Make Your Child Smarter

How to Improve Your Child's IQ: Learning the Basics

By Andrew Loh

Many of us will do whatever we can to assist our children reach success both in the school and future life. Parents try hard to make their children smart and talented by sending them to best school and by creating highly conducive environment for emotional and physical growth. But, in spite of putting hard effort, most of us are not really satisfied with the progress that our children achieve. In many cases, parents try to measure the degree of their children's success with the grades or scores achieved in the classroom. Sometimes, parents also try to compare their children's score with their peers in the class. Experts believe that such comparisons could be wrong and counter-productive in the long run as intelligence or talent are those characters that cannot be created nor can one establish. Now, the big question is can parents raise their children's intelligence? The expert opinion and feelings are equally split, with some of the experts agreeing to this hypothesis while others totally disagreeing to the idea.

However, recent research findings suggest us that it is possible to raise and improve intelligence in children at least by some degrees, by adapting a series of techniques and tricks. IQ is of intellectual brightness when compared to your peers. A standard IQ test measures your intelligence by applying certain guidelines and principles. Most of the standard IQ tests are used to measure the level or degree of intelligence of a child depending on the age bracket. Under normal circumstances, the average IQ of person is around 100 while anything less than a score of 70 is not satisfactory.

Raising or improving your child's IQ is a difficult game as it involves manipulating your child's brain functions with a series of revolutionary techniques and methods. Improving your child's IQ means streamlining your child's thought process to suit and match a stimulating growing environment. One of the best methods to enhance your child's IQ is to create a stimulating environment in your home. It is possible to create a mentally stimulating and encouraging ambience for your child. Here are some basic methods that you can use to set up a stimulating environment in your home:

1. Use highly expressive facial gestures while talking to your child; this simple process will help create a highly stimulating environment for brain growth.

2. Reading bed time stories is another idea that helps your child understand text, language and voice signals.

3. Help your child to mingle with other children so that he or she understands the power of association as well as partnership.

4. Sign language and mimicking actions will help your child to learn a number of techniques like facial recognition, anticipation, guessing, thinking, analyzing and evaluating.

5. Just be there with your child whenever there is a real need. Children need support from their parents while they are doing homework or indulging themselves in some extra-curricular activities like painting and drawing.

6. Active children are happy children! Physical activity that includes sports and games will boost a spurt in blood flow to all sensitive parts of body like brain and nervous system. Fresh blood with plenty of oxygen will help improve their body enhance the power of concentration, attention and thinking. Physical activity in children can promote clear thinking, step up creativity, stimulate the brain power, enhance concentration and provide conditions that are conducive for raising IQ. Extended physical play sessions will also help their body develop fine motor and cognitive skills.

7. Playing chess and music are two of the well-recognized activities that can help raise IQ to higher levels. Introduce music and rhythm early in your child's life and watch your child perform better in class as well as other field of activities. Play chess with your child for some time everyday; chess is just like mental gymnastics and this intricate game helps your child develop the immense power of concentration as well as thinking process.

Though some experts believe that IQ tests are not the real indicators to measure the intelligence and talents of children, they do provide some basic insights on how your child can perform in some areas of scholastics and academics. But, parents should be cautious enough not to just rely on improving IQ in their children; successful children are those wonderful kids, who are not only better in their IQ scores, but also strong in their emotional and life skills.

Improving IQ in your children is an intensive activity that needs considerable amount of efforts and personal time from you. Improving IQ also means inching forward very slowly in a calibrated manner, so that you will not be rushing things in a hasty manner. Just remember that intelligence, talent and brilliance are the cherished birth gifts of God and there is a limit to what you can achieve with your children. Good nutrition, sound sleep, ample exercises and an array of brain boosting activities will help your children improve their IQ levels to certain extent.

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