Raising an intelligent child

When should you begin to think about your children's intelligence? The answer: From day 1!

The level of intelligence and achievement attained by any child is a combination of nature and nurture, i.e. inheritance and experiences. There is not a great deal you can do to change the genes of children, but there is much you can do to enhance their environment and experiences to maximise their attainment.

Unfortunately, there is still an attitude among many parents that there is no need to teach a child to talk until they are ready, so they do not stimulate their speech development until they are three or four years old (some parents never stimulate their children's speech development!). By this time, of course, it is far too late.

Bringing up children is exhausting, so why not be exhausted bringing up your children properly rather than be exhausted bringing them up badly and having to suffer the consequences on a day by day basis?

It is very important to realise that language and communication are the key to most learning and that you need to begin the day the baby is born. Babies need two types of language input. The first is to hear the language of their parents spoken around them constantly – i.e. complete sentences and phrases that will gradually come to make sense as the months go by. The second is the baby sounds such as b-b-b-b-b or t-t-t-t-t or ay-ay-ay-ay or sox-sox-sox that teach the vowel and the consonant sounds. These will in due course be put together to make words. It is a mistake to think that young children should only be exposed to ‘adult' language – baby talk is an essential part of language development and should be practised by the adult and encouraged in the child.

Until the age of about six months, children can make every sound in every language in the world. After that they start to lose the ability to make sounds they do not hear regularly. This implies that a baby who is not exposed to all the sounds in a language from very early on may well have difficulty in speaking them clearly later in life. This also means that if you wish your children to be bilingual, they should be exposed to both languages from birth too, especially if the two languages contain different sounds. It is easy to see this in action by listening to a person from the middle east, for example, trying to pronounce the ‘th' sound of English.

Why is language development so important? The reason is that language distinguishes one idea from another. When children are young this is true mainly of nouns. Distinguishing a knife from a spoon is done through the use of language. As children become older, they use adjectives to distinguish a blue car from a red car. Later come prepositions to distinguish the knife and spoon from the table on which they are sitting. Adverbs follow to describe such ideas as speed. Pretty soon abstract ideas appear in their language.

They will only develop advanced use of language if adults talk to them as much as possible and allow the children to use their own language skills to reply and make their own suggestions. There seems to be much greater use of dummies these days and I am constantly amazed how many parents allow their children to use them. How on earth can a child develop the proper mouth and lip movements necessary for good language skills with a dummy in its mouth? I personally believe that this is often done to keep the child quiet while the parents talk to their friends on their mobile phones! But what damage is it doing to their children's development?

When my grandson was nearly two years old, I took him to a park we visit often. We were throwing a Frisbee to each other and he was saying sentences such as, ‘Grandad's turn to throw now,' ‘Frisbee roll down hill,' and ‘Grandad wearing brown shoes'.

In the same area of the park was a boy of similar age with – you've guessed it – a dummy in his mouth. For the half hour or so that he and his mother were in our vicinity, she did not say one word to him. He just played on his own, making grunting noises! The difference between the two boys was astounding. The sad part is that when the second boy goes to school, his mother will probably blame his teachers for not teaching him ‘how to speak proper'! What a terrible waste.

Children (except for certain occasional medical reasons) do not need dummies. Talking to them and diverting their attention away from problems to something more interesting is a much better use of the child's and the parents' time.

What else do children need to develop their mental capacities? A happy and comforting home life is also essential. You only have to think how much easier it is for you to learn something new when you are relaxed and open minded. The same applies to children. If they are subject to a lot of stress in their lives, they will be focussed so much on the causes of the stress that they will not be able to open their minds to new ideas, so try to provide a relaxed atmosphere from the beginning. For example, a child's bedroom (even up to quite a late age) should be a place of relaxation and peace. It should not be filled with computers and electronic games. My own personal advice for new parents is that you would be well advised to not allow a television set or computer into a young person's bedroom until they have finished their GCSE examinations. Once you allow one in there, it is extremely difficult to get it out again! A television in a youngster's bedroom encourages hours of watching mind numbing stupid programmes well into the night and consequently not enough hours of proper relaxed sleep. This is not the best way to encourage a good day's work the following day.

The computer and television should be kept in a communal area where you, as parents, have control over what is watched and viewed online.

Introduce your children to books as soon as possible as this encourages vocabulary development, a chance to listen to and relate stories and, of course, a love of books.

Exercise is an essential part of a child's intellectual development as well as their physical well being. Exercise increases blood flow to the brain and teachers and researchers will often tell you that pupils do better in class immediately after exercise as opposed to coming from another lesson in which they have just sat down for three quarters of an hour. Don't forget that walking is good exercise and you should therefore encourage your children to walk to school where possible instead of taking them everywhere in the car.

Certain areas of the brain may be stimulated by activities that at first sight do not seem related to their main purpose. For example, listening to and playing music stimulates the part of the brain dealing with mathematics, so providing a range of music for your children to listen to and music lessons will help with their mathematical development.

There is so much research going on into the development of the brain, it would take a lifetime to study it all, but you can shortcut most of it by simply providing a wide range of stimulating activities for your children. If you see your children just sitting on their backsides for long periods of time (especially if they are on the computer or just watching television) it is normally time to get them up and moving onto something more interesting. The only exception is if they have already had a very active day and simply need a rest to absorb all they have learnt.

Once your intelligent children get to a certain point in their language development, they will be ready to use WordsPlease , of course, which provides just the kind of activities and opportunities to keep their minds active and stimulated.