Stimulating Your Child’s Brain: 12 Ways

What do we mean when we talk about brain health? Well, it simply helps your child reach emotional and developmental stages appropriate for his or her age. For this, it is important to stimulate the health of your child’s brain.

“The experiences and stimuli that the brain receives in the early stages of life determine the formation of biological pathways that influence not only learning and behavior, but also your overall health for a lifetime,” said Vladimir Muñoz, a pediatrician at the National University. .

Based on the above information, we can deduce that good brain health is essential for your child to learn social skills and respond well to the demands of schoolwork. In this article, we will therefore present some ideas to boost your child’s brain health.

How to boost your child’s brain health

Physical activity is essential for proper brain development. To stimulate the brain, we recommend doing ‘neurobics’, also known as brain aerobics or brain training.

It is basically a series of exercises that allow you to work through both physical and mental activities on both sides of your brain. As you will see below, we recommend physical and mental exercises that promote the creation of neural connections in the brain.

1. Draw parallel

Ask your child to pick up two pencils, one in each hand. Lay out a large sheet of paper in front of him, or two sheets if you don’t have a large one. Now it’s time to get to work: the idea is that your child should draw with both hands at the same time.

Your child should try different movements: up and down, around, etc. This simple (and fun) exercise promotes fine motor skills (Spanish link) and writing.

2. Cross-Creep

Let’s pretend we’re babies and start crawling! The aim of this game is to improve coordination and activate the brain through vision and kinesthetic learning.

To play this game, your kid has to move his opposite arm and leg at the same time to move forward, crawling like a baby. Once your child gets the rhythm, you can try variations and involve the other senses. For example, play a song to move forward and pause the song when it needs to stop.

3. Memory Exercises

Stimulate your child’s memory with repetitive activities and games. Memory games are great fun to play as a family, and they also help kids work on areas of thinking that they don’t often practice.

4. Puzzles

Puzzle means that children have to make a complete picture from small pieces, which promotes logical and concentration skills. Keep increasing the number of pieces as your child improves, and remember that the ages recommended by the toy manufacturer are just suggestions.

5. Sudoku

Older children can make sudoku puzzles, initially with help. These exercises are very good for promoting concentration, logical thinking and attention.

6. Painting

Painting promotes creativity and expresses emotions. Read a book to your child and then ask them to paint or draw a picture of what you have read. In this way you help him to use his creativity, train memory, read comprehension and express emotions.

7. Musical Activities

Learning to play an instrument is a great activity to boost your child’s brain health. For example, playing the piano requires you to know what notes you are reading, how to decipher them and translate them into hand movements, which must be well coordinated for the melody to sound right.

8. Play with modeling clay

Modeling clay is an excellent option for stimulating fine motor skills, while also working on hand-eye coordination. You can play with your child to create all kinds of animals and even associate the game with a story you have read, to also work on reading comprehension and act out the story.

Other Tips To Achieve Brain Stimulation

Sports and social skills are basic aspects of children’s brain health. Mental training isn’t the only way to boost your child’s brain health. In fact, it is extremely important that you:

• Talking to your children, even when they are just born: Exposing your child to language from an early age can help them develop understanding while internalizing their mother tongue and its cultural components.
• Don’t expose them to long-term stress: Exposure of children to long-term stress has been shown to affect their cognitive development.
• Read to your children: Like talking to them, reading to them is a fundamental activity to promote social skills and language development.
• Look at your children: visual contact helps them develop emotional relationships and learn social behavior.
• Hug your children: Physical contact is essential for social and emotional development.

• Promote the love of sports in your children: outdoor activities help your children to work on their emotions, motor skills and social skills.

If you want to boost your child’s brain health, talk to a specialist. He will certainly be able to recommend other options to work on your little one’s mental abilities.