Give Your Baby A Higher IQ Through Better Nutrition (How to Raise a Brighter Child Book 1)

Should parents help a youngster learn to read before he or she starts the first grade? How can parents safely use computers and the Internet as early learning tools? Is a child's intelligence level actually fixed for life by inherited genes? You'll find the answers to these and hundreds of other vital questions in this revised and updated edition of this classic parenting guide. How to Raise a Brighter Child incorporates groundbreaking scientific findings on brain development to help you boost your child's potential from birth.

Discover specific early learning techniques to aid your child's development of his or her mind -- in his or her own personal style and at the appropriate speed. These are not formal lessons. Most are fascinating games. Later, she became the first woman member of the Tribune's editorial board and her twice-weekly op-ed columns were syndicated in hundreds of newspapers nationwide.

Beck was also the author of four books: Virginia Apgar, and How to Raise a Brighter Child, which has been translated into eight languages and published widely around the world. By clicking 'Sign me up' I acknowledge that I have read and agree to the privacy policy and terms of use. Free eBook offer available to NEW subscribers only.

Must redeem within 90 days. See full terms and conditions and this month's choices. Tell us what you like, so we can send you books you'll love. Sign up and get a free eBook! Price may vary by retailer. This title is temporarily out of stock, please check back soon. You How much is your child capable of learning before he's six years old and ready for first grade?

2) The Dumb Jock Is A Myth

What happens to his brain during these preschool years when his body is growing and changing so rapidly? Is your youngster's intelligence level fixed for life by the genes she inherits? Or can it be raised by the way you care for her at home, long before she ever meets a teacher in a classroom? As a parent, what can you do to give your child ample opportunity to grow in intelligence during these irreplaceable early years of life? An explosion of new research into how the brain grows is yielding exciting answers to these questions.

The discoveries add up to a larger, happier, and extremely important role for parents in fostering the mental development of their children before school age and to the promise of lifelong higher intelligence for these youngsters. Most child-care books concentrate on helping parents learn how to raise children who are physically healthy and emotionally well adjusted. They have detailed directions about how to become a competent diaper changer, tantrum stopper, rash identifier, bathroom attendant, and referee between rival siblings.

But parents receive almost no help or information or credit for their role as teacher and nurturer of their offspring's developing intelligence. Much more has been written about what should go into a baby's stomach than what should go into her growing mind. More emphasis has been put on teaching a child to use the bathroom than to use her brain.

Today, the evidence is overwhelming that the quantity and quality of learning experiences your baby has -- even before he is out of diapers -- can greatly influence how well his brain works all the rest of his life. Scientists have made astounding discoveries about how rapidly a baby's brain grows in the first few years of life -- forming trillions of connections every second that will later serve as the pathways of thought. Learning experiences and loving, one-on-one attention strengthen those connections, actually shaping the neurological structure of the brain. But scientists also know conclusively that without ample, appropriate stimulation, those neural connections will wither and die.

In fact, the optimum time for many kinds of learning may already be past by the time a child reaches age six and enters first grade. These findings provide important information for families trying to balance work and child care. More than half of mothers with young children now work outside the home and fear missing out on some of the best learning opportunities.

Fathers increasingly want to play a bigger role in their children's development but face time pressures of their own. Yet helping enhance a child's mind often takes no more time than caring for her physical needs, as later chapters of this book show. The new neurological discoveries have profound implications for national policy as well. Growing numbers of children are at serious risk of not getting proper stimulation that will help their brains grow. Today, nearly 3 million infants and toddlers under age three live in poverty. More than 25 percent are born to unwed mothers, many of whom are still adolescents themselves.

Yet study after study has shown that early learning can go a long way toward making up for those early setbacks and help children of all socioeconomic levels grow up more intelligent and capable than they otherwise would have been. Not surprisingly, these discoveries have infused new passion into the old political debates over day-care and family-leave policies. They have also attracted the attention of educators, philanthropists, and politicians who see a rare opportunity, and an urgent need, to help ensure that children grow to their full intellectual potential. Governors in several states have championed expanded preschool programs.

First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton sponsored a White House conference calling for greater investment in young children aged zero to three. Even the prestigious Carnegie Corporation of New York has focused its resources to call fresh attention to the critical years between birth and age three, calling for a "national investment" in the nation's youngest children to give all babies and toddlers the opportunity for optimal neurological development. But the opportunities are equally dramatic: You have the unique opportunity to boost your youngster's intelligence when it is most subject to change, to teach her individually, at her own pace and by what means she is most likely to learn, to shape your relationship with her in ways that can actually help her become brighter.

