Be Realistic About Your Baby

As new parents, you all want your baby to become smart and smarter every day. There are certain elements that may play a pivotal role.

Time

Time will fly as your baby grows. Time is of essence because it shapes the future of your baby. There is a Chinese saying: “Age three defines what is up to eighty years old.” The first three years of your baby are most important; they design his destiny and shape his future. Remember, you can never turn back the clock.

Of the first three years, the first year is the most important in the life of a baby: it defines his temperament and personality; it develops his brain cells; it forms the bonding with his parents. The first year is the only time to develop his multi-language skills and verbal talents. If you want your baby to speak more than one language or even multiple languages, give him the exposure within the first year, and don’t procrastinate.

Time is of essence in that the more time you are willing to spend with your baby, the smarter he will become. It all depends on you, the parent.

The Changes and 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.

Stephen Lau

Copyright© by Stephen Lau

The Don't of a Healthy Pregnancy

There are many things you should not do if you wish to become pregnant or if you are already pregnant”

Don’t start a teenage pregnancy (why not: pregnancy between age 15 and 19 may result in many emotional traumas, such as difficulty in keeping up with peers, financial problems, and health and life challenges).

Don’t contact mold (why not: harmful to fetus, leading to birth defects, such as paralysis, developmental problems, and even miscarriage).

Don’t eat bacteria-harboring foods (why not: increasing the chance of developing food-borne infections during preconception stage and in a developing embryo).

Don’t eat raw, such as sushi, raw clams, and oysters.

Don’t eat undercooked meat and eggs (why not: avoiding bacteria growth; do refrigerate food below 40°F/4°C).

Don’t take certain herbs (why not: some herbs, such as echinacea, ginkgo biloba, and Saint-John’s wort may prevent conception). 

Don’t stress out, develop anxiety or depression in pre-pregnancy stage.

It is important to have a healthy pregnancy in order to have a healthy baby.  Understandably, pregnancy may be stressful, especially if it is your first pregnancy. Therefore, it is important that you and your spouse should plan it and do things together to lessen the stress.

NO EGO NO STRESS: this book about wisdom of living in a stressful contemporary world through the power of the mind.

The Dos and Don't of a Healthy Pregnancy

Stephen Lau

Copyright© by Stephen Lau

How to Help Your Baby's Brain Develop

Understanding how the brain functions and develops is important to you, as the parent. If you want your baby to become smart and super smart, you need to know and understand how your baby’s brain works and functions.

Brain cells develop and function as soon as they receive data from the surrounding through the five sensory organs—ears, eyes, mouth, nose, and skin; that is, hearing, seeing, tasting, smelling, and touching. The development and sharpness of these organs depend a great deal on the amount as well as the intensity of stimuli that they receive.

There are billions of brain cells, and they are like blank sheets of paper to be filled up with data obtained from the five sensory organs. They gradually become the brain, the physical organ of the body, which is responsible for thinking, often referred to as the mind.

The mind serves to control and coordinate mental and physical actions, including thoughts and feelings, as well as beliefs and attitudes. Over time, thinking will continue to develop and shape the mind, turning it into two major components—the conscious mind, and the subconscious mind. The former selectively controls the data input; the latter involuntarily and indiscriminately takes in all the data received. The truth of the matter is that the subconscious mind dominates the conscious mind. In other words, one’s conscious mind may want to do one thing, but one’s subconscious mind may instruct one to do another thing, and one may end up doing the other thing, which may be quite different from what one originally intended. Therefore, it is important to provide the right and appropriate data to the baby, because the mind of the baby is not mature enough to separate the truths from the half-truths or untruths. In other words, a baby’s perceptions are permanently stored in his subconscious mind.

Remember, in the beginning, the baby’s brain is not fully developed. Speed up its development through enhancing its five senses.

