Give your baby a good start before birth. Stay healthy while you are pregnant, and be aware that certain drugs can be destructive to your baby's brain in utero.Ģ. These easy tips, stimulating books and supervised, interactive activities will help make sure your young child’s brain is primed for years of learning ahead.įor more book and reading ideas, sign up for our Scholastic Parents newsletter!ġ. In turn, your baby will acquire rich language, reasoning, and planning skills. When you provide loving, language-enriched experiences for your baby, you are giving their brain's neural connections and pathways more opportunities to become wired together. And, amazingly, a toddler's brain has twice as many neural connections as an adult’s. Although an infant's brain does have some neurological hard-wiring, such as the ability to learn any language, it is more pliable and more vulnerable than a grown-up’s brain. Synapses that are not 'wired together' through stimulation are pruned and lost during a child's school years. Pretty impressive, right?īut here’s the thing: The rule for brain wiring is to use it or lose it. During your baby's first years, they will grow trillions of brain-cell connections, called neural synapses. At birth, your baby's brain contains 100 billion neurons (as many as there are stars in the Milky Way!).

20 year old prodigy math game