4 very simple ways to boost your toddler's cognitive development

How do you want your child to develop, using his/her thinking ability to learn & take decisions or just follow what others believe?

I am sure everyone will choose the first option. So you must understand about cognitive development. And the ways to stimulate cognitive development.

What is Cognitive Development?

Cognitive development in simplest term can be described as development of thinking brain. Developing the ability to think, understand, analyze, decide.

Parenting guidance for cognitive development in childhood

The biggest advantage of newborns is that their brain is raw &  with every new experience & interactions with the environment new neural connection is made and brain development of child happens.

The good thing is that creating the environment for the child and shaping their personalities is in our hands.

But the sad part is due to lack of knowledge and obligation to follow society norms we ruin this opportunity to great extent.

So please follow the post carefully to learn what you should do in real life scenario to boost your child's cognitive development in best possible way.

Helping immediately affects cognitive development in child

Cognitive development relates to development of thinking brain and its capacities, so to stimulate this kind of brain development in children you must create an environment in home to give your child maximum exploring opportunity.

Children have the natural ability to explore things and at an early age they don't miss any opportunity to explore things in their environment. 

By this they learn and grow. So kids must get every possible opportunity to learn grow from their surrounding.

Now lets imagine a scenario, a toddler trying to climb the bed for the first time. He is not able to climb it in first attempt and from a distance it looked like he may fall in this process.

Her mother sees this and helps the child climb the bed may be for the sake of safety or just to help him. The situation looks absolutely normal and most of us can relate to this.

But what most people can not figure out that a learning opportunity was lost here. And also the opportunity to increase the confidence of child.

If the mother would have watched this from a distance without intervention, to take care of the safety then the child would have tried some more ways to climb the bed. 

So he would have used his thinking brain to solve this problem, If he failed then the learning would be what is not working in this situation.

Now if he can climb the bed successfully then he would learn how to climb the bed and by solving the problem without help he would have got immense confidence.

This confidence would lead to try more things, which means more learning opportunities.

So you must have understood how by helping the child in the very beginning  an opportunity was lost. I am sure now you have started to think about this.

So its better not to help the children immediately for solving their problem and give them sufficient chance for experiential learning.

Handholding is necessary for children to grow confidence

Not helping kids immediately does not mean we should not help our kids. The same fact of raw brain applies here.

Kids don't know how to do things and learn by exploring. But if they aren't able to do something even after several attempts, its time to intervene.

Leaving the child alone in this situation won't help and failing several times to do something he/she may loose interest in it.

The brain gets the signal that this is difficult and not to try it again. And an opportunity of cognitive development will be lost.

Will you like wrong signal going into your child's brain? I am sure you will not. 

So what to do now? In this situation they need handholding by adults. but there is a particular way. 

Consider a situation where a child of 2.5 years  girl is playing with a toy in which there are holes of different shapes and particular shape cutting will go through its own hole only.

Like circle will go in circle, star in star and so on.

The child is trying to put make shapes go through the holes and not able to do it. Her mother is watching this but does not help. She tries several times but fails even one shape to go through.

Now her mother comes to help her. She picks up a the simplest shape first  and talks to her daughter to make her understand how it looks like.

Then she shows her daughter a hole looking similar to this and puts the shape in the hole. It goes through. 

Now she tells her child to pick the same shape and find the hole for it. The child tries to find the proper hole by trying to put it in different holes. 

And she could not find proper hole. Her mother again shows her the similarity between the hole and the shape. And give the demo again.

Now its time for her daughter to try again. This time her daughter is able to find the proper hole and make the shape go through it.

She enjoys it. Her mother says, "excellent! you have done a great job". And claps for her. The kid is now filled with joy and proud. She has done something great.

Here the mother helped her daughter, But she did not do it for her daughter. She showed how to do it and then let the kid a chance to it. 

She also continued it till her daughter succeed. 

Children learns to do things when they are able to do it, and when they do it several times the learning become concrete and confidence is built about that task.

So in scenarios like this handholding becomes very important, and then giving child the confidence and chance to do things themselves help them immensely. 

