How To Raise A Smart And Intelligent Child?

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SURBHI VERMA


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Your baby’s brain is like an empty slate when they are born. It starts to develop as they encounter different experiences. The growth of a child’s brain happens in correspondence with the actions and experiences the surrounding offers. Whatever the kid sees, listens and experiences becomes a part of their intellect.

Senses like touch, feel, smell, sound, and taste stimulate brain cell connections. The more your kids are exposed to human senses the smarter they get. The development of your kid’s brain is directly proportional to the experiences they encounter in their daily lives.

As you continue with the article, you will learn a slew of ways to induce more intellect in your growing kids and keep them high on IQ.

5 Ways To Raise A Smart And Intelligent Child:

As a parent you wish to see your kid grow up into a smart, dynamic and appealing personality. It is not just academics your kid should be good at, but other areas like sports, art, communication and other fun activities too. It is important for you to open doors for them to learn more from their surroundings. However, as a parent you also have the responsibility to extract the good out of the bad.

Here are some suggested ways to raise a smart and intelligent child?:

1. Interact With Your Kids:

Scientists suggest that children that are loved, played with and cuddled have a much better mental growth than those who do not enjoy much attention and love at home.

• Talk to your kids and listen to them.
• Talking, expressing and enjoying with your kids will help them open up more.
• It will prepare their minds for worldly experiences and eventually pump up their thinking skills.
• You may read out to them and make them read. This will help improve their communication skills and understanding of languages.

2. Complete Exposure For Full Development:

Indulging your kids in activities that develop both sides of the brain is necessary.

• The left part of the brain works for logic, reasoning and language whereas the right part works for art and creativity.
• For a smarter kid, it is vital to expose them to things that work in developing both sides of the brain.
• Include interesting and challenging games and activities in your kid’s regular routine.

3. Play Time And Exercise:

A generous amount of playtime is important in your kid’s daily schedule.

• Playing improves and creates a base for your kid’s social, physical, intellectual and emotional skills.
• When your kids interact with other children, they learn to combine different ideas and feelings together.
• Also encourage your kids to get involved in some physical exercise as it will help them become stronger and smarter.
• Exercise increases blood flow and helps in development of new brain cells.

4. Introduce Music In Your Kid’s Life:

You may have noticed that kids take some time to learn a school lesson, but quickly memorize the song they love. It is a simple example of growing intellect when kids hear music.

• Music boosts attention, memory, motivation and learning.
• It develops patience for listening.
• Learning musical instruments will help your kids in developing spatial temporal reasoning and proportional thinking.
• This is the ground work for abstract math.

5. Let Your Children Play Intelligent Computer Games:

There are a slew of video games available in the market and not all of them are productive.

• Violence is the most commonly sold commodity through computer games and you need to be extremely careful to keep your kid away from these.
• There are games that work in favor of development of your kid’s brain.
• By indulging in such and a couple of other fun games you can help your kid develop hand-eye coordination.

Smartness is an asset cherished for life. So, know how to make your kids smart through these simple steps. And you will definitely take pride in them when they mature as bright and dynamic human beings.

Parents of Successful Kids Have These 12 Things in Common

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by Rachel Gillett and Yu Han / BusinessInsider.com

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This story originally appeared on businessinsider.com.

Good parents want their kids to stay out of trouble, do well in school, and go on to do awesome things as adults.

And while there isn't a set recipe for raising successful children, psychology research has pointed to a handful of factors that predict success.

Unsurprisingly, much of it comes down to the parents.

Here's what parents of successful kids have in common:

They make their kids do chores

"If kids aren't doing the dishes, it means someone else is doing that for them," Julie Lythcott-Haims, former dean of freshmen at Stanford University and author of "How to Raise an Adult" said during a TED Talks Live event.

"And so they're absolved of not only the work, but of learning that work has to be done and that each one of us must contribute for the betterment of the whole," she said.

Lythcott-Haims believes kids raised on chores go on to become employees who collaborate well with their coworkers, are more empathetic because they know firsthand what struggling looks like, and are able to take on tasks independently.

She bases this on the Harvard Grant Study, the longest longitudinal study ever conducted.

"By making them do chores — taking out the garbage, doing their own laundry — they realize I have to do the work of life in order to be part of life," she tells Tech Insider.

They teach their kids social skills

Researchers from Pennsylvania State University and Duke University tracked more than 700 children from across the US between kindergarten and age 25 and found a significant correlation between their social skills as kindergartners and their success as adults two decades later.

The 20-year study showed that socially competent children who could cooperate with their peers without prompting, be helpful to others, understand their feelings, and resolve problems on their own, were far more likely to earn a college degree and have a full-time job by age 25 than those with limited social skills.

Those with limited social skills also had a higher chance of getting arrested, binge drinking, and applying for public housing.

"This study shows that helping children develop social and emotional skills is one of the most important things we can do to prepare them for a healthy future," said Kristin Schubert, program director at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, which funded the research, in a release.

"From an early age, these skills can determine whether a child goes to college or prison, and whether they end up employed or addicted."

They have high expectations

Using data from a national survey of 6,600 children born in 2001, University of California at Los Angeles professor Neal Halfon and his colleagues discovered that the expectations parents hold for their kids have a huge effect on attainment.

"Parents who saw college in their child's future seemed to manage their child toward that goal irrespective of their income and other assets," he said in a statement.

