Children are wondrous creatures, and why should they not be? In previous writings, I have given a lot of credit to the capability of young children, adolescents, teens, and so on – so much credit in fact that many have claimed that I have too little experience to make the kind of claims that I have made. I have said such things as that you should not ‘baby talk’ your children, you should get them listening to Mozart, Canon B, in the womb because proper musical exposure aids in their intellectual development, and that teenagers are actually biologically more intellectually capable than adults. Upon further reflection of the points I have written about in the past, however, I have come to a certain realization over the capabilities of children. Some of what I said I have not backed up with cited evidence, research, or admittedly my own personal experience. Well, let us go through the movements one more time.

Overall, there are a number of points that I wish to make about how to raise children, what children should know, and, as a parent, what you likely want your child to be doing to be prepared for the rest of the real world:

• Children should be exposed to as much information as possible as early as possible. However, they should not be required to actually learn the information. Essentially, this point is to state that children should be surrounded with nothing but the most productive environment possible.
• Allow children to try things that are impossible for them to do. It does not matter that at age 3, children are incapable of learning particular sorts of ideas, or that at age 5 their logic is still limited – let them try as hard as they can. As usual, however, always reassure them that it is okay not to understand just yet. They do not actually have to learn anything. Guide them through the processes of whatever it is their goals are the best that you can.
• Children should be involved, from before birth, in music and other intellectually involving activities. Kids who are taught piano or other classical forms from an early age often demonstrate an increased level of academic performance in both their early and later years of schooling. But again, even if they are not as talented as anyone would like them to be, simply let them be exposed.

With each of these items, you will notice that I have said that children should be allowed to learn as much as possible without actually learning it. Some people might bang their head against a wall asking me, “But if they can’t learn it, and they’re not ready, then why teach it?” Because the results will show themselves in a much more drastic extent than if you wait the normal period of time. Learning is a long term process, and during the course of a child’s brain development, the knowledge they are exposed to, even beyond their capacity to understand it initially, will become a part of their whole body of knowledge forever.

The first thing that can be said about children is that children, from even before the time they are born, are operating on two fundamental factors. The first factor is their intellectual or mental development, and the second factor is their physical development. As with adults or human beings of any age, these two forces work together at all times, never without one another, and are dependent upon each other in order to create a fully functioning person. But how long does this entire mental and physical developmental process take in order to enable the full scale learning of a highly functioning person?

One person who commented on a previous article I wrote entitled, How to Raise Talented Children, scoffed that children are “people, not computers.” The fact is, we human beings are both. The brain operates the same way a highly sophisticated computer does, and when taking the capabilities of the subconscious mind into account, we realize that the human brain operates in a way that is potentially more powerful than the fastest, most advanced computer known in the world today. In fact, they estimate the human brain will operate at a speed that will be faster than the best computers we will have for approximately another 40-50 years, when taking Moore’s Law into account, or even the recent advances on a molecular level. Human beings are genetically and environmentally created machines. Computers are built based off of a groundwork of circuitry and software that allow them to have certain base capabilities, then be adapted and specialized to certain purposes during the rest of their lifespan. Human beings are the same way.

Kathleen Stassen Berger of Bronx Community College of City University of New York notes in her Developing Person textbook the following milestones about children’s neurological development from birth leading all the way up to age 7:

…Indeed, by age 2, most pruning, or sculpting, of dendrites has already occurred, as has major brain growth: The 2 year old brain weighs 75 percent as much as the adult brain.

If most of the brain is already present and functioning by age 2, what remains to develop? The most important parts! Brain weight continues to increase faster than the child’s body eight, reaching 90 percent of adult weight by age 5 and almost 100 percent by age 7 – when the rest of the child’s body still has about 100 pounds to gain. More important, these functions of the brain that make us most human are the ones that develop after infancy, enabling quicker, more coordinated, and more reflective thought. Human brain growth after infancy is one crucial difference between humans and other animals.

Infancy, commonly defined within the terms of lifespan is typically known to be the period between ages zero to two, in which the bulk of cognitive development occurs, but the most advanced portions do not come into full swing until many years down the line, even leading into young adulthood. As it says, almost 100 percent of brain growth and brain weight is there by age 7, leaving parents with ample opportunity to expose loads of information to a child before they even reach the age of 10. This alone, is evidence enough to show that children given proper exposure to information under terms of guided participation can learn at an accelerative rate and be ready to face high school level concepts like algebra, pre-calculus, articulate literature, and concepts of physics and science by the time they reach age 13. Quite simply, the components to learn these concepts and understand them with sufficient comprehension are there, and the brain is never more eager to take in information than during these early years of development leading up to the teens.