Keeping patience here is the key as if you build expectation from the child and he/she fails you may get irritated and behave in a way which is not appropriate which may hamper the child's confidence. Remember patience is one of the key requirements of parenting.

As matured individuals don't we need the same treatment when we are struggling with something? Think about it.

So handholding is necessary in some situations. Do it for your child.

Curiosity is a natural feeder of brain development for child

Another very important aspect of cognitive development is curiosity. Children by nature are curious, and we need to keep feeding their curiosity to make it grow.

But in reality we do just opposite most of the times. 

Curiosity makes the learning process self driven and children don't need to be pushed to learn things when they are driven by curiosity.

While interacting with the environment, children come to see or hear new things. They want to know about it. 

For example a child finds a thermometer in house and he/she is not familiar with it. So by natural curiosity child  asks parents what is it? 

Some parents will react don't touch that, its important instrument. And takes it from the child's hand and does not answer the question of child. The hunger to know remain unfed.

Some parents will listen to the child carefully and answer what is it. Child follows up another question, how is it used? And the parents again calmly answers the question. 

So which approach stimulates the thinking brain? It is not difficult to understand.

In our daily life we encounter with many such situations where child asks us something, and many parents don't answer it or may give some harsh reply which affects the curiosity negatively.

They do it as they don't know what will the impact of it.

But now as you know how important curious nature of children is for learning and growing, please start listening to the kids and answer their questions. However silly they may seem to you. As what is silly for you is very important to them.

If for your business at moment the child asks something and you can not answer then, talk to the child calmly that you are busy now and will answer all the questions as soon as the work is over. 

Remember child looks up to you  not just as a caregiver but as a source of knowledge also. And if you keep rejecting his/her questions then soon they will stop asking it. 

And either they will find the answers from somewhere else, which might not be correct. Or may loose the habit of asking questions completely and the gift of curiosity will be lost lost with time.

So Keep feeding the hunger of knowledge of your child for growth of curiosity. 

Exposure to TV & Mobile before age 3 hampers brain development of child

Till now I have discussed about what to do to stimulate thinking brain development. Now you need to know one very very important thing that must be used very carefully for positive growth of thinking brain.

TV & mobile are important source of information. This the age of technology and children are growing up with gadgets. But these gadgets have serious impact on the brain development of children.

According to stages of child development the brain of child can not discriminate between real and unreal things before age 3. Whatever the child sees is perceived as real.

So it is very important that child only receives real experiences in order to develop proper connection in brain.

Cartoon are very attractive and children like it very much. But everything shown in the cartoon are not good for brain development. So whatever is not appropriate for the child must be avoided.

Consider a scenario where a 2 year old sees a cartoon character fights with a monster and kills it. The brain of the child perceives that monsters exist. And he/she need to fight against it.

Now if he/she continues to watch this, the child will catch the habit of fighting as it was portrayed that fighting is good. And this is not good.

Now the child does not know who is a monster. So any one who goes against him/her may seem to be monster to child and the child may start fighting against that person, it may be another child.

This is just one example. The TV and mobile are full of these kind of unreal things which surely hampers child's brain if exposed regularly.

Another bad effect of TV and mobile is that these are passive mode of communication. That means the child can only see and listen to it but can't interact. 

This passive mode of if continued for longer period at an early age creates severe cognitive impairment. One of them is speech delay. 

In recent time I have encountered a significant increase in speech delay in kids and most of them attributed to over exposure to TV and mobile at very early age. 

So it is better to avoid TV and mobile completely before age 3. After age 3 if you need to expose child to mobile and TV  then select good content and watch with them. don't leave them alone. 

By this you will be able to talk to them and make them understand what is going on. The passivity also will reduce by great extent if you watch with them

Remember  TV and mobile are rich source of information which can act very well for child's positive development also. But you need to control what they watch and what they don't. If you can use it smartly then it can help to stimulate brain positively, but only after age 3.

So it is good not to expose kids to TV & mobile till age 3 as it hampers cognitive development.

Remember you don't need to do lot of things to boost your child's cognitive development. As a parent just need to encourage natural ways of learning and keeping a positive home environment. That is good enough for child's positive development and make him/her a champion.