It's time you got more help in this vital role. That is the purpose of this book. Parents who have tried using early-learning techniques with preschool children often report delightedly about the results. Some cases in point: In a small town in Indiana, Jeanne Jenkins is giving a birthday party for her four-year-old daughter and six friends. Toward the end of the party, Ms.

Jenkins leaves the young guests alone in the living room while she dips up the ice cream and lights the candles on the cake. From the kitchen, she hears nothing but a worrisome quiet. Anxiously, she peeks into the living room and sees that one of the guests has pulled a Smokey the Bear book from the shelf and is reading with great delight to the other children, who are fascinated by the story. After the party, Ms. Jenkins telephones the small guest's mother.

1) Music Lessons

But she does read everything she can get her hands on. She announces to her baby-sitter a surprisingly complex thought for someone still in diapers: In the space for key word , she types in dogs and is soon clicking through Web page after Web page, printing out color pictures of the breeds that catch her eye. In Ann Arbor, Michigan, a third-generation Armenian couple -- she a grade-school teacher on extended maternity leave and he a teaching assistant finishing work on his Ph.

So they have spoken only Armenian to him since his birth. Outside his home, Jack hears -- and learns -- English effortlessly. Now, at age four, he is happily fluent in both languages and switches from one to the other when it is appropriate. In a nursery school outside Los Angeles, Danny, four, walks purposefully over to a supply cupboard and pulls out a box of beads and numbered cards. Sprawling on a little rug on the floor, he arranges a set of the numbers in order from 0 to 9. Beside each he places a little glass dish and into each he drops a corresponding number of beads.

Next, Danny puts another set of numbers in "tens place" making his figures read 11 to With ready-made chains of 10 beads each, he lays out matching rows of 10 to 90 beads beside the tiny dishes. Then he adds a third set of numbers in "hundreds place" and the right number for bead units. When he finishes, he has correctly created and labeled rows for , , , , , , , , and -- and, with obvious satisfaction, taught himself a major lesson in number concepts.

None of these children was born a genius. But because someone who loved each youngster knew about the importance of early learning experiences, each had the opportunity to learn more than most children usually do at the age when their fast-growing minds could absorb knowledge readily. All of them appear to be developing above-average intelligence and a joyous love of learning as a result.

Meagan's mother taught her to read for fun, using a series of phonetic games and cartoons published by a Chicago newspaper. Emily's attentive baby-sitter -- and her busy parents, both professionals -- made a point of conversing with her as much as possible and expressing their delight whenever she learned new words and put them to use in sentences. Andrea has played games on the family computer since she was three and watched her older sister use the Internet for research. Her parents let her set up her own password and watched -- at a safe distance -- as she explored the Internet on her own.

Jack's parents are deliberately using early-learning principles to preserve an ethnic heritage that is important in their own lives and that they want to pass on, with all its cultural richness, to their children. Danny attends a Montessori school, where he can choose freely from a wealth of early-learning materials. Interest in early learning and research about it are coming from many different scientific fields and forging exciting new connections among them. Neuroscientists are using new imaging technology to actually watch the brain in action, and they are finding neurological explanations for what pioneering educators had long noticed about how eagerly young children learn.

Biologists are conducting experiments probing the effects of early stimulation on young animals and demonstrating how experience shapes the brain. Psychologists are learning more about the biological basis of behavior and studying how a "bad upbringing" may actually change the chemistry of the brain. Sociologists and teachers are urgently searching for ways to help disadvantaged children, many of whom reach first grade with learning abilities already stunted for lack of adequate stimulation during the first six years of life.

Educators are reaching out to some of those children and contributing to the growing volume of evidence that preschool learning experiences can raise their intelligence levels. Many parents are discovering upon thoughtful observation that their own small children are ready and eager for learning previously assigned only to first grade level or beyond.

Computer experts are looking with fresh excitement at the potential that computers offer young children for unprecedented kinds of learning opportunities. Research about early learning emerging from all of these sources, from the fields of neurology, physiology, psychology, biology, and education, and from specialists working from many divergent points of view, can be summed up like this: We have greatly underestimated what children under age six can and should be learning.

It is possible, by changing our methods of child rearing, to raise the level of intelligence of all children and to have happier, more enthusiastic youngsters as a result. That chance does not last forever. Without ample, appropriate stimulation, unused neurons in a young child's brain atrophy and disappear.

