Make Your Baby Smarter

The Changes and the Challenges

Your baby’s arrival changes everything in your life: your relationships, your career, and, above all, your attitudes—how you look at everything and everyone around you. Challenges come with changes. To deal with these new life challenges, you need adaptability and compromise. For one thing, parenting priorities are always uniquely different in a couple. Make sure that both of you agree to disagree. 

The bottom line: a happy marriage always holds the key to raising a happy and smart baby. The birth of a baby should enhance and complement the marital relationship of a couple, and not putting any distance between them. No matter what, a single parent is always in a disadvantageous environment in raising a child. Welcome all challenges because they are also life-changing. Life is forever changing; a static life is not worth living, and this applies to your baby, as well as to you, the parent.

The Real and the Unreal

Your baby is living in a real world, and learning has to be real. Boosting your baby’s language skills with language DVD is unreal; instead, your presence with your constant eye contact is real. Likewise, educational TV is no substitute for real human interactions. A plain cardboard box and crayons are real learning tools; they are far superior to expensive toys or high-tech learning devices and gadgets.

Telling your baby that he is smart is unreal in your baby’s mind if he doesn’t believe that he is really smart; worse, he may become unwilling to work on challenging problems. On the other hand, praising his effort is real for him.

Happiness and Unhappiness

A happy baby learns faster, and makes more friends when growing up. The importance of human relationships cannot be overstated; it plays a pivotal role in the future happiness of your baby. Knowing how to make friends and to keep friends is a lifelong skill that involves knowing when to interact and when to withdraw—that is, the capability to decipher nonverbal communication with others. To illustrate, while playing with your baby, if he turns away from you and starts sucking his thumb and staring into space, stop the play and wait for your baby’s next response. If he turns to you again with an inviting smile, then resume the play.

As a parent, have the wisdom to decode the nonverbal communication of your baby. Babies can’t talk, but by six months, most babies can experience anger, disgust, fear, happiness, surprise, and other emotions. Pay attention to the emotional landscape of your baby to understand his behavior, thereby instrumental in helping your baby develop his own nonverbal communication skills. Always verbalize your baby’s emotions: “You’re happy”; “You feel surprised, don’t you?”; “I know you’re angry.” Verbalizing his emotions helps conveying your empathy, and thus calming the nerves of your baby. In addition, instill in your baby the attitude of gratitude.

Reading the minds of others to understand how they feel, and thereby instrumental in controlling one’s own emotions, is critical to establishing good relationships with others, which is the source of happiness later in life. 

Stephen Lau

Copyright© by Stephen Lau