As your baby grows, he learns to coordinate his five senses – sight, hearing, touch, smell, and taste – and his ability to do so is integral in enabling him to explore his world. Here are some ways to stimulate his five senses:

1. Face-to-face contact is essential.

Aside from enhancing your baby’s senses of touch, sight, and hearing, you are also creating a strong bond with him, and reassuring him of your love.

2. Encourage physical activity

An inactive baby (especially the young couch potato) may need some prodding from you. For instance, you may have to get down on all fours to encourage him to crawl. Or you can put a favorite toy slightly out of reach so he can reach out for it.

3. Let playtime be playtime

Physical activity does not mean structured gym or swimming classes. A baby’s natural activity consists of crawling, walking, running, and so forth. There is no need for formal exercise classes. In fact, structured exercise classes have led to not a few cases of muscle strains and bone fractures in infants.

If you want to leave your baby in a play gym, make sure that he is attended at all times and that the gym supervisors are proficient at emergency procedures.

As for swimming classes, kids under the age of 1 should not take organized swimming lessons. Wait until your child is four years old.

4. Choose toys that work on the different senses

If you want to splurge on one nice plaything for your baby for his birthday, activity boards, shape sorters, and dexterity toys are great choices. Toys that need a lot of hand movements, such as pushing, pulling, spinning, dialing, and pressing, not only stimulate your baby’s senses of sight, hearing, and touch, but also help develop his motor skills.

5. Train the babysitter

If you regularly work outside the home, teach the babysitter appropriate ways of stimulating your baby’s different senses. Introduce exercises and games.

6. Be patient with your baby

Your baby is slowly growing and learning, and even though his skills have improved, he certainly still has a long way to go before he masters them. His attention span is still short, so if he wriggles out of your lap before you finish your story, don’t be frustrated. Give him a hug, and go on to another activity.

7. Take him to see the world

If your baby sees nothing but his own room, or the TV set, all the time, he will become bored. More alarmingly, the brain pathways needed to enhance learning are not being created and reinforced. Take your baby around the neighborhood, to the zoo, to the supermarket, to the museum, to the park, to the pet store even! Make him see various sights, hear various sounds, smell various odors, taste various tastes, and touch various textures.

8. Beware of over-stimulating your baby

When his attention wanders, when he looks bored, when he yawns, when he cries, he may be too tired for any kind of activity. Let him rest – let him sleep.

9. Avoid TV for infants

TV viewing is not recommended for babies under one year. Though it is tempting for busy parents to plunk their child in front of the TV set, resist the urge to do so. Too much TV exposure has been linked to eyestrain, passivity, and possibly, desensitization to violence.

10. Let him be creative

Enhance your baby’s creativity by allowing him to scribble and doodle on paper. Don’t worry about form and just allow him to be spontaneous. Be careful: nontoxic crayons are good, but do not allow pencils or pens at this stage because the sharp points may injure your baby. Let him play with clay, let him dabble with watercolor.

Parents come here from these terms:

Technorati Tags: baby grow, baby sense, Babysense, Stimulate Baby Brain, Stimulate Baby senses

Also Try Searching: baby grow, baby sense, Babysense, Stimulate Baby Brain, Stimulate Baby senses

Developing emotional intelligence in kids is as important as teaching them their ABCs and 123s. Children with a high level of emotional quotient (EQ) tend to have a good relationship with their family and peers.

Consequently, when they grow up, they become good citizens. Research has shown that most of the executives who rose up the corporate ladder have high EQ. Having a high EQ and a high IQ is better than having a high IQ alone because EQ enhances IQ.

Conversely speaking, children with low EQ grow up as adults who are pessimistic, see failure as permanent, want immediate gratification, and have no ability for leadership because people do not want to follow them.

But before honing EQ in your children, you must acknowledge that you can only impart what you have. You must have the courage to admit that you are imperfect and that controlling emotions is a lifelong struggle. In the course of inculcating emotional intelligence in your child, you may also have to improve yourself as a person.

Defining EQ

These days, with computers providing quick information, children tend to have higher IQs than EQs. But who has not heard of children becoming depressed or of the high incidence of suicides among their group?

EQ is defined as a process of being sensitive to one’s own feelings, taking into account the feelings of others, and using these information to express an appropriate action to a given situation. When people react without processing the emotion, the action does not match the feeling. Most perpetrators of crimes of passion fall in this category.

Hardened criminals, who usually had poor role models in their childhood, lost the natural ability to empathize. Parents, who serve as the first role models of a child, therefore face the challenge of reinforcing EQ. EQ has been know to eventually disappear when it is not encouraged.

Aside from empathy, EQ also deals with other intangibles such as self-awareness, persistence, optimism, motivation, sympathy, and resilience. It is a multi-faceted talent. It is so complex that, unlike IQ, you cannot attach a numerical value to it.

In a broader sense, EQ equates to the meaning of love. EQ is all about loving and understanding yourself and others.

EQ has helped a lot of parents in raising children with a high level of social competence. Although the term was introduced in the mid-90s, long-term studies on children started way back in the ‘60s.

Parents and other role models teach children by way of example about how to behave. Observe how children, especially those between the ages of one and seven, absorb and follow how their role models act. Allow the child to express his emotions if the situation can accommodate the expression. Here are ways by which parents can direct their children to express what they feel:

1. Help them label their feelings by teaching them what to say. Say, “I feel _______ because ________.”

2. If the behavior is not appropriate, explore with your children. Understand where they’re coming from, then suggest a more suitable action. If you cannot delve into what the children are feeling at the time they are “acting up,” recognize what they are feeling first and then delay the talk until you get home. When you refuse to buy a toy that they really want and they start throwing a fit, you can tell them this, “I know you are frustrated because we did not buy the toy. We will talk about it later.” The phrase, “you should not” is a tall order for children.

3. Talk to your children often. This opens the communication lines.

4. Be an emotional coach. You can teach your own values by telling them, for instance, that it is not right to laugh at the crippled and people with handicaps.

5. When children are angry, tell them to count from 1 to 10 and breath deeply so they can process their feelings first.

6. Don’t downplay what they see and feel. If they ask why daddy and mommy are fighting, tell them that both of you are trying to resolve matters and are working on a solution. The contest may not mean anything to you but to them, it is something.

Change must start from within. If you want to have a better world for your children and your children’s children, you can start by owning to the fact that you can be better. Improving your own and your kids’ EQ determines what kind of person they become.

Parents come here from these terms:

Technorati Tags: Child EQ development, Develop Children emotional intelligence, How to Develop EQ in Children

Also Try Searching: Child EQ development, Develop Children emotional intelligence, How to Develop EQ in Children

Dream Ball for Pregnant Woman – believed Could Increase baby IQ

Parents come here from these terms:

Technorati Tags: Dream Ball, Harmony Sound for Baby Brain, Music to Increase Baby IQ

Also Try Searching: Dream Ball, Harmony Sound for Baby Brain, Music to Increase Baby IQ