After age 2, myelination occurs, in which axons and dendrites in the brain are coated with myelin, a substance that aids in the speed of communication among neurons. This is already known, and this simple fact once again illustrates, you do not have to wait until elementary school to teach children elementary level ideas or concepts.

In regards to baby talk, there is a number of things that can be said about a lot of the research that has surrounded it. For one thing, baby talk, or “Motherese,” as it is sometimes called, is a natural phenomenon that takes place across a number of different places and cultures throughout the world. However, it is also culturally reinforced conditioning. A child that is intellectually capable of beginning to have their own conversations and build their abilities for logic and abstract reasoning at the age of 5 or 7 does not need to be spoken to as if they are still in infancy. And are children of that age range spoken to that way often? Yes, they are, and it needs to stop. Children spoken to in “Motherese” during infancy, or an age range that is closer to zero to tree, are actually aided by language that varies in pitch and tone, because it allows the interpretive language devices and mental perceptions of language itself to be better separated and understood.

Some parents, or adults in general, seem to have a bizarre fear that they are going to ruin the opportunity of children to ‘let them be children’ by exposing them to too much information too quickly. If it is research or scientific evidence you are looking for, all contemporary research points to very early periods of behavior reinforcement as the basis for every child’s overall emotional development and general personality temperament. Their level of education or attempts at information exposure have nothing to do with their ability to be socially well adjusted or to engage in childlike activities. You do not have to stop children from playing with their toys or interacting socially with people in order to teach them more than they are currently often being taught in modern society at an earlier age. In all actuality, children will be children at whatever age they are supposed to be children.

Essentially what I have heard from parents who have expressed criticism towards these ideas is that they are refusing to develop their children more during their earlier state because they seem to be concerned with losing touch their child, or their child losing touch with the world. This is certainly understandable from a particular perspective. But folks, I am with little apology telling you that we are capable of more, and the vast potential children are capable of fulfilling is entirely possible. So why should we not try?

Children are not superhuman, and I am not at all intending to say that they should be created as such. Children are meant to be children, and this is true. Let me explain the benefits of exposing your children to more advanced ideas earlier in life, in terms of how the long term effect is going to aid both them, and the whole of humanity, in the real world.

Intelligence is an ambiguous term these days, and modern science tends to be pointing toward a direction more suited toward the more modern theories of individuals like Howard Gardner, and his Theory of Multiple Intelligences, rather than the idea, held during much of the earlier part of the 20th century, of a generic intelligence quotient, or IQ, that would say whether or not individuals were smart or not based on only a couple of factors. Today, educators are experiencing the renewed and renovated paradigm of appealing to different portions of a child’s innate intelligence in areas such as visual/spatial, linguistic, or musical intelligences. Under this more recently adopted model of strengths and weaknesses, this illustrates a fact that intelligence is something society is mistreating.

Every single facet of American culture is based on paper tests and the numerical scores individuals achieve off of those tests. You take an SAT to get into college, you take a standardized state exam to graduate high school or be considered for special post-high school recognition, children are tested under concepts they may not have had the opportunity to learn, even if they are capable of doing so, as to whether or not they belong in the gifted & talented program of their elementary school. Upon graduating college, it is all about the quality of the quantity you achieved along a linear timeline many others have surpassed – do you have an associates, bachelors, masters, or doctorate degree and what was your grade point average upon the completion of those items?

And this is such a universally accepted model that under the scrutiny that science itself has given these points – it seems absurd that we allow the entire system as it exists to continue. If an IQ test cannot be all encompassing of a person’s intellectual ability, then how can we expect the test scores that are given via note taking and repetitious lectures to show anything more?

But at the present time, there is little we can do to change it, is there? The public school system is largely politically driven, not industry driven. The college system is increasingly driven by requirement, not by choice, and by this the very nature of the quality of education received at college campuses is now being welcomed to lower down than the level it could have been at before. Society is becoming more and more right brained, but for centuries paper test taking has been largely reliable for the left brained world we have found ourselves in, so how do we change, or why would we change now?

The fact of the matter is that society is the way that it is. The question you have to ask yourself when teaching your children both more than they will learn in school, as well as more than they will learn before beginning school, is: do you want them to be able to succeed at a high level with their educational, social, developmental, and financial futures?

On that end, there is not a single parent I have met who would turn away every idea given to them possible that allows their children to live a happier, more abundant life. This whole notion of ‘raising talented children’ is not based on the desire to shove children into something they ought not be, or an attempt to make them ’superhuman,’ it is simply another method to help ensure their future. And why would parents resist that?