Brain Building Basics for Babies
"Challenges to Changes", Submitted to the IHEA Informer for the Mar-Aug, 2000 Issue
By: Marcia B. Blackwood, Phone: 317.375.1775, E-Mail: marciablackwood@juno.com
It’s been well established that the first five years of life for our children are significant in the amount of learning that takes place during that time. That estimated amount can vary, but I believe it’s approximately half of all they will learn in their lifetime. They learn to: hear and listen, see and observe, feel and sense their bodies in space, move and become mobile and coordinated, make sounds and communicate. Those are tremendous skills that develop primarily in those first few years.
It’s as though these babies are little sponges just waiting to soak up all there is to know and do from day one. If we work hard to stimulate them appropriately throughout these early years, much of our work in educating them will have been accomplished. I often hear parents say about their preschoolers, “We have not yet begun to home school them.” They have begun whether they realize it or not. They may not be formally “schooling” them or having classes but much of what they are doing (or not doing) will either eliminate or lead to learning problems.
Many parents are relieved when they have a “good baby.” That may describe all kinds of different children, but unfortunately this often describes an undemanding child. It may mean that they sleep 14 to 20 hours a day and only wake up to eat and have their diapers changed. They are so docile as to be called “good” when what they really are is “bored out of their minds.” I personally experienced watching a mom make a dramatic change from allowing her baby to sleep many hours to actively stimulating that same child for several hours a day, and the results were significant to say the least. That baby went from being very lethargic and uninterested in her surroundings to a very active, inquisitive little girl. How did this dramatic change take place?
We often think our babies are on “hold” for several years, and that after and adequate number of months or years and after they have achieved a certain level of “maturity”, we will begin to teach them and they will eagerly learn all they need to know. The truth is that any baby’s brain develops and learns to think through stimulation. How can we adequately stimulate our babies to develop these mental skills?
When you look at a newborn, it’s pretty obvious that their brain does not know much of anything yet. Their eyes do not focus, they do not correctly interpret what they hear, they don’t respond when you squeeze them, and their arms and legs flail around as thought they don’t know what they are doing. The transformation from this child with a brain that doesn't process or understand much to a child that is a high functioning human being is largely a reflection of what you, the parent, do during those early years.
Many of you will say, “well we didn’t do anything much or anything specific with our older children and they turned out all right.” That may be true because there are many children who do not receive purposeful, planned stimulation that are okay, but a lot of them are not functioning as well as they could be if they had been given the opportunity. Let’s look at some areas in which we cam work to begin developing superior function in our children.
The first thing we need to teach our baby’s brain is to feel his body and to recognize where his body is in space. When you squeeze a newborn or tickle him, he will not respond noticeably. You need to begin “waking up” his feelings. You need to squeeze his fingers, hands, arms, toes, feet and legs with a deep pressure that fives him the feelings that are appropriate. You can stimulate surface sensations with a brisk rub with a towel until he literally has pink, glowing skin. You can apply cool and warm compresses to their arms and legs, and you can do baby massages on them. All of these techniques serve to help your baby interpret his tactile sensations more accurately. In order to make this stimulation effective, you must do it with sufficient frequency, intensity and duration to affect the brain. Several times a day with a few minutes in each session should be frequent enough and long enough in duration. If you are holding your child, or squeezing your child, or patting your child dry after their bath as though they were made of fine china, you are probably no intense enough. When you are providing input, make sure it is significant.
Once a child begins to perceive outside stimuli to his skin and deeper feelings like pressure and pain, you can work on the beginnings of fine motor skills and advance as rapidly as your child will go. Begin with board books by turning the pages one at a time. Move on to magazines or books with paper pages. When successful at these, begin to stimulate your child to discriminate between similar objects such as two hot wheel cars or two coins of similar size. Keep watching for hand preference as they approach 4 to 6 years of age. Continue to present objects at midline, but observe which hand he prefers to use for various skills – eating, combing hair, drawing or coloring, etc.
