How to Have a Smarter Baby

Excerpted from
How to Have a Smarter Baby: The Infant Stimulation Program For Enhancing Your Baby's Natural Development
By Dr. Susan Ludington-Hoe

The Infant Stimulation Revolution

For most of the three and a half million babies born in 1984, there was a set of parents wanting desperately for their child to be the smartest, happiest, best emotionally and physically adjusted baby he or she possibly could be.

If those parents used Infant Stimulation, those goals are not only possible, they are realistically attainable. Infant Stimulation isn't some esoteric mystique dreamed up in an isolated laboratory. It is a direct, simple, satisfying approach to enjoying your child more fully.

To understand Infant Stimulation, it is important, first, to dispel the myths that babies only eat, sleep, and excrete; that they don't see well; can't hear at all, and in general don't know what's going on around them until they are three months old.

We must replace those myths with these eight revolutionary proven facts of life:

• Fetuses respond to their mother's heartbeat and voice while still in the womb.

• Up to six weeks before birth, fetuses actively use their senses of taste, touch, sight, hearing, and movement, as documented by changes in fetal brain-wave patterns.

• In the first two hours after birth, newborns maintain alertness longer than they will for the next two months.

• Infant Stimulation can help babies repeat sounds and facial movements like tongue thrusts when only four days old, recognize a simple word at nine months, and construct complete sentences before eighteen months.

• Babies have a biological need to learn.

• Any stimulation provided during the first twelve months has more impact on the brain's growth than at any other time in baby's future life.

• By six months of age, a full 50 percent of baby's brain growth has occurred.

• By one year of age, 70 percent of brain development is completed. Baby's mind grows faster in the first year of life than it ever will again.

Since 1979 thousands of health professionals throughout the United States have attended my lectures and read my publications on Infant Stimulation. The hundreds of parents who attended my workshops have learned the easy, rewarding techniques that make their babies smarter and encourage bonding.

These professionals and parents alike have expressed their desire for me to write a book covering all the tools, toys, and techniques that make the Infant Stimulation Program so successful. They wanted a workable resource of proven ideas based on existing research and my own investigations with infants at every stage of their first six months of life.

What has emerged is a book designed to help you maximize your child's learning pleasure with a minimum of time expenditure: 15 minutes a day. That's a realistic amount of time for most busy parents, even in families where both parents work.

How to Have a Smarter Baby is the product of my fruitful collaboration with Susan Golant, a writer specializing in bio-psychosocial issues. We are delighted to share the results of our explorations into Infant Stimulation. In How to Have a Smarter Baby you will find:

A program of appropriate and rewarding techniques to simulate your baby's senses of hearing, sight, touch, taste, smell, and motion, in order to:

• promote faster growth
• coordinate muscle movements
• increase concentration span from 10 seconds to as
• long as 45 minutes start the process of raising baby's I.Q. as much as 15 points.

All with a simple 15-minute-a-day program.

The sample Stimulation Programs put new Infant Stimulation research at your fingertips. We have also included an illustrated chapter on how to make appropriate toys.

The Origins of Infant Stimulation

My interest in how and when newborns respond to their world was first aroused during my early education as a maternal-child health specialist.

As a staff nurse at the University of California Medical Center in San Francisco, in 1972, I was attracted by the sight of a new mother in the Premature Nursery gazing lovingly into the eyes of her month-old, two-pound son. She was holding him in the palm of her hand, stroking him gently as she cooed ever so softly about his enchanting beauty.

Every day this mother came into the premie nursery to carry out the same routine. She talked and stroked and sang to her tiny infant. And somehow, over the weeks and months, despite our fears and doubts, this small beloved person gained weight and thrived. By the time he reached five months, he was well enough to be released from the hospital.

This little premie's struggle for life and his eventual growth prompted a number of questions for me. Could he actually hear his mother's voice and feel her touch all through those long hours that she lingered over him? Was he aware of her presence, as distinguished from that of a nurse or hospital attendant? Could all her talking, holding, and stroking have made a difference in his growth? And why was it that this little baby grew and flourished when so many others like him did not?

These questions gave rise to other, more general queries about all newborns. How much and how well can they actually see at birth? Do they recognize certain sounds? Can they distinguish voices, faces, tastes, and odors? Do they prefer one toy over another? Does it make sense to consider them as people rather than as tiny, unsensing beings?

My desire to seek answers led to graduate studies specializing in child development. I received my bachelors and master's degrees in Maternity Nursing at the University of California Medical Center in San Francisco, completing my doctorate in Maternal-Child Health and Child Development at Texas Woman's University in Denton, Texas. In 1979, I became a certified nurse-midwife at State University of New York, Downstate in Brooklyn, New York.

As a professor of maternal-child health, I taught maternity and neurological nursing and child development at the University of Illinois in Chicago; Baylor University in Dallas, Texas; the Imperial Medical Center of Iran; Georgetown University, Washington, D.C.; American University, Washington, D.C.; and the University of California at Los Angeles.

My fascination with infants led at last to my becoming director of the Infant Stimulation Education Association of America. In this capacity I have conducted five research studies throughout the United States, and have taken pleasure in teaching physicians, nurses, occupational therapists, play therapists, special education teachers, child-life specialists, childbirth educators, and early childhood education specialists about Infant Stimulation, as well as developing consumer products and pamphlets about Infant Stimulation.

Both Susan Colant and I sincerely hope that what began as a personal effort to meet the needs of the health professional community, and grew in response to parents' excitement, will now also prove to be helpful and enjoyable to all parents and children.