Hearing is one of the earliest senses awaken even before birth. Therefore, any practice of fetal/prenatal education, such as reading to the fetus or playing music to it, is actually not a waste of time (see Fetal education in 4th month). This practice continued after birth.
When DD first came to this world, her version was still quite blurry. While she couldn’t identify an object farther than 8 to 15 inches away, her hearing was already well developed. So her perinatal education during the first two months focused on listing to music and talking, which I believe, would help stimulating her brain development and lead to physical accomplishments.
The music I played for her was the soothing and light music which I listened during my pregnancy. Sometimes I rocked her gently along with the music. I told her mommy listened to this music quite often and asked her whether she could remember hearing it when she was in my womb. Although she couldn’t give me an answer, she did seem calmer when the music was on.
Talking was another major stimulation. Since she couldn’t see well yet, the content of our conversion runs randomly from weather, the coming thanksgiving, flattering, game playing, to self-made lullaby (see Baby talk).
These are the principles I follow when I talk to DD:
1. Don’t treat the baby as a bundle of organs who only knows the basic needs like eating, drinking, peeing and pooping. Regard her as a baby human being, who also has senses, feelings, personality, likes and dislikes. Respect her soul, respond to her needs and comfort her feelings.
2. It is fine to occasionally imitate her cooing and uttering back. But most of time it is better to talk meaningfully to her. The wording can be simple, and repetition is fine. But be sure to talk to her with complete sentences, correct and more adult language and things that make sense.
3. Last but not the least, have fun! Don’t feel intimated about baby talking. It should be a fun thing to do.
This is only the first step of hearing education. The next step is to combine visual and audio together, once her version is mature, to improve the efficiency of perinatal education.
Healthiness, both in physics and mentality, is the biggest wealth parents can give to their child. It determines whether the child’s future will be poor, average, or optimal. It lays the foundation for the child’s education. Think about a student who always gets sick or is mentally retarded, his quality of studying will surely be compromised.
A healthy diet is one of the fastest ways a mother can provide to help building her child’s equipment for living. When I was pregnant, I followed the guidelines of Healthy Eating. Right now, I am following Heidi Murkoff’s nine principles of postpartum diet to maintain good nutrition for myself and to produce enough quality milk.
The nine basic diet principles for new mothers are: (from
What to Expect the First Year (Second Edition)
by Heidi Murkoff)
Principle 1: Make most bites count. Eat a wide variety of foods that help maintain abundant energy and ensure a plentiful supply of quality breast milk.
Principle 2: All calories are not created equal. Different foods, even they hold the same amount of calories, aren’t nutritionally equal.
Principle 3: Starve yourself, cheat your baby. A consistently irregular eating schedule can cut into mother’s own reserves and seriously reduce her milk supply.
Principle 4: Stay an efficiency expert. It is important to select foods dense in nutrition in relation to their calorie content.
Principle 5: Carbohydrates are a complex issue. Unrefined complex carbohydrates, such as whole grain breads, cereals, and cakes, brown rice, dried beans, peas, and other legumes which provide fiber and plenty of vitamins and minerals, are just the kind a new mother wants to concentrate on postpartum.
Principle 6: Sweet nothings are exactly that. Limiting the sugar intake helps trimming mother’s weight.
Principle 7: Eat foods that remember where they came from. Eat fresh foods rather than highly processed foods, which often contain excesses of saturated fat, sodium, and sugars, as well as artificial colors and other chemical additives.
Principle 8: Make good eating a family affair. Include the whole household in good eating and the baby will grow up in a home where good nutrition is natural.
Principle 9: Don’t sabotage your diet. Alcoholic beverage, tobacco or illegal drug use can definitely affect the baby adversely.
It is a common sense that parents are a child’s first teachers. They teach child the basic skills (walk, talk, self-control) and knowledge they need to survive in this world. But do you know parents are also child’s life-time teahers? The way parents treat their baby during the early stage of his life influces the child throughout his whole life.
In his paper Brain Child, Dr. Mark R. Pitzer, a post-doctoral neuroscientist of St. Luke’s Medical Center in Chicago, suggests that a child’s intellectual development is influenced equally by their inherited genetic blueprint and the early immediate environment.
While a child’s early environment, according to Dr. Pitzer, is largely controlled by its parents, through both direct interactions with the child and their decisions about the child’s surroundings. Therefore, parents play a critical role in their child’s intellectual growth.
In her book
What to Expect the First Year (Second Edition)
, Heidi Murkoff also points out that parents are the greatest influence during a child’s early age. The kind of a care a child receives during that time, no matter it is physical touch (touching, cuddling, or hugging) or communication (talking, singing, making eye contact, or cooing to the baby) or satisfying his/her basic needs (fed when hungry, changed when wet, held when frightened), determines to a large extent how successful, how content, how confident, and how competent to handle life’s challenges that child will be.
I never imaged being a parent can be this important. I am glad to find it out before I make any mistake.
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