The major importance of helping your child’s brain to interpret his body’s special relationships is that we want to get the body moving as soon as possible in meaningful ways. Crawling on their tummies is the first significant movement of the whole body that we should teach. The “army crawl” is more easily facilitated on a smooth surface than on a carpet or (of all things) a blanket ON a carpet. No baby could be more frustrated in his attempts to crawl than a baby who is on the blanket on the floor and every time he moves, the blanket moves with him. Find a clean SMOOTH surface on which he can practice this crawl, help his establish a cross pattern crawl – pull with the left arm while pushing with the right leg and then pull with the right arm while pushing with the left leg.
After he has become accomplished at this and can do it without any help, begin to teach him to creep on hands and knees. Begin by holding him under the tummy and moving the hands and knees on the floor. Again, encourage him to creep cross pattern with the left hand and the right knee moving simultaneously and then the right hand and left knee. While babies are working on these two major lower level functions, they are learning the beginnings of coordination and organizing the lower areas of the brain. This is the time for children to develop depth perception also, so don’t take this step lightly and hurry along to bigger and better things. As their coordination increases and their vestibular system (which is largely responsible for balance) is stimulated by movement at this stage, they will begin to try to stand and “cruise” around the furniture. About the time they accomplish creeping and pulling to stand, they often develop the muscle coordination to sit. Premature sitting is one of the fastest ways to slow down development and often is achieved with a “rounded” rather than straight back. Sitting is not a true developmental stage, but a learned skill. Eventually the big moment arrives and they “walk.” Encourage them to increase the number of independent steps.
Once they are walking, have them walk a lot. You can take them out two or three times a day for 10 or 15 minute walks. These are wonderful times to be together and enjoy God’s creation and just talk about all there is to see in your neighborhood. As they progress in their stability, have them run a lot, march and gallop and skip a lot, too. It will build stamina and endurance as they exercise their heart and lungs in the process. Once they have done all this, they are going to move into sports and activities in their future with a great deal more ease than those children who bypass some of these steps.
As we continue to look at different ways to stimulate our babies to develop normally, we have to look at an area of input we have not discussed – seeing.
As a newborn, your child will “see” very little. Has a papillary response to light and sees very little detail. The more a baby sees, the more he wants to see. He is building a repertoire of experiences and forming abilities on which later learning depends. The messages we want to send through the eye to the brain have three requirements – large, clear, and repeated.
Newborns are not usually able to understand what they see. They are not able to focus or use their eyes together at birth. When you are working with your baby at first, get close up and face to face. He will respond first to faces and to the contrast your shape makes against the light. So, in addition to your own face, introduce pictures of other people’s faces and of strongly contrasting shapes in black and white. You can use 12” x 12” pieces of posterboard with lots of black and white patterns – checkerboards, polka dots, triangles, shapes, etc. Present these for a second or two or until the attention fades, and then let him see another one. Move from these patterns to line drawings of faces and other easily recognized toys and household items.
As your child develops, use what you have to stimulate visual attention. If the Christmas tree lights are fascinating, string them around the crib. Use bright colors instead of pastels. Moving objects are preferable to stationary ones. Babies favor curved shapes over straight geometric ones and are sensitive to patterns. They like big objects that are brightly lit.
Soon you will see your child begin to track large objects horizontally and then vertically; babies do not se scenes as we see them. They only see elements of scenes, one element at a time – a line here, an angle there, whatever catches the eye because it is large and contrasts sharply against its background. They begin seeing the dark shape of Mother’s head moving in front of the light from a sunny window. The contrast of light and dark are helping establish the ability to see outlines. Once they can see the outline, they start searching for the detail of eyes and mouth or nose. As central vision begins to develop, they will begin noticing more and more detail.
Convergence must develop in vision and does so in the early stages of mobility. Creeping is important in mobility but also terribly important in a child’s visual development. It is believed that when a child creeps on his hands and knees, his near point vision, depth perception, and convergence are developed.
This is the stage of development when the child first experiences objects that are at a fixed distance from the eyes. It is the floor that is a constant fixed distance from the child’s eyes – equal to the length of the child’s arms. Playing on the floor may very well be of great importance in visual development for your child.
