Best Way to Help Your Children to Gain Knowledge

A young child is like a scientist. He gathers knowledge as he explores the world around him, making one new discovery after another. This process, which starts at birth and continues endlessly throughout childhood, is a constant source of excitement for your child. He actively uses movement, vision, hearing, taste, and touch in an increasingly sophisticat­ed way to explore his surroundings. Through this process, your child gains knowledge about himself, his skills and abilities, and the world.

Your baby is preprogrammed to gain knowledge through discovery. Research shows that babies are born with an impres­sive range of sensory and perceptual skills that enable them to interact with their environment through their senses:

• Vision. Within hours of birth, a baby can differentiate his mother’s face from that of a stranger. When a baby as young as nine minutes is shown a picture of a normal face and a pic­ture of a mixed-up face (where the eyes and the nose are interchanged), the baby looks more closely at the normal face, indicating his preference for it. A newborn can also dis­criminate red, green, yellow, and blue, and can see the differ­ence between drawings of a triangle, cross, circle, and square. Grasping. Place your finger in the palm of your newborn baby‘s hand. You’ll find that his fingers encircle your finger in a grasp that is so tight that you may be able to pull him to a sitting or standing position.
• Reaching. A newborn reaches purposefully for objects placed in front of him, although his hand may be closed by the time it makes contact with the object. In one study, young babies wore special goggles that presented the illusion of a reachable object. The investigators found that the babies reached for the illusion and then cried when they discov­ered they couldn’t grab it.
• Touch and balance. Soon after birth, a baby reacts different­ly to the touch of brush hairs of different thicknesses. The baby will also respond to puffs of air that an adult has diffi­culty detecting. Although the baby doesn’t have a well-developed sense of balance, he will become sick if spun around rapidly. He’ll try to right his head if placed in an awkward position.

• Taste and smell. New babies make distinct facial expressions when they experience sweet, sour, and bitter tastes. These expressions match those of adults experiencing the same tastes. A sense of smell is also present soon after birth; a baby makes a positive expression when smelling fruity odors, and a disgusted expression when smelling fishy odors. Research also shows that a newborn will turn toward the smell of his own mother’s breast pad, but not toward the smell of someone else’s.
• Hearing. A newborn baby cries at the sound of another baby’s cries, but stops when he hears a tape-recording of his own cries. This suggests the newborn can tell one cry from anoth­er. Newborns also prefers the sound of a human voice to any other type of sound, and they have a particular preference for their mother’s voice. A newborn baby can also discrimi­nate between the noise of a buzzer and the noise of a rattle.

These innate skills enable your young baby to start immedi­ately on his never-ending quest for knowledge. Although many of your baby’s reactions are automatic at first, within a few months he will explore toys and other objects more purposefully.

Your child’s strategies for discovery change with age and experience. For instance, your child will develop different forms of hand grasp once he has had the opportunity to handle dif­ferent shapes; he will learn to look at different parts of an object rather than look at the whole thing; and his hand-eye move­ments will become better coordinated. The more your child tries to extend his knowledge, the more sophisticated and elaborate his discovery skills become. Jean Piaget, a Swiss psychologist, was the first to propose a comprehensive theory about the way children acquire knowledge of the world around them. His the­ory is based on four stages of development:

• Sensorimotor period (birth to eighteen months). In this early phase, an infant uses overt behavior—such as sucking, lick­ing, touching, grasping, smelling – to learn about objects with which he comes into contact. This is a time of contin­ual exploration and discovery.
• Preoperational period (two to seven years). A child at this stage has the ability to use one object to represent another, and this means he can engage in symbolic play; he can also use language, which is simply a system of shared symbols that allows people to communicate knowledge and ideas to each other. Drawings become possible because your child can represent his ideas on paper.

• Concrete operational period (seven to eleven years). Now a child is able to organize his thoughts, ideas, and information in a more logical way. He can cope with more complex numeri­cal operations, such as addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division, and he uses these to gain a deeper knowledge of the way things work. A child of this age can also reason out general principles from specific incidents in his own experience.
• Formal operational period (twelve years+). At this stage of development, a child can extend his reasoning skills to objects and situations that he hasn’t seen or experienced firsthand. Problem-solving skills are more advanced, and he is more able to take another person’s perspective.