Vital connections between brain cells never develop. The brain loses much of its capacity and potential -- permanently. Burton White, who founded and directed the Harvard Preschool Project, a research study focused on how children develop during the first six years. Early learning doesn't mean that you should try to teach your three-year-old to read to make him a status symbol, or because your neighbor's four-year-old can read or because you want to be sure he gets into Harvard 15 years from now.

You aren't trying to make a six-year-old out of a four-year-old or turn a nursery school into a first grade or deprive your youngster of the chance to be a child. Early learning does mean that you try and understand your youngster's innate drive to learn, to explore, to fill her developing brain's urgent needs for sensory stimuli and satisfying learning experiences, just as you try to understand and fill the needs of her body for nourishing foods.

You aren't stuffing his brain with facts so he'll make Phi Beta Kappa at Yale any more than you give him vitamins to force his growth so he'll make the Chicago Bears' backfield. Early learning simply means using new knowledge about what your youngster's brain needs during the crucial first years of life so that his mental development will come nearer to reaching its potential and your child will be brighter and happier for it. Research is showing that traditionally accepted child-care practices may even be inadvertently curtailing children's mental development in some ways.

Parents may leave an infant alone and crying with boredom in his crib or playpen, in an attempt to train him to be "good" and undemanding. Yet a baby's needs for sensory stimuli and motor activity -- to look at a variety of things, to listen to myriad sounds and voices, to move and be moved about, to touch, to hold -- are as great as her hunger for food and for love.

Parents may spank the hands of a toddler who is not trying to be destructive but merely trying to satisfy some of her insatiable desire to explore, to climb, to push, to pull, to take apart, to taste, to experiment. Researchers have discovered that even well-read, educated, and intelligent parents have probably handicapped their children in the past because of child-rearing practices that ignored the needs of the developing brain. These are the parents who were most aware of prevailing child-care theories, who heeded the warnings about not "overstimulating" a child, and who read the books that said a youngster would develop "readiness" for learning on his own inner timetable regardless of the amount of stimuli in his environment.

Many of these parents feared to stimulate their children intellectually for fear of, "pushing" or "pressuring" them and because they had heard that fathers andmothers are "too emotionally involved" with their youngster to do an adequate job of teaching. Much new research now shows that the idea of "readiness" has been overrated and that a child's ability to acquire many skills depends on the stimuilation and opportunity in his environment as well as his inner schedule of growth.

How to Raise a Brighter Child | Book by Joan Beck | Official Publisher Page | Simon & Schuster

In fact, some kinds of brain development may actually be dependent on a child's having certain kinds of environmental stimulation, some researchers now say. Most of the experimental programs concerned with early learning have been deliberately designed to remove any kinds of pressures -- or even extrinsic rewards -- from the learning activites and have been set up so that the young children participate only if they wish and stop whenever they choose and are never praised nor criticized for what they do or do not do.

Yet even under these circumstances, children of three and four eagerly teach themselves such intellectual activities as reading and writing. Observers in almost all early-learning research projects comment on the joy and happiness and enthusiasm of the children involved. And the most careful follow-up studies do not detect any ill effects on these youngsters' personality, emotional well-being, behavior, eyesight, or general health. Dolores Durkin, professor of education at the University of Illinois, made studies of children who learned to read before they entered first grade, she was surprised to find that few of them came from professional or upper-middle-class families.

In fact, more than half of the early readers in her California study had parents she classified as being lower socioeconomic class. One fourth more she identified as lower middle class. Studies of the home backgrounds of these early readers -- and of a control group with similar IQs who could not read before first grade -- pointed up an important difference.

The better-educated parents in higher socioeconomic groups knew the theories that reading should be taught only by trained teachers and that parents should keep hands off the whole process. Families less informed about these traditional concepts had happily and enthusiastically welcomed their children's questions about words, answered them, helped them, and accepted their preschoolers' ability to read. None of these parents felt guilty about their youngster's reading skill, as did two or three of the parents with professional backgrounds.

Durkin's research showed that the early readers consistently outscored the control group with equal IQ in the elementary grades. But part of the careful scientific design of the research -- which intended to keep each early reader matched with a nonreader of equal IQ as they advanced through several grades -- was upset because many of the early readers were double-promoted.

The widely accepted idea that a preschooler's only occupation should be "play" and the attitude that play is the direct opposite of learning have also tended to deprive youngsters of desirable mental stimulation. Small children love to learn. They are born with an innate hunger for learning.

And they keep on having an insatiable desire to learn -- unless you bore, spank, train, or discourage it out of them. If you think carefully about what most interests your baby or your toddler, you'll observe that it is seldom "play," as adults use the word. It's much more apt to be learning.