Once central detail vision and convergence are established, your child is ready to take off with large amounts of visual input and receptive language. Give him lots of pictures that he will understand. Begin with pictures of family members, pictures of things in his immediate environment – ball, rattle, doll, and then move to objects around the house, neighborhood and his world. As you present these picture cards to him, start identifying them with names. As you name the picture, you are developing receptive language so your child knows the names of the things you have been showing him. He is also receiving lots of input so he will be developing expressive language as well. When you have put enough in, he will begin to put it out. Expand his world and his vocabulary through the use of picture cards. They will love them, so either make and laminate them so they are sturdy or be prepared to make more as children do love to handle these precious picture cards.
You can help your child develop his sequential processing visually by showing him two things – car, truck. Point at them and identify them and then take them away and ask the child to tell you what they were. When he is able to identify two, give him three. He can tell you that he saw a ball, hammer, and clock. Do this for very short periods of time, but frequently through the day.
Once your child is identifying many pictures, you can actually introduce visual language – sight words. Children can learn to speak and read at the same time. High interest words like elephant and butterfly will be learned easily at this stage. Children are “wired” to learn language and their brain cares very little whether that language is visual or auditory. Have fun with your child as you expand his world through his eyes.
As we continue to look at the way our babies develop, we cannot neglect the whole area of hearing and auditory function. This is an extremely important area to develop and it will have a tremendous affect on auditory processing skills, intellectual function, social skills and maturity level achieved by our children. It is so important that I believe failure to develop good auditory skills is a leading cause of our children being labeled with ADD. How can we go about developing these skills from infancy?
As a newborn, your child will begin life with very little “functional” hearing – that is to say, they have no learned how to process a lot of sound yet. It’s interesting to note that they do have a greater ability to process their native language than any other. They have been “listening” to their mother speak in that tongue for the previous 9 months, and unless other languages are used with a great deal of frequency in the home, this baby will soon lose the ability to produce certain phonemes from other languages. Children raised in bilingual homes will usually be able to develop ability in both languages equally well.
Children learn how to process specific tones by hearing them. The auditory pathways to the brain are laid down in the first year or two by hearing a wide variety of sounds. One of the keys to good language development is in providing a great deal of high quality auditory input. That is to dive the child clear and precise speech and clean clear sounds from his environment.
Help your child process the language by talking face to face with your child so he can see what you are doing with your mouth and tongue. As your child is hearing and seeing you produce the sounds, you will see him zero in on your mouth and pay close attention to how you are using your lips and tongue to produce those sounds. He may even investigate further by touching your face and mouth as you speak to him and them trying to imitate you. One way to encourage your child is to imitate him and then take him a step further. It’s like pretending you are on a stairway on the same step as your child, but having one of your feet on the next step to demonstrate and help hem move forward. If your child is making vowel sounds like “a” or “uh”, you imitate that and add a consonant to it making it “da” or “buh”. After your child begins to put these together, put the sounds together to create initial words. Bring your child along further in communication by working on couplets, and then progressing to three-word phrases. Move to questions and answers and general information as he develops the skill to do so. As you work with your child, Scripture memory is a good tool for improving the number of words he can hold and repeat, and at the same time you are helping him hide God’s word in his heart.
Very important to basic development is auditory sequential processing which is the ability to put pieces together in a sequence. Your child’s ability to use language to communicate is largely reflected in his ability to process things sequentially. If he is only producing random sounds, he is not yet processing one piece of information. As he begins to speak in a few spontaneous words, he is probably processing one piece. Continue to imitate (with correct pronunciation) his initial words and add another to it. If he says “ball”, demonstrate “red ball”. If he says “truck”, demonstrate “big truck”. Continue to move into two-word phrases until he picks that up and then move to three-word phrases (such as “big red ball”) and four-word phrases (“big red bouncing ball”) as he progresses in ability. You can also do this with directions like “touch your nose, and lips”, then on to “touch your hair, ear and tummy”. You need to consistently take your child where he is and show him the next step.
Classical music with lots of high frequencies (like those of violins) and very little bass (you know – the thump, thump stuff) is one good source of stimulating input. Music you can “feel” through your body is neurologically negative to the development of your baby, while good quality classical music as described above is very positive in developing auditory skills as it exposes him to all the variety of tones he needs to learn to process it meaningfully.
