to say, all brain regions have entered the stereotypes period.
During the brain shaping period, children's environment and experience have a great influence on brain development. Those brain synapses that are frequently stimulated by the external environment and are highly active will be preserved. Less active synapses will gradually degenerate and decline because they are not stimulated enough. In this process, people's thinking is gradually optimized, and finally a specific path of permanent perception and behavior is formed.
Knowing this level, we know that early education is important or not. Of course it matters. At the fastest stage of brain development, if there is no active intervention from outside, it will inevitably affect a person's ultimate intelligence level.
When we say early education, we don't mean to guide parents to send their children to expensive early education centers. The idea of early education center is good, but if you go to class only once a week, it can't obviously stimulate your child's brain development. The real early education still comes from family education. Research shows that whether children aged 2-3 will have behavior problems is closely related to their parents' psychological adjustment ability and sensitivity.
Every interaction between parents and children (sharing food, playing, harsh criticism, etc. ) will stimulate specific synapses in the limbic system of the child's brain. Parents have certain emotional reactions and social interactions, and children will imitate them. This will also activate and solidify specific neural circuits in the child's brain.
Why do we often find that our behavior is strikingly similar to that of our parents when we are adults? Some people say that this is a genetic effect, but from the perspective of brain science, environmental influence plays a greater role.
So how should parents carry out early education? Combined with the contents of the book, I give the following suggestions:
(2) Be able to communicate with children after the age of 3 in a cooperative manner and guide them to reflect.
(3) Start parent-child reading as soon as possible. Storytelling helps children to strengthen their memory ability through clues such as time, place, people and experiences. On the other hand, stories convey emotions. The limbic system responsible for emotions also plays an important role in memory storage. So people are more likely to remember things with strong emotional reactions. This is similar to the principle of "five senses memory method" put forward by some experts.
(4) Pay attention to cultivating children's musical literacy. Conditional families can expose their children to some musical instruments or vocal music training. If you don't have the conditions, you can also listen to more songs for your children, especially classical music.
Research shows that people with musical talent often have a strong ability to integrate time and space. For example, he is good at math, chess and engineering. Music can activate brain functional areas related to spatio-temporal integration and reasoning. You may have heard that Mozart's music can make the brain smarter. This is based on research. Compared with college students, children's brains are more sensitive to music "exercise". Mozart began to compose music at the age of 4, and his music is considered to be closer to the primitive mode of temporal and spatial activities in the cerebral cortex.
After watching the golden five years of brain development, I have a deeper understanding of why some western countries extend maternity leave to 1 year or even three years. This is of great significance to improving the quality of the whole people. In some developed countries, a maternity care package is also given to every child at birth. There will be some books for mom and baby to read. I think the book "The Golden Five Years of Brain Development", as a gift package for novice mothers, is well worth reading.