The day your baby met you, she started on her homework.

You might remember that her gaze was fixed on your face, hairline, areola, eyes, open mouth — the round things.

The interest she showed was the beginning of her ability to observe, collect information based on what she sees, and notice details of objects, or differences between objects.

Later in life those skills will be called mathematics.

There are plenty of everyday activities that teach your young child what she needs to know about future academic skills.

• Laundry – as soon as your baby can stoop and recover, or toddle, she is ready to “help” you with laundry. When you tell her that the red socks  belong to sister’s clothing pile, and the white socks go in daddy’s pile, you are teaching her about sorting. Mommy’s little secret: your kid just did a chore!
• Play time – If you have a shapes puzzle for your 2 1/2 year old, know that it helps her to match an object to its form.  If you don’t, take 3 or 4 household items, trace around them, and allow your child to place each item in its outline.
• Dinner preparation –  This is also great way for your toddler to see you measuring ingredients, and making decisions about how much lettuce to apportion each person. Another stealth chore: those pudgy little crazy-strong hands of hers can tear lettuce and place it in bowls.
• Group play times – While your toddler won’t be able to remember the rules, or be terribly concerned about following them, she can participate in some parts of the games that older kids play.  When it is time to deal each player a card, or move the game pieces two spaces because the dice landed on snake-eyes, your child learns one-to-one correspondence, a basic principle of counting.

Instead of quizzing or pressuring your child to learn, encourage her natural interest in shapes, amounts, one-for-me, one-for-you. Fun-based learning will make academic skills seem like just another part of life, rather than a stress-inducing performance.

The judge of knowledge (the teacher) decides which evidence (information) is worthy of consideration.

In later grades, the test is the method by which students are allowed to prove their cases, their understanding of the material.

What if your child already understands the facts of the case, and becomes bored?  Objection! What if your child is a kinesthetic learner, and will remember better by acting out what butterflies do?  Objection!

As a recovering schoolteacher, I can tell you that most of the thinking skills, learning styles, and beliefs about her own abilities will have already been set in your child’s mind before she sets foot in a formal classroom.

Shortly after birth, your newborn will tell you what’s on her mind by looking at things that interest her.  She’ll like to look at your face, your hairline, and high-contrast patterns.  By the time she is a settled baby (about 3 months old), she will indicate what looks interesting to her by reaching for it.  If your infant accomplishes the goal of actually grasping the tantalizing item, she’ll taste it.  Mouth exploration is normal, and necessary.  For now, it is polite to stare.  The brief gazes of a newborn evolve into a full stare by the time she’s 3 or 4 months old.  This gaze lasts about a minute, but it seems like forever to grandparents awaiting the return of a smile.

In the last half of baby’s first year (6-12 months), the mouth exploration no longer yields enough information.  Children of this age love to touch and poke different textures.  They also like to drop, yank, flick, bang, and pull things.  Here it comes again, folks… the “S” word:  Safety-proofing.  And we need to talk about the big “O” as well:  Object permanence.  This means that hiding contraband or distracting your baby is not the end of the issue anymore.  Your kid can now remember that something exists (and tastes delicious, btw), even though you just confiscated said item.  On the plus side, that milestone is an indicator of intellectual development.

The best possible preparation for formal schooling begins now.  If you nurture your baby in an environment that respects her questions by answering them, her future questions will continue to be meaningful ones.  If she discovers a talent or a niche that has a place of honor in her home, the inspirational process of learning will have a place of honor in her life. Your infant’s curiosity is an expression of innate intelligence.  Her learning instinct should be rewarded by the joy of discovery, not mishaps due to lack of safety-proofing.  Later in life, your child won’t be content to wait for an external authority to tell her what to think, or what to think about — if you let her practice at home.

When you honor your infant’s emerging wonder about the world, you allow your baby’s learning process to be less like a courtroom, and more like a laboratory filled with experiments, hypotheses about what will happen, theories, trial and error, logic, and the power of knowledge.

Learn

[Parent function]:

to observe, to know what to expect from your baby, when to expect it, and what to do about it.

Learn \’lərn\

[Baby function]:

to stare at, wonder about, poke, shake, experiment, smile at, taste, and drop.  Several times per day, during the first three years of life.

To a child development geek like me, the word “learn” has fascinating origins.  The ancient languages that gave us this word first described learning in terms of footprints, furrows and tracks.  Considering the process by which experiences shape the brain, and leave a physical trail of life’s experiences, it is clear that the old schoolers were intuitively aware of principles of neuroscience that would not be (could not be) confirmed for centuries.

Here are some images that remind me of how new experiences stimulate the infant brain: Envision walking along, leaving your footprints on a soggy beach when the tide is coming in.  The faint impression is there, but shallow, and not necessarily permanent.  Now think of a well-worn path that suggests itself as the best way to cross a yard, or hike a hill.  Those repeated trips across the terrain are analogous to how repeated experiences shape the brain.  On the beach or nature trail, our feet make the journey.  In our brains and bodies, electrical impulses carry information between brain cells (also called neurons).

The path of great persistence wins out in neuroscience.  Experiences make impressions, but repeated experiences lay down tracks and become more deeply grooved/organized with more and more usage.  Conversely, lack of stimulation leads to weak neuronal connections, and eventually a winnowing away of what could have been a connection.  And all of this happens incredibly quickly:

• Hundreds of millions of cells are made in baby’s brain before birth.
• At six months of age, baby’s brain is 50% of what the adult size will be.
• At three yeas of age, baby’s brain is 80% of what the adult size will be.

Most of the learning (brain development, really) that happens to your child, will happen with you as the teacher.  Under your tutelage, she will learn the life skills of walking, asking for help, self-dressing, self-feeding, curiosity, how to make friends and how to keep them, crying her heart out — but somehow smiling again.  Before her first day of formal schooling, she’ll already need to understand rules, responsibilities, the surprisingly complex business of using a bathroom, that fork vs. spoon thing, and how to love herself and others.

Your baby’s first classroom will be the world that parents show her.  That classroom will be as interesting or as boring, as authentic or as artificial, and as large or as small as the world you help her to experience.