Reading to children at night, responding to their smiles with a smile, returning their vocalizations with one of your own, touching them, holding them - all of these further a child's brain development and future potential, even in the earliest months.
Interpretation
Engaging with children through reading and interaction enhances their cognitive development and future abilities.
This quote emphasizes the importance of nurturing a child's early development through interactive activities such as reading, smiling, and physical touch. T. Berry Brazelton highlights how these seemingly simple acts significantly contribute to a child's brain development and lay a strong foundation for their potential as they grow.
In practice
During a parenting workshop, a speaker might use this quote to highlight the importance of engaging with children.
Every time you give a parent a sense of success or of empowerment, you're offering it to the baby indirectly. Because every time a parent looks at that baby and says 'Oh, you're so wonderful,' that baby just bursts with feeling good about themselves.
How much more do they deserve our reverence and praise, whose lives are devoted to the formation of institutions, which, when they and their children are mingled in the common dust, may continue to cherish the principles and the practice of liberty in perpetual freshness and vigour.
I can create as many programs and mentorships and scholarships as I want, but it doesn't change the environment in which our youth are growing up in.
Teenagers are in some ways the best readers because their imaginations haven't been narrowed down by boring things like jobs and the realities of money and capitalism.
To look into some aspects of the future, we do not need projections by supercomputers. Much of the next millennium can be seen in how we care for our children today. Tomorrow's world may be influenced by science and technology, but more than anything, it is already taking shape in the bodies and minds of our children.
There are no college courses to build up self-esteem or high school or elementary school. If you don't get those values at a early age, nurtured in your home, you don't get them.
When I was growing up in rural Alabama, it was impossible for me to register to vote. I didn't become a registered voter until I moved to Tennessee, to Nashville, as a student.
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