How to Boost Your Child's Brain Development?

August 8, 2024

Have you considered enrolling your child in music, art, or language training class for their brain development?

If this is the case, you are not alone.

Parents are often stuck with the issue to decide which brain games, toys, lessons, exercises, and activities will benefit their child's brain development the most. However, if you are also looking for new ideas on your child’s brain development, you don't need a specialised class or even money to start with.

In this blog, I will talk about hacks to boost your child's brain development that I learned while raising my daughter in Germany. These are very simple yet effective hacks that you can incorporate into your kid’s routine to boost their brain development.

From the age of one to three, your child learns at the speed of light.

You can assist him/her in reaching their full potential because a child's healthy brain growth is impacted by many factors, including relationships, experiences, and environment—so the most important part in enhancing your baby's brain power is you!

So, what do you need to teach your kids for their brain development?

Parents need to teach their kids some Executive Skills in their early childhood for enhanced development of the brain. [1]

Now, you must be thinking about what executive skills are and how can you teach them to your kids.

Fret not! I will explain it to you.

Executive Function Skills are mental processes that allow us to organize, focus attention, remember things, and successfully manage several tasks.

The brain needs these skills and experience to filter distractions, prioritize work, create and achieve goals, and control emotions, just as an air traffic management system at a busy airport successfully manages the departures and arrivals of several aircraft on different runways.

Children with executive functioning skills outperform children with high IQs in terms of their health, well-being, happiness, and achievement. [2]

Memory, Mental Flexibility, and Self-Control are three basic forms of brain function that are required for executive function and self-regulation skills. These functions are strongly interconnected, and successful implementation of executive function abilities requires that they work together.

To be effective, executive function abilities must be used in combination with one another.

Memory controls our ability to remember and alter separate pieces of knowledge throughout periods spans.
Mental Flexibility enables us to maintain or move our focus in response to changing needs or to apply various rules in various environments.
Self Control helps us to set priorities and avoid uncontrolled acts or responses

Other types of Executive Skills include: Focus and Concentration, Creativity, Self Control, Adaptable Thinking, Planning, and Perseverance

Children are not born with these abilities; rather, they are gifted with the ability to acquire them.

Some kids may require more assistance than others in developing these skills. In other cases, if children do not receive what they require from their connections with people and the conditions in their environments, or (worse) if those influences are causes of toxic stress, their skill development can be seriously affected or delayed.

Another cause for delayed skill development could be a poor diet. You can give your child brain development foods like nuts and seeds, eggs, salmon, or a multivitamin supplement. A great option for kids' multivitamin supplements is Smarty Kids which is 100% sugar-free multivitamin gummies. You can give this to kids between 2-18 years of age which will help in the development and growth of their brains, as well as in their overall physical growth and development.

Apart from this, it also helps in enhancing the immunity of the child.

Smarty Kids

5 Executive Skills to Boost Child Brain Development

Adaptable Thinking

It allows a child to complete tasks or adjust to surroundings as needed, overcoming instant difficulties.

This skill also applies to a child's capacity to see things from another person's point of view. A child who shows this sort of executive skills and cognitive thinking is not discouraged by ordinary challenges or differences of opinion. [3]

A child who discovers a blockage on their way to school and develops an alternate route is an example of adaptive thinking.

Self Evaluation

The ability of a youngster to self-evaluate or understand how effectively he or she is performing a certain task is referred to as self-monitoring.

Self-monitoring allows youngsters to monitor and reflect on their performance on a specified task and recognize that adjustments may be required to complete the task at hand.

A positive self-monitoring example is when a child notices that a mathematical formula isn't getting the correct results and double-checks their work to find the error.

Patience

Children must acquire the patience to think they can manage and not give up when confronted with a challenging situation.

Children of all ages must also develop self-regulation, or the capacity to concentrate on long-term goals rather than just seeking instant satisfaction. [4]

Patience is beneficial not just in the early years of life, but also when the child grows older and attempts to master new skills, live independently, or relocate to another area of the country.

I'll give you a firsthand account. I used to tell my daughter Sophie that she needed to wear her stockings. As you know, wearing stockings is difficult and needs a lot of effort, but doing so helped her to grow patience.

Creativity

When we talk about creativity, we often talk about it as if it were a natural skill. Either you are naturally creative or you are not. In reality, parents may promote their children's creative thinking abilities from an early age. [5]

Parents who want their children to be more creative may enroll them in art lessons or give them puzzle toys. Those things can surely help, but there are more basic and likely-to-be successful hacks that won't break the bank.

I had firsthand experience with this when I told Sophie to choose her clothes and stockings while dressing up. Because she had to mix and match her stockings with her clothing, this helped her develop her creativity.

Memory

Working memory refers to a child's ability to remember and store learned information before applying it later. This skill is important to a child's academic achievement because it is in charge of short-term memory and performance.

Encourage children to visualize what they've just heard or read in their minds. A child with a good working memory remembers and executes instructions successfully.