In fact, sometimes you can't seem to stop your baby from working hard at learning in order to persuade her to play or eat or rest, no matter how hard you try.

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A four-month-old baby, for example, who is just learning to roll from her stomach onto her back works harder at pushing herself up and over than does a runner trying to shave seconds off a marathon time. Once she manages to flop over, she usually screams until you put her back on her stomach so she can try again. If you offer her a rattle or a cuddly animal so she will quiet down and play and you can get back to your own work, she usually bats it away in her eagerness to resume her difficult learning activity. No one is forcing her or pressuring her or hurrying her or grading her or making her compete or threatening not to love her unless she learns to roll over.

She wants to learn, urgently, on her own. You can see this same phenomenon clearly when your baby is trying to pull himself up on his feet. He grunts and grimaces and struggles and works harder than a weight lifter. At first, when he finally does pull himself up on his feet, he doesn't know how to let go and sit down. You lower him gently to the floor and give him a toy to play with. But he doesn't want to play. He wants to stand up. He wants to learn. How long does a baby practice vowel and consonant sounds, stringing them together in delightful nonsense before he hits on a single word that brings recognition from his mother?

No one pressures him into that concentrated practice, which typically goes unrewarded for months. Yet this is what babies and toddlers do endlessly, of their own free choice. How many questions do two- and three-year-olds ask in a single day? They're trying to find out all they can about the world around them, about cause and effect and all the fascinations of existence.

This is not what an adult considers play. Yet a busy, impatient, tired mother can't turn off the torrent of why's even for an hour. Three- and four-year-olds love what preschool educators call "imitative play" -- pretending to be grown up. Grades have more to do with conscientiousness than raw smarts. Via How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character:. What intrigues Roberts about conscientiousness is that it predicts so many outcomes that go far beyond the workplace.

How to Raise a Brighter Child

People high in conscientiousness get better grades in school and college; they commit fewer crimes; and they stay married longer. They live longer — and not just because they smoke and drink less. Who does best in life? More on how to improve self-discipline here. Via Brain Rules for Baby: They had no positive effect on the vocabularies of the target audience, infants months. Some did actual harm. Stop merely reading and test yourself: Our brains evolved to learn by doing things, not by hearing about them.

More on how to teach your child to be a hard worker in school here. Overall, it would be better if kids ate healthy all the time. Everybody knows you should eat breakfast the day of a big test. High-carb, high-fiber, slow-digesting foods like oatmeal are best, research shows. But what you eat a week in advance matters, too. When 16 college students were tested on attention and thinking speed, then fed a five-day high-fat, low-carb diet heavy on meat, eggs, cheese and cream and tested again, their performance declined.

There are always exceptions. No kid eats healthy all the time. Research shows caffeine and sugar can be brain boosters: Caffeine and glucose can have beneficial effects on cognitive performance… Since these areas have been related to the sustained attention and working memory processes, results would suggest that combined caffeine and glucose could increase the efficiency of the attentional system.

More on the best way for kids to study here. On average, happy people are more successful than unhappy people at both work and love. They get better performance reviews, have more prestigious jobs, and earn higher salaries. They are more likely to get married, and once married, they are more satisfied with their marriage. Being a happy parent. More on how to raise happy kids here. Your genetics and the genetics of your partner have a huge effect on your kids. But the way you raise your kids? Not nearly as much. On things like measures of intellectual ability and certain aspects of personality, the biological children are fairly similar to their parents.

For the adopted kids, however, the results are downright strange. Their scores have nothing whatsoever in common with their adoptive parents: Living in a nice neighborhood, going to solid schools and making sure your children hang out with good kids can make a huge difference. Pick a smart roommate. Via The Happiness Advantage: One study of Dartmouth College students by economist Bruce Sacerdote illustrates how powerful this influence is. He found that when students with low grade-point averages simply began rooming with higher-scoring students, their grade-point averages increased. More on the how others affect your behavior without you realizing it here.

When teachers were told certain kids were sharper, those kids did better — even though the kids were selected at random. Via The Heart of Social Psychology: A Backstage View of a Passionate Science:. Absolutely nothing else was done by the researchers to single out these children. Yet by the end of the school year, 30 percent of the the children arbitrarily named as spurters had gained an average of 22 IQ points, and almost all had gained at least 10 IQ points. Without ethics and empathy really smart people can be scary.

So if you want to learn how to raise a happier kid go here and a more well-behaved kid go here.