Play a variety of cassette tapes for your baby when he is awake. Progress from familiar sounds within his environment, such as the soft voices of his parents, to other sounds around the house, to outdoor sounds, to street sounds, to others – rain, wind, nature, storms, birds, etc. These can be the inexpensive tapes you record yourself on a home tape recorder. Using an inexpensive microphone instead of the ones built in to the recorders will usually produce a tape with less static and reel noises. As your child develops and learns to enjoy “stories”, record his favorite books on tape – let him help by clicking for the page to turn. You can choose from a much wider variety of prerecorded tapes now; Bible stories, the Bible on tape, classic children’s stories, adventure tales, etc. Don’t hesitate to tape stories from family members, too. The storytellers in your family may create some great keepsakes as well.
This last section is a word of caution for you parents. Ear infections and fluid in the middle ear are major causes of learning problems down the road and one of the reasons for the ADD label in many school-age children. Fluid in the middle ear distorts sounds or allows only inconsistent hearing. Audiograms simply test threshold hearing using pure tones. An audiogram does not test the quality of hearing. It will not therefore indicate hypersensitivity or susceptibility to distraction from environmental noise. Children diagnosed with a range of labels from “learning disabilities” to “autistic” have been known to be so sensitive and distracted by sounds that they simply shut down auditorily to the “roar” of noise and yet test well on audiograms. These complications can be a result of an injury to the hearing system, or simply because of constant or chronic ear infections. It is suggested that ear infections be treated very aggressively and tubes be used to keep the middle ear fluid level normal. Frequent tympanograms should be done to ensure that the ears are clear when infections or congestion have been present in these early developmental years. Ear infections can interfere with the development of balance and therefore cause a delay in walking for the child. They can be a significant cause of visual tracking and convergence problems as pressure builds up against the visual system as well. Chronic infections and congestion usually lead to mouth breathing. Mouth breathing is very inefficient; it keeps the body from having the high level of oxygen it needs for good brain development and at the same time desensitizes the tongue and lips so that articulation problems may result later in the child’s development. Keeping the ears clear and exposing the child to a great deal of high quality sounds, music and information will help develop superior auditory function.
It is very exciting to watch and participate in the development of a young child and it can bring great joy as we see them fulfill God’s design. You, as parents, can take an active role in providing what your child needs to reach the potential the Lord has given him.
Back to Teaching and Educating
By: Marcia B. Blackwood, Phone: 317.375.1775, E-Mail: marciablackwood@juno.com
It’s been well established that the first five years of life for our children are significant in the amount of learning that takes place during that time. That estimated amount can vary, but I believe it’s approximately half of all they will learn in their lifetime. They learn to: hear and listen, see and observe, feel and sense their bodies in space, move and become mobile and coordinated, make sounds and communicate. Those are tremendous skills that develop primarily in those first few years.
It’s as though these babies are little sponges just waiting to soak up all there is to know and do from day one. If we work hard to stimulate them appropriately throughout these early years, much of our work in educating them will have been accomplished. I often hear parents say about their preschoolers, “We have not yet begun to home school them.” They have begun whether they realize it or not. They may not be formally “schooling” them or having classes but much of what they are doing (or not doing) will either eliminate or lead to learning problems.
Many parents are relieved when they have a “good baby.” That may describe all kinds of different children, but unfortunately this often describes an undemanding child. It may mean that they sleep 14 to 20 hours a day and only wake up to eat and have their diapers changed. They are so docile as to be called “good” when what they really are is “bored out of their minds.” I personally experienced watching a mom make a dramatic change from allowing her baby to sleep many hours to actively stimulating that same child for several hours a day, and the results were significant to say the least. That baby went from being very lethargic and uninterested in her surroundings to a very active, inquisitive little girl. How did this dramatic change take place?
We often think our babies are on “hold” for several years, and that after and adequate number of months or years and after they have achieved a certain level of “maturity”, we will begin to teach them and they will eagerly learn all they need to know. The truth is that any baby’s brain develops and learns to think through stimulation. How can we adequately stimulate our babies to develop these mental skills?
When you look at a newborn, it’s pretty obvious that their brain does not know much of anything yet. Their eyes do not focus, they do not correctly interpret what they hear, they don’t respond when you squeeze them, and their arms and legs flail around as thought they don’t know what they are doing. The transformation from this child with a brain that doesn't process or understand much to a child that is a high functioning human being is largely a reflection of what you, the parent, do during those early years.
