Day 3

Fun Fact of the Day: I love to learn about brain research, finding out how the brain learns and functions is an amazing thing. When we look at how language is acquired in infants, we have to look at the brain research. From the book "Inside the Brain" by Ronald Kotulak, "Babies whose mothers talked to them more had a bigger vocabulary than others. At twenty months, babies of talkative mothers knew 131 more words than infants of less talkative moms, and at 24 months the difference was 295 words." Look at the numbers taken from this same research...staggering.

• children in white collar families hear 2100 words per hour on an average day compared to 1200 words per hour in the average working-class family and 600 per hour in the average welfare family.
• Children in welfare families hear negative remarks twice as often as positive ones
• By age four, children in welfare families have 13 million FEWER words of cummulative language experience than the average child in a working-class family.

Why is this important? Does this say that children who's parents don't work will have lower IQs. NO! The study continues to say "Further analysis reveals that parents' education, social status, race or wealth are not as important to IQ levels as how much THEY TALKED TO THEIR CHILDREN and interacted with them in other ways. The intellectual differences had occurred by the age of 3, long before the children had gotten into a formal education setting."
The key to improving your child's IQ and language abilities is very simple...TALK to them.

Tip for the Day: Tell your baby about EVERYTHING that you do. Explain why you are putting the dishes in the dishwasher that way. Why don't you just throw them in there? Why the big ones are on the bottom and not on the top. Talk about your thinking. Babies are amazing! If you begin to explain the reason you think a certain way and do things a specific way when they are an infant, you will be amazed at how receptive they are to hearing an explanation for "why you can't throw a ball in the house" as a toddler. They know that there is a reason behind your thoughts from a very early age and it makes sense to them. I remember when my daughter was about 2 years old, my parents would say that she is "narrating life." What a great compliment! I had given her the vocabulary and experiences to retell and explain why she was doing certain things. She was constantly saying, "I think I want this here, because..." and she would be playing by herself. She had the tools by 2 years old to think about her thinking. That is something that we try to teach kids in school and it is a real struggle.

Sign for the Day: "finished" The sign for "finish" is made by placing both of your open hands in front of you. Each hand should face you, with your fingers pointing upward. Twist both hands quickly a couple times ending with the palms pointing (somewhat) forward. You can also do this sign with just a single twist which makes it seem more "final."

Begin to introduce this sign with meals or bottle time and generalize into other areas such as playing when they are older and more mobile.