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.
Education has for its object the formation of character.
When you've got African parents, you go to uni, do finance, and go into accounting. But I'm not good with systems. I dropped out in my final year of college to become a Christian poet. Then went back to do my A-levels and went to uni in Birmingham to do political science and theology. I lasted 12 weeks.
The arts, sciences, humanities, physical education, languages and maths all have equal and central contributions to make to a student's education.
I think it's very important that we instill in our kids that it has nothing to do with their name or their situation that they're growing up in; it has to do with who they are as an individual.
Organizing facts in terms of principles and ideas from which they may be inferred is the only known way of reducing the quick rate of loss of human memory.
If we as a nation are to break the cycle of poverty, crime and the growing underclass of young people ill equipped to be productive citizens, we need to not only implement effective programs to prevent teen pregnancy, but we must also help those who have already given birth so that they become effective, nurturing, bonding parents.
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