By: Dorothy Joan Calma – July 11, 2020
As a hands-on parent, you probably understand that genes, together with balanced diets, a sound body, lots of play activities, and exercise, function collectively to develop your child’s intelligence. Yet, it is understood that you would never settle for less as you always want what’s best for your child. You might be asking yourself the question, “Is there anything else I need to do to improve my child’s IQ consistently?”
Ironically, many child development specialists don’t criticize the trendiest gadgets or computer applications, or even the popular videos you subscribe to on Youtube. However, they also provide ideas that help achieve your child’s maximum intellectual capacity.
Read on the tips below to learn more about how to develop your child’s intelligence quotient.
1. Feed Your Kids with Foods Rich In Omega-3 Fatty Acids
Many people often find fish oil or other Omega-3 sources to be something older people take to prevent heart diseases. Substantially, Omega-3 massively improves brain development in children. The earlier your child consumes Omega-3 fatty acids, the better. This macronutrient is produced by lactating mothers and breastfeeding your babies even after their first couple weeks supply them with the essential Omega-3.
Past infancy, where breastfeeding is discontinued, feeding your children fish, spinach, broccoli, and other sources of Omega-3, should be made a habit. The downside is that these food groups might escalate to an argument if you attempt to get any child to like them. Thankfully, blackberries, walnuts, strawberries, and raspberries are also valuable sources of Omega-3.
Furthermore, it would help if you supplement your child’s diet with milk enriched with Omega-3 fats—it looked and tasted very much like ordinary milk. Similarly, kids are often advised to consume lots of protein, including amino acids and vitamins that aid brain development.
2. Ensure That Your Kids Have Adequate Sleep
Besides providing your child with nutrient and Omega-3 rich foods, adequate sleep is also essential for brain health. As most experts prescribe, your child should get eight hours of uninterrupted sleep to relax and grow their minds and bodies.
Children who are deprived of sleep run the risk of sluggish cognitive development and functioning. With that, it would be best to ensure that your child keeps getting adequate sleep essential for their growth—most notably in boosting their IQ.
3. Read with Your Kids
Reading is far more complicated compared to listening or talking. When you read, portions of your brain create associations—you need to correlate and visualize. Reading not only helps develop your child’s language skills, which are essential to interact and carry out everyday activities, but it also sharpens your child’s mind.
Furthermore, making reading a habit in the early stages of your child’s development wouldn’t only aid in literacy. Still, it may benefit a wider variety of intellectual abilities that later becomes crucial in their lives.
When you have toddlers that are just starting to speak, try to chat and read with them every day consistently. Doing so would broaden their way with words and practice their habit of making conversations.
Also, it’s suggested that when you’re reading with them, give focus to some words or phrases explicitly. And establish conceptual storytelling for toddlers to enhance their comprehension and inspire imagination. This lets children have a better understanding of more complex ideas, thereby challenging and improving their intelligence quotient.
4. Let Your Kids Play with Educational And Interactive Toys
Blocks, puzzles, games of memory, drawings, and action figures are toys for which each child grows up with. Allow your kids enough space and time to experiment with any of these toys. Blocks, puzzles and building toys are particularly beneficial and useful because they provide your child with numerous learning experiences.
Children develop spatial awareness and cultivate spatial intelligence while forming structures and playing with blocks. Spatial intelligence involves the capability in one’s mind to imagine representations. Children use their spatial knowledge when determining whether to stack bricks, beneath, over, or adjacent.
Enhancing spatial abilities among children will support subsequent learning in mathematics, science, engineering, and technology. It has also been noticed that children who are superior at visualizing spatial relations have high grades and develop excellent arithmetic skills in grade school.
5. Encourage Your Kids to Do Mathematics Exercises
Abstract thinking, interpreting, and recognizing patterns, problem-solving, and establishing relationships using your previous experience defines fluid intelligence. Generally, when people come across a new experience, they use their fluid intelligence to survive.
Yes, it would be right to conclude that fluid intelligence is another essential intelligence your child should develop. Yet you might ask, “How can I build my child’s fluid intelligence?
