Scott Free Thinking

Before anyone freaks out about this title and the other fact that I am 18, I want to first stress the fact that I myself have not yet had children. Second, I’d like to also mention that while infant and adolescent development is not my specialty, I do have some knowledge of what will produce very well conditioned individuals. Sometimes when talking with other people about their children, it astonished and astounded me how many of them took offense to my ideas. Hopefully if you’re already here, however, you’ll want to take a bit of interest. While I do not currently want children now or even in the future, I do know that if I did have children there is a very particular way that I would want to raise them.

Get them listening to Mozart in the womb.

I don’t know if anyone is sure what it is about Mozart that causes the music to have an effect on intelligence, but we do know through studies that Mozart actually temporarily can increase intelligence quotient by as much as 7% or 8%. When the children are not yet born, talk to them and give them a beautiful Mozart song every once in a while, preferably Canon B, through headphones at a reasonable volume.

When they are born, don’t “baby talk” your children.

This is one of the biggest and most emphasized ideas I have ever given anyone on this issue. Do not baby talk your children! None of that high pitched, cutesy voice saying, “Hey, little guy! Are you smart? Yes! Yes you are! Yes you are!” Every time a sentence like that comes out of your mouth, you’re ruining a chance for intellectual development and exposure. While some people believe that it doesn’t matter much what you say to children or expose them to before a certain point, I can tell you from both the research I’ve done and personal experience that the more information you expose them to the earlier on, the more easily they will deal with learning and sorting through information as they grow.

Imagine you were having a conversation with someone you really looked up to intellectually and you were wanting to explain something complex to them in a very particularly way. How would you speak to them? That is the way that you should speak to your children, even from the first day they’re born. Talk to them the same exact way that you would talk to anyone else. Would you baby talk your business associate? Your brother? Your friends? No, you wouldn’t. Don’t baby talk your children. Exaggerative behavior and reinforcement of intense periods of elevated emotion are one of the key characteristics attributed to a troublesome, misbehaving child later on. Keep it calm, keep it intelligent, keep it civilized.

The problem most people have with this concept is the flaws it then reveals in themselves. By speaking to their child in a way that is as they would speak to anyone else and treating the child as they would treat anyone else, they run into strange philosophical problems. If you were talking to your best friend, and after not getting his favorite food he breaks down crying and whining, would you be friends with the person much longer? My guess is that you might think they are a little loony, unless you really understood what it was that was going on. If someone was constantly wanting your attention, they would get annoying. I don’t know if this is true, but I think it could be perfectly possible that baby talk was actually one of the defense mechanisms to dealing with this kind of behavior.

Children are going to behave differently, and their brains are inherently different. When you say or do certain things with your children, one thing that you’re probably not going to be used to is that you’re getting the natural, direct response that an individual would give you without any prior knowledge of anything. This means that whatever your child says back to you, or does in response to what you say to them, is often entirely unconditioned in the start. Parents who lose themselves and tell their children to “shut up” or then proceed to do baby talk, “Awwww, you’re okay! You’re okay!!” often ruin the child’s chance for developing faster and better as an emotionally intelligent human being. You must control your own behavior and for all of the behavior that you wish to see in your child you must show that within yourself. Your children do in fact reflect upon you.

To someone who was acting like they were in despair you would first ask them, “Are you okay?” and then they would communicate some way that they were or were not. Sometimes it can be incorrect to assume that some people feel a certain way. Sometimes there really is not many ways to truly know. Just because someone is crying or there is tears coming out of their eyes does not necessarily mean that there is something wrong with them.

They then have to be introspective and examine everything what they’re doing when they choose not to baby talk. Suddenly people are being given a chance to think about how they were raised and apply that knowledge to their present situation. But unfortunately, all too often I see something ridiculous happen. Instead of taking the time to examine their flaws they go into denial saying, “There is nothing wrong with my behavior,” where they then proceed to simulate the exact action their parents did on them to create the goodness of themselves. This is why the old folks say, “Well when you are raising your own children you will understand why I did what I did.” No, I won’t - it’s not that simple. If you are getting angry at your children over things they have no knowledge of, you must examine yourself.

Expose them to as much information that you would like them to know as possible, as early as possible.

Some people would disagree with this but I just cannot stress it enough. If you have a healthy child, there is little reason to hold them back from at least trying or attempting to gain any piece of knowledge or information, no matter how early their age. At age 8, I was reading Star Wars novels and learning science fiction. At 15, I was reading dozens of personal development books every month. Just imagine what I could have done if my parents would have thrown more at me at an earlier time. But here is the thing - do not require that your children learn the information. Do not focus on that portion of the process, because that part of the process will proceed to come naturally.

The simple act of surrounding children with a wealth of information is going to allow them to soak up whatever is around them. On Saturday mornings, don’t have your children watch cartoons. Hand them books that YOU read yourself, or even books that are too advanced for even you. Let them read those books. Do whatever you can before the age they learn to read to teach them everything possible about reading. If they want to learn to read earlier than pre-k, try and teach them, teach them anything they are willing to spend time on, no matter how short the period. But again, when it comes to their learning, do not worry about that process, it comes to children naturally you simply have to put things in front of them and they will develop a way to sort the information. Do not give them worksheets, do not give them crossword puzzles, those sorts of things you do not need to worry about early on.

Surround them with the information they need to know. When they’re in elementary, spend time with them during those nights that they do not have a lot of homework and take the time to teach them the concepts of multiplication, division, addition, and subtraction before the teachers even get to it themselves. Whether or not they’ve mastered the concept, show them and try explaining to them pages worth of geometry, algebra, calculus, biology - it doesn’t matter if they can’t understand it right this second, they will.

I think people everywhere are underestimating the abilities of children. And it’s funny, because much of the time the mind of a 10 year old is actually more powerful than the mind of a 20 year old in terms of their ability to absorb and comprehend new information.