Many of you will say, “well we didn’t do anything much or anything specific with our older children and they turned out all right.” That may be true because there are many children who do not receive purposeful, planned stimulation that are okay, but a lot of them are not functioning as well as they could be if they had been given the opportunity. Let’s look at some areas in which we cam work to begin developing superior function in our children.
The first thing we need to teach our baby’s brain is to feel his body and to recognize where his body is in space. When you squeeze a newborn or tickle him, he will not respond noticeably. You need to begin “waking up” his feelings. You need to squeeze his fingers, hands, arms, toes, feet and legs with a deep pressure that fives him the feelings that are appropriate. You can stimulate surface sensations with a brisk rub with a towel until he literally has pink, glowing skin. You can apply cool and warm compresses to their arms and legs, and you can do baby massages on them. All of these techniques serve to help your baby interpret his tactile sensations more accurately. In order to make this stimulation effective, you must do it with sufficient frequency, intensity and duration to affect the brain. Several times a day with a few minutes in each session should be frequent enough and long enough in duration. If you are holding your child, or squeezing your child, or patting your child dry after their bath as though they were made of fine china, you are probably no intense enough. When you are providing input, make sure it is significant.
Once a child begins to perceive outside stimuli to his skin and deeper feelings like pressure and pain, you can work on the beginnings of fine motor skills and advance as rapidly as your child will go. Begin with board books by turning the pages one at a time. Move on to magazines or books with paper pages. When successful at these, begin to stimulate your child to discriminate between similar objects such as two hot wheel cars or two coins of similar size. Keep watching for hand preference as they approach 4 to 6 years of age. Continue to present objects at midline, but observe which hand he prefers to use for various skills – eating, combing hair, drawing or coloring, etc.
The major importance of helping your child’s brain to interpret his body’s special relationships is that we want to get the body moving as soon as possible in meaningful ways. Crawling on their tummies is the first significant movement of the whole body that we should teach. The “army crawl” is more easily facilitated on a smooth surface than on a carpet or (of all things) a blanket ON a carpet. No baby could be more frustrated in his attempts to crawl than a baby who is on the blanket on the floor and every time he moves, the blanket moves with him. Find a clean SMOOTH surface on which he can practice this crawl, help his establish a cross pattern crawl – pull with the left arm while pushing with the right leg and then pull with the right arm while pushing with the left leg.
After he has become accomplished at this and can do it without any help, begin to teach him to creep on hands and knees. Begin by holding him under the tummy and moving the hands and knees on the floor. Again, encourage him to creep cross pattern with the left hand and the right knee moving simultaneously and then the right hand and left knee. While babies are working on these two major lower level functions, they are learning the beginnings of coordination and organizing the lower areas of the brain. This is the time for children to develop depth perception also, so don’t take this step lightly and hurry along to bigger and better things. As their coordination increases and their vestibular system (which is largely responsible for balance) is stimulated by movement at this stage, they will begin to try to stand and “cruise” around the furniture. About the time they accomplish creeping and pulling to stand, they often develop the muscle coordination to sit. Premature sitting is one of the fastest ways to slow down development and often is achieved with a “rounded” rather than straight back. Sitting is not a true developmental stage, but a learned skill. Eventually the big moment arrives and they “walk.” Encourage them to increase the number of independent steps.
Once they are walking, have them walk a lot. You can take them out two or three times a day for 10 or 15 minute walks. These are wonderful times to be together and enjoy God’s creation and just talk about all there is to see in your neighborhood. As they progress in their stability, have them run a lot, march and gallop and skip a lot, too. It will build stamina and endurance as they exercise their heart and lungs in the process. Once they have done all this, they are going to move into sports and activities in their future with a great deal more ease than those children who bypass some of these steps.
As we continue to look at different ways to stimulate our babies to develop normally, we have to look at an area of input we have not discussed – seeing.
As a newborn, your child will “see” very little. Has a papillary response to light and sees very little detail. The more a baby sees, the more he wants to see. He is building a repertoire of experiences and forming abilities on which later learning depends. The messages we want to send through the eye to the brain have three requirements – large, clear, and repeated.
