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Enhancing
your Child's Intelligence
To push or not
to push
Parents vary
widely in the stand they take on this issue. On one hand, you have the
parents who follow the laissez-faire school of thought. They believe that
a child's intelligence is determined at birth and develops naturally. As
long as their children seem intelligent enough to get on in the world,
they are quite happy to leave them to their own devices. The parents on
the other end of the spectrum might call this lazy parenting. They feel
that while nature gifts a child with the seed of intelligence, it is the
parents' job to nurture and stimulate this intelligence to its full potential.
Use it or lose
it
Theva Nithy,
author of a book entitled "Your Child Your Genius" is a person who supports
the latter school of thought. He graduated in neuroscience from the University
of Toronto, Canada and has been researching childhood intelligence for
the last eight years. He is the founder of and a neuroscience consultant
at Smartbrain Mind Technologies, a centre that specializes in child and
adult mind development. His theory is based on the simple premise that
what one doesn't use outgrows its usefulness and is discarded. According
to him, every child is born with 12 billion brain cells called neurons.
However, those neurons that are not used by the time the child is twelve
years old die and cannot be replaced. Studies show that on the average
only 6 billion neurons survive. In Mr. Nithy's opinion this is a colossal
waste. He feels that parents must strive to ensure that their child uses
as many of those 12 billion neurons before the child reaches the age of
12. In this way, parents can be sure that the child has made optimum use
of its brain capacity.
Opposing views
Sanjana Mishra
has a one-year-old daughter and she says, "I want my daughter to enjoy
her childhood, but at the same time I will do my best to stimulate her
intelligence by exposing her to different sights, sounds and experiences.
I don't believe that being able to recite ten different nursery rhymes
is a great achievement. In my opinion rote learning is no learning at all
because in the long run one does not remember things just because you have
memorized them."
Mary Thomas,
mother of twelve-year-old Ashish, feels differently. According to her,
"These days there is a lot of pressure on children. It is not like the
old days when you could play as long as you liked as long as you did your
homework. Now parents have to be more involved and they have to make sure
that their children do not lag behind. My son has tuitions twice a week
in maths and Hindi. My son has also been going for swimming and guitar
classes since he was ten years old. He was not happy in the beginning,
but he will thank me in the end. I feel it is very important that children
learn other things besides what is in their school books. Next year I want
to send Ashish for computer classes."
In the past,
childhood was a time free of care, full of play and anticipation for what
the new day would bring. Today, it is a bit of a rat race out there. There
are far greater demands on children today than there were a decade ago.
They have to know more, do more and be more. Parents are beginning to see
it as a duty to equip their child to deal with the pressures of the real
world. The attitude is that parents should give their children the best
opportunities that money can buy to learn and the rest is up to them. Parents
of the 'laissez-faire' school may not agree with this. They probably do
not understand the need to 'pressure' the child at this age when the pressures
of adulthood are inevitable. While some children turn out fine without
attending hundreds of classes aimed at turning them into well-rounded individuals,
there are others that find themselves sorely lacking. The debate rages
on with no conclusion in sight.
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