You may proceed by using specific examples to explain the connection among objects for your child.
For instance, when you explain the difference between a rectangle and a square to your child, present the real things. Have them go around, see for themselves, and touch the shapes so they can notice the difference.
6. Never Neglect Physical Exercise
Observation also indicates that physical activities may also boost fluid intellect in addition to early familiarity with Mathematics. Similarly, it was observed that certain hormones were produced when a child is at play. Such hormones are useful for the hippocampus, an area of the brain related to learning, thinking, and memory. So let your child out to play, and run around.
7. Allow Your Child to Experience Things
The human brain is one of the unique organs of the body which molds itself by experience. Interactions and experiences ultimately influence the organization, structure, and functioning of the brain.
Rather than seeing their child’s intellect as a progressive process, parents frequently assume that their child’s brain is a vessel that can be loaded with information. But that isn’t how the brain functions, particularly with children in the early stages of development.
Effective learning takes place through active and constructive involvement. A child gets excited, counting stones while gardening, weighing ingredients while following a recipe or gathering nails while constructing a wooden box.
Even at buying your groceries, children can learn while measuring items, reading labels, and counting money. Most importantly, you can take the opportunity and teach them the values of patience, courteousness, and being polite. Let them be used to waiting patiently in line and say, “please,” and “thank you.”
In the contemporary age, there are several learning opportunities that you can try. All you need is some research and maybe some help from tutors or online resources. In doing so, never assume that all your efforts are in no good as all these learning activities you do for your child are essential.
8. Don’t Be A Lawnmower Parent
Lawnmower parents go well before their kids, plowing a perfect, often tricky path to follow. Most lawnmower parents were doing rough things while their kids never have to. Moreover, such parents hand their children the money to buy their favorite toys instead of teaching them how to earn money themselves.
Do your child a huge favor by letting them take on complex and challenging stuff. Always remember the brilliant quote from Ann Landers says, “It isn’t what you’ve done for your kids, but what you’ve enabled them to do with themselves will make them productive beings.”
9. Seek Help from Professionals
While it might be true that nobody is a perfect parent, you can always create an ideal learning experience for your child. Seek the help of professionals, those who are well-founded on enhancing intellectual capacities.
Start by hiring a tutor to support your child’s learning. After all, it’s a tutor’s primary role to assist in developing your child’s intellect.
Moreover, with the advancements in technology, one-on-one, and more personalized tutorials can be made online—a convenient, timesaving, stress-free, and optimized setting for your child to learn.
10. Believe In Your Child
If you don’t show appreciation for your child’s capabilities, it doesn’t matter if your kid is smarter or savvier.
Even so, it has been observed that students who were frequently appreciated for being smart ended up having a higher overall IQ score than their classmates.
As parents, you are the source of your child’s emotional support. Never let them feel that they’re not good enough in any way. Learning would be more effective if you’ll appreciate all their achievements, no matter how small they are. It is also essential that you should be cautious to know how and when to give corrections when your child did something wrong.
Believing in your child and accepting their imperfections will take both of you to greater heights—more than just learning or boosting your child’s IQ.
Wrapping Up
Your child’s Intelligence quotient develops over time and therefore, can vary considerably depending on a variety of reasons.
Though intelligence isn’t the only predictor of your child’s success in life, it is equally essential. While it’s true that IQ only quantifies the intellectual capabilities of a child, having a higher level makes success more achievable. Yet, as parents, do not undermine the fact that success is also about numerous different attributes, including character, skill, perseverance, and adaptation.
Chalkboard, as a learning platform, is founded with these beliefs and principles in mind. Our team and pool of highly qualified tutors are aware of how vital learning is for your child.
Thus, we guarantee that not only your child’s IQ is enhanced with our learning approaches. Our goal is to bridge every Filipino child’s holistic development. Molding and leading them to become assets of our society, the nation, and the world in general.
At Chalkboard, rest assured that your child will receive the best learnings possible. We pride at offering balanced, targeted, goal-oriented, need-based and child-centered instruction. With Chalkboard, you can never go wrong with your investments.