Newborns are not usually able to understand what they see. They are not able to focus or use their eyes together at birth. When you are working with your baby at first, get close up and face to face. He will respond first to faces and to the contrast your shape makes against the light. So, in addition to your own face, introduce pictures of other people’s faces and of strongly contrasting shapes in black and white. You can use 12” x 12” pieces of posterboard with lots of black and white patterns – checkerboards, polka dots, triangles, shapes, etc. Present these for a second or two or until the attention fades, and then let him see another one. Move from these patterns to line drawings of faces and other easily recognized toys and household items.
As your child develops, use what you have to stimulate visual attention. If the Christmas tree lights are fascinating, string them around the crib. Use bright colors instead of pastels. Moving objects are preferable to stationary ones. Babies favor curved shapes over straight geometric ones and are sensitive to patterns. They like big objects that are brightly lit.
Soon you will see your child begin to track large objects horizontally and then vertically; babies do not se scenes as we see them. They only see elements of scenes, one element at a time – a line here, an angle there, whatever catches the eye because it is large and contrasts sharply against its background. They begin seeing the dark shape of Mother’s head moving in front of the light from a sunny window. The contrast of light and dark are helping establish the ability to see outlines. Once they can see the outline, they start searching for the detail of eyes and mouth or nose. As central vision begins to develop, they will begin noticing more and more detail.
Convergence must develop in vision and does so in the early stages of mobility. Creeping is important in mobility but also terribly important in a child’s visual development. It is believed that when a child creeps on his hands and knees, his near point vision, depth perception, and convergence are developed.
This is the stage of development when the child first experiences objects that are at a fixed distance from the eyes. It is the floor that is a constant fixed distance from the child’s eyes – equal to the length of the child’s arms. Playing on the floor may very well be of great importance in visual development for your child.
Once central detail vision and convergence are established, your child is ready to take off with large amounts of visual input and receptive language. Give him lots of pictures that he will understand. Begin with pictures of family members, pictures of things in his immediate environment – ball, rattle, doll, and then move to objects around the house, neighborhood and his world. As you present these picture cards to him, start identifying them with names. As you name the picture, you are developing receptive language so your child knows the names of the things you have been showing him. He is also receiving lots of input so he will be developing expressive language as well. When you have put enough in, he will begin to put it out. Expand his world and his vocabulary through the use of picture cards. They will love them, so either make and laminate them so they are sturdy or be prepared to make more as children do love to handle these precious picture cards.
You can help your child develop his sequential processing visually by showing him two things – car, truck. Point at them and identify them and then take them away and ask the child to tell you what they were. When he is able to identify two, give him three. He can tell you that he saw a ball, hammer, and clock. Do this for very short periods of time, but frequently through the day.
Once your child is identifying many pictures, you can actually introduce visual language – sight words. Children can learn to speak and read at the same time. High interest words like elephant and butterfly will be learned easily at this stage. Children are “wired” to learn language and their brain cares very little whether that language is visual or auditory. Have fun with your child as you expand his world through his eyes.
As we continue to look at the way our babies develop, we cannot neglect the whole area of hearing and auditory function. This is an extremely important area to develop and it will have a tremendous affect on auditory processing skills, intellectual function, social skills and maturity level achieved by our children. It is so important that I believe failure to develop good auditory skills is a leading cause of our children being labeled with ADD. How can we go about developing these skills from infancy?
As a newborn, your child will begin life with very little “functional” hearing – that is to say, they have no learned how to process a lot of sound yet. It’s interesting to note that they do have a greater ability to process their native language than any other. They have been “listening” to their mother speak in that tongue for the previous 9 months, and unless other languages are used with a great deal of frequency in the home, this baby will soon lose the ability to produce certain phonemes from other languages. Children raised in bilingual homes will usually be able to develop ability in both languages equally well.
Children learn how to process specific tones by hearing them. The auditory pathways to the brain are laid down in the first year or two by hearing a wide variety of sounds. One of the keys to good language development is in providing a great deal of high quality auditory input. That is to dive the child clear and precise speech and clean clear sounds from his environment.
