Important information new parents are rarely told

1. Movement grows your baby’s brain, increasing the connections between neurons. Your baby has almost all the neurons in place at birth and develops connections between them at a very fast rate –at its most rapid 700 synapses are formed per second!
2. Your baby will go through two periods of neural pruning to make their brain more efficient. One at around the age of two and the other in early adolescence. The brain works on a ‘use it or lose it’ basis!
3. Your baby’s sensory systems are in place from an early stage to enable your baby to interact with their environment. Babies explore and discover the world through their senses. They can see, hear, touch, smell and taste from birth, although these senses develop and refine as they grow. Within hours of birth a baby can identify their mother’s voice from those of other women.
4. Your baby needs multi-sensory learning to develop social, emotional and cognitive skills. A rich, loving environment provides the best conditions for a baby to fully acquire these skills.
5. Development is not a blank slate. It is dependent on a combination of genes and the experiences of the child. The genes provide the ‘hardware’ of development but the baby’s early experiences are the ‘software’.
6. It’s important to give your baby time on the floor, both on their back and their tummy. These give the baby the opportunity to develop muscle control through integrating the primitive reflexes as they learn to move consciously.
7. Research has shown that ‘tummy time’ relates to babies achieving the four motor milestones of rolling, belly crawling, crawling on hands and knees and sitting.