UNDERSTANDING YOUR BABY’S VISION

Even before birth, babies can see: they can tell what is light and what is dark. After birth, their vision improves significantly when they see shapes by following their lines. At first, they can see only within 8 to 12 inches, and they see only black, white, and gray. When they are several weeks old, they may begin to perceive their first primary color—red. Progressively, they learn how to use their eyes to see what they want to see by following moving objects. Then, they begin to learn their “binocular vision,” which is coordinating and seeing with both eyes. Babies should develop their normal vision, which includes eye-hand coordination, within the first several weeks and months.

UNDERSTANDING YOUR BABY’S HEARING

Hearing is the 1^st step towards language learning. Therefore, it is important to identify and address any hearing problem by having a hearing screening test right after birth.

Babies have different responses to sounds, depending on their own temperament; more sensitive babies are more reactive to sounds; calmer babies are less reactive.

Around two months, babies begin to respond to familiar voices by making vowel sounds like ohh. At about four months, babies start to look for the source of a sound, and by six months they try to imitate sounds. By eight months, they babble and respond to changes in the tone of

The baby’s brain continues to respond to complex sounds and attach different meanings to different sounds heard. Your baby will continue to use hearing to make sense of the world and to learn to communicate with sounds.

Stephen Lau

Copyright© by Stephen Lau

The Importance of Teaching Your Child to Read

A READING PROBLEM IN THE UNITED STATES

The United States is the most affluent and technologically advanced of all the industrial nations on earth. With its “free” compulsory education for all, a network of state-owned and state-operated teachers’ training colleges, strict teacher certification requirements, and more money and resources dedicated to education than any other nation on earth, the appalling illiteracy rate of the country is a disgrace to educators. Teaching children to read should be the foremost responsibility of all parents. Well, sometimes you cannot blame the parents, because they themselves may be poor readers to begin with—it is something like the blind leading the blind.

Even if parents are educated, they may not want to spend quality time with their children. It is not surprising to find some parents with the notion that their only parental responsibility is to bring their children into this world, leaving them to fend for themselves in matters of education and learning, or simply relegating the intellectual well-being of their children to their teachers.

In addition, many people may erroneously believe that in this day and age, information can be readily obtained from the visual media, such as the television, such that there is little need to turn to the written word, and hence the general indifference to developing reading skills.

PARENTS SHOULD TEACH THEIR CHILDREN TO READ

Reading should always begin at home, and parents should be children's first teachers. Ideally, teaching children to read should be the joint efforts of both parents and teachers. It has always been a wrong presumption that teachers alone should do the teaching of reading and that teaching should be conducted only at school. Contrary to popular belief, educational researchers have found that important aspects of intellectual behavior are often acquired at home rather than at school.

Parenthood is not just a moment; it is an ongoing process. It would be wrong for parents to assume that they could ease their responsibility of teaching once their children attend school. At best, the nursery or kindergarten should be an adjunct to, not a substitute for, the home and the role of parents.

Since parents teach their children to talk, it is only natural that they should teach them to read as well. If parents think they should educate their children, they should shoulder the responsibility of teaching their children to read. To teach their children to read and write is the greatest gift and enjoyment of all parents. If you do not enjoy your child, why did you bother having one in the first place?

WHY YOU CAN TEACH YOUR CHILD TO READ

Parents, who are interested in their children's intellectual development and who are responsive to their children's interest in printed language can teach basic reading skills. They not only can but also must if they want their children to become early and proficient readers. Children are born learners; and parents are natural teachers and main educators of their children in reading and writing in their early years. Parents do not need a course in reading instruction before they can effectively teach reading and writing. Parents often have the following advantages over their teachers:

They understand much better the temperamental climate of their own children—their interests in certain activities and their readiness to learn.

They can provide consistently daily reinforcement in developing their reading skills—something that may not be possible at school.

They can afford the one-on-one relation with them, which is virtually impossible in the classroom.

They can create a learning environment that makes learning easy and possible, since parents already provide for them all of their basic daily needs.

Stephen Lau

Copyright© by Stephen Lau