Help your child process the language by talking face to face with your child so he can see what you are doing with your mouth and tongue. As your child is hearing and seeing you produce the sounds, you will see him zero in on your mouth and pay close attention to how you are using your lips and tongue to produce those sounds. He may even investigate further by touching your face and mouth as you speak to him and them trying to imitate you. One way to encourage your child is to imitate him and then take him a step further. It’s like pretending you are on a stairway on the same step as your child, but having one of your feet on the next step to demonstrate and help hem move forward. If your child is making vowel sounds like “a” or “uh”, you imitate that and add a consonant to it making it “da” or “buh”. After your child begins to put these together, put the sounds together to create initial words. Bring your child along further in communication by working on couplets, and then progressing to three-word phrases. Move to questions and answers and general information as he develops the skill to do so. As you work with your child, Scripture memory is a good tool for improving the number of words he can hold and repeat, and at the same time you are helping him hide God’s word in his heart.
Very important to basic development is auditory sequential processing which is the ability to put pieces together in a sequence. Your child’s ability to use language to communicate is largely reflected in his ability to process things sequentially. If he is only producing random sounds, he is not yet processing one piece of information. As he begins to speak in a few spontaneous words, he is probably processing one piece. Continue to imitate (with correct pronunciation) his initial words and add another to it. If he says “ball”, demonstrate “red ball”. If he says “truck”, demonstrate “big truck”. Continue to move into two-word phrases until he picks that up and then move to three-word phrases (such as “big red ball”) and four-word phrases (“big red bouncing ball”) as he progresses in ability. You can also do this with directions like “touch your nose, and lips”, then on to “touch your hair, ear and tummy”. You need to consistently take your child where he is and show him the next step.
Classical music with lots of high frequencies (like those of violins) and very little bass (you know – the thump, thump stuff) is one good source of stimulating input. Music you can “feel” through your body is neurologically negative to the development of your baby, while good quality classical music as described above is very positive in developing auditory skills as it exposes him to all the variety of tones he needs to learn to process it meaningfully.
Play a variety of cassette tapes for your baby when he is awake. Progress from familiar sounds within his environment, such as the soft voices of his parents, to other sounds around the house, to outdoor sounds, to street sounds, to others – rain, wind, nature, storms, birds, etc. These can be the inexpensive tapes you record yourself on a home tape recorder. Using an inexpensive microphone instead of the ones built in to the recorders will usually produce a tape with less static and reel noises. As your child develops and learns to enjoy “stories”, record his favorite books on tape – let him help by clicking for the page to turn. You can choose from a much wider variety of prerecorded tapes now; Bible stories, the Bible on tape, classic children’s stories, adventure tales, etc. Don’t hesitate to tape stories from family members, too. The storytellers in your family may create some great keepsakes as well.
This last section is a word of caution for you parents. Ear infections and fluid in the middle ear are major causes of learning problems down the road and one of the reasons for the ADD label in many school-age children. Fluid in the middle ear distorts sounds or allows only inconsistent hearing. Audiograms simply test threshold hearing using pure tones. An audiogram does not test the quality of hearing. It will not therefore indicate hypersensitivity or susceptibility to distraction from environmental noise. Children diagnosed with a range of labels from “learning disabilities” to “autistic” have been known to be so sensitive and distracted by sounds that they simply shut down auditorily to the “roar” of noise and yet test well on audiograms. These complications can be a result of an injury to the hearing system, or simply because of constant or chronic ear infections. It is suggested that ear infections be treated very aggressively and tubes be used to keep the middle ear fluid level normal. Frequent tympanograms should be done to ensure that the ears are clear when infections or congestion have been present in these early developmental years. Ear infections can interfere with the development of balance and therefore cause a delay in walking for the child. They can be a significant cause of visual tracking and convergence problems as pressure builds up against the visual system as well. Chronic infections and congestion usually lead to mouth breathing. Mouth breathing is very inefficient; it keeps the body from having the high level of oxygen it needs for good brain development and at the same time desensitizes the tongue and lips so that articulation problems may result later in the child’s development. Keeping the ears clear and exposing the child to a great deal of high quality sounds, music and information will help develop superior auditory function.
It is very exciting to watch and participate in the development of a young child and it can bring great joy as we see them fulfill God’s design. You, as parents, can take an active role in providing what your child needs to reach the potential the Lord has given him.
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