The teacher is a responder and not a stimulator. In a poll released a month ago, Zero to Three found that 87 percent of parents think that the more stimulation a baby receives the better off the baby is, Melmed said. We are concerned that many parents are going to take this new information about brain research and rush to do more things with their babies, more activities, forgetting that it's not the activities that are important. Some people think that any interaction with very young children that involves their intelligence must also involve pushing them to excel, he said. It does not involve teaching several languages or numerical concepts but rather carrying out an ongoing dialogue with adult speech.
Vocabulary words are a magnet for a child's thinking and reasoning skills.
This constant patter may be the single most important factor in early brain development, according to Dr. Betty Hart, a professor emeritus of human development at the University of Kansas in Lawrence. The researchers studied 42 children born to professional, working class or welfare parents. During the first two and half years of the children's lives, the scientists spent an hour a month recording every spoken word and every parent-child interaction in every home. For all the families, the data include 1,300 hours of everyday interactions, Dr. Hart said, involving millions of ordinary utterances. At age 3, the children were given standard tests.