The finding came out in standardized tests: 57% of the kids who did the worst were expected to attend college by their parents, while 96% of the kids who did the best were expected to go to college.

That parents should keep their expectations high falls in line with another psych finding — the Pygmalion effect, which states "that what one person expects of another can come to serve as a self-fulfilling prophecy" — as well as what some teachers told Business Insider was most important for a child's success.

They've attained higher educational levels

A 2014 study lead by University of Michigan psychologist Sandra Tang found that mothers who finished high school or college were more likely to raise kids that did the same.

Pulling from a group of over 14,000 children who entered kindergarten in 1998 to 2007, the study found that children born to teen moms (18 years old or younger) were less likely to finish high school or go to college than their counterparts.

Aspiration is at least partially responsible. In a 2009 longitudinal study of 856 people in semirural New York, Bowling Green State University psychologist Eric Dubow found that "parents' educational level when the child was 8 years old significantly predicted educational and occupational success for the child 40 years later."

They teach their kids math early on

A 2007 meta-analysis of 35,000 preschoolers across the US, Canada, and England found that developing math skills early can turn into a huge advantage.

"The paramount importance of early math skills — of beginning school with a knowledge of numbers, number order, and other rudimentary math concepts — is one of the puzzles coming out of the study,"coauthor and Northwestern University researcher Greg Duncan said in a press release. "Mastery of early math skills predicts not only future math achievement, it also predicts future reading achievement."

They develop a relationship with their kids

A 2014 study of 243 people born into poverty found that children who received "sensitive caregiving" in their first three years not only did better in academic tests in childhood, but had healthier relationships and greater academic attainment in their 30s.

As reported on PsyBlog, parents who are sensitive caregivers "respond to their child's signals promptly and appropriately" and "provide a secure base" for children to explore the world.

"This suggests that investments in early parent-child relationships may result in long-term returns that accumulate across individuals' lives," coauthor and University of Minnesota psychologist Lee Raby said in an interview.

They're less stressed

According to recent research cited by Brigid Schulte at The Washington Post, the number of hours that moms spend with kids between ages 3 and 11 does little to predict the child's behavior, well-being, or achievement.

What's more, the "intensive mothering" or "helicopter parenting" approach can backfire.

"Mothers' stress, especially when mothers are stressed because of the juggling with work and trying to find time with kids, that may actually be affecting their kids poorly," study coauthor and Bowling Green State University sociologist Kei Nomaguchi told The Post.

Emotional contagion — or the psychological phenomenon where people "catch" feelings from one another like they would a cold — helps explain why. Research shows that if your friend is happy, that brightness will infect you; if she's sad, that gloominess will transfer as well. So if a parent is exhausted or frustrated, that emotional state could transfer to the kids.

The moms work outside the home

According to research out of Harvard Business School, there are significant benefits for children growing up with mothers who work outside the home.

The study found daughters of working mothers went to school longer, were more likely to have a job in a supervisory role, and earned more money — 23% more compared to their peers who were raised by stay-at-home mothers.

The sons of working mothers also tended to pitch in more on household chores and childcare, the study found — they spent seven-and-a-half more hours a week on childcare and 25 more minutes on housework.

"Role modeling is a way of signaling what's appropriate in terms of how you behave, what you do, the activities you engage in, and what you believe," the study's lead author, Harvard Business School professor Kathleen L. McGinn, told Business Insider.

"There are very few things, that we know of, that have such a clear effect on gender inequality as being raised by a working mother," she told Working Knowledge.

They have a higher socioeconomic status

Tragically, one-fifth of American children grow up in poverty, a situation that severely limits their potential.

It's getting more extreme. According to Stanford University researcher Sean Reardon, the achievement gap between high- and low-income families "is roughly 30% to 40% larger among children born in 2001 than among those born 25 years earlier."

As "Drive" author Dan Pink has noted, the higher the income for the parents, the higher the SAT scores for the kids.

"Absent comprehensive and expensive interventions, socioeconomic status is what drives much of educational attainment and performance," he wrote.

They teach 'grit'

In 2013, University of Pennsylvania psychologist Angela Duckworth won a MacArthur "genius" grant for her uncovering of a powerful, success-driving personality trait called grit.

Defined as a "tendency to sustain interest in and effort toward very long-term goals," her research has correlated grit with educational attainment, grade-point average in Ivy League undergrads, retention in West Point cadets, and rank in the US National Spelling Bee.

It's about teaching kids to imagine — and commit — to a future they want to create.

They give their kids bias-proof names

A host of research shows just how much your name can affect your lifetime success, from your hireability to your spending habits.

Career-wise, people with names that are common and easy to pronounce, for example, have been found to have more success.

They understand the importance of good nutrition and eating habits

Successful people recognize that good eating habits can help you focus and be productive throughout the day.

As Tech Insider previously reported, Dr. Catherine Steiner-Adair, a family and children's clinical psychologist and author of books like "The Big Disconnect: Protecting Childhood and Family Relationships in the Digital Age," told Slate that developing food habits in kids that are both mentally and physically healthy requires involvement from parents.

To help their kids develop a sense of body acceptance and a body-positive self-image, she says parents need to role model good attitudes about their own and others' bodies, healthy eating habits of their own, and a positive attitude about food.