Motherhood: Nurturing Children Into Well-Balanced Adults 3

The mental/intellectual realm: Nurturing a Child’s Mental/Intellectual Needs

Hello Great Mother! In the first series of this article, we described nurturing as taking care of not only our children”s physical needs, but also their emotional/psychological, mental/intellectual, and spiritual needs. We have discussed how as mothers we can provide for our children’s physical and emotional/ psychological needs. In this article, we shall be talking about nurturing a child’s mental/intellectual needs.

In their early years, children experience fast mental development in addition to physical growth. Their abilities to see and engage with the world are constantly improving. Even very young children and toddlers develop implicit ideas to explain how things work and how people behave. Later on, these ideas serve as the basis for causal learning and a more complex understanding of the natural and social sciences.

Various mental processes, including attention span, comprehension of new information, reasoning, learning, memory, problem-solving, and thinking, develop in children from birth until maturity, and these are the typical mental processes that are used to describe intellectual development in children.

It has been observed by researchers that 90% of the brain is formed at 6 years old. Therefore, the foundation for further learning is formed in the early stage of life. So, as the major person in our children’s life at this stage, it is our duty as mothers to give our children the necessary support needed to be intellectually balanced. How?
● Develop your child’s problem-solving skills; this can be done in their formative years by encouraging them to undertake activities like board games, brain games, and puzzles.
● Improve their concentration abilities by getting them involved in activities that interest them. According to researchers, children concentrate more and are eager to partake in activities that they are interested in.
● Improve their memory abilities: this can be done by applying some techniques. For example; they can learn to recall word sequences, animal names based on distinctive characteristics, and location names based on distinctive features.
● Read aloud to your kids; According to research, reading aloud to your kids increases their vocabulary, grammar, sentence structure, and general understanding by exposing them to more words. Vocabulary is a crucial component of IQ testing and is directly tied to academic success. According to one research, children who are routinely read have superior language comprehension, larger vocabularies, and stronger cognitive ability than their classmates as early as age two.

Mother’s’role in a child’s development is great.

Watch out for my next article for the last category of nurturing children into well-balanced adults.

Kindly drop your comments below.

Bye!