By Sue Shekut, Owner, Working Well Massage, Licensed Massage Therapist, Certified Wellness Coach, ACSM Personal Trainer
Are you a new parent or a parent of a young child? Do you ever wonder what is going on in your child’s mind? One book recommended by some Montessori schools can tell you more about your child’s brain development and inner world: What’s Going on in There?: How the Brain and Mind Develop in the First Five Years of Life by Lise Eliot.
Amazon reviewers summed the book up better than Publisher’s Weekly so I am reposting excerpts of some of the top reviews of this book.
One Amazon reviewer provides an overview of the book contents:
How the brain is developed
Prenatal risk factors
The special benefits of breast milk for brain development
What newborns can hear
Infant walkers don’t help infants walk
How to encourage a baby’s motor development
Stress, attachment, and brain development
How the brain store memories?
Language in the 1st eighteen months
The role of genes
The role of environment
The chapters in the book include:
Chapter 1 Nature or Nurture? It’s All in the Brain
Chapter 2 The Basic Biology of Brain Development
Chapter 3 Prenatal Influences on the Developing Brain
Chapter 4 How Birth Affects the Brain
Chapter 5 The Importance of Touch
Chapter 6 Why Babies Love to be Bounced: The Precocious Sense of Balance and Motion
Chapter 7 The Early World of Smell
Chapter 8 Taste, Milk, and the Origins of Food Preference
Chapter 9 Wiring Up the Visual Brain
Chapter 10 How Hearing Evolves
Chapter 11 Motor Milestones
Chapter 12 Social Emotional Growth
Chapter 13 The Emergence of Memory
Chapter 14 Language and the Developing Brain
Chapter 15 How Intelligence Grows in the Brain
Chapter 16 Nature, Nurture, and Sex Differences in Intellectual Development
Chapter 17 How to Raise a Smarter Child
Audry’s (who is an ex-reference librarian and ex-reference librarian who reads and reviews adult and children’s fiction) writes in her Amazon review that “Subtitled ‘How the Brain and Mind Develop in the First Five Years of Life’ and written by a neuroscientist mother of three, this book benefits as much from its organization as the material it presents. Research, supplemented with anecdotes, is divided into chapters based on sense or function and then detailed chronologically within each section…This is one of those books you should write in — underline, highlight, take notes — because if you are indeed interested in using this information to understand your child’s progressive developmental changes, you will be referring to it often. The author presents a lot of research material in accessible language and style, but the book is dense and is not a day-to-day how-to guide. You will not read about colic or how to tell a cold from the flu, but you will learn why your four-month old prefers a little salt in her mashed potatoes or why most of us can’t recall anything that happened before we were three-and-a-half years old. Because there is a lot of information, this is not one of the easiest books you will ever read, but it is eminently worthwhile. The author not only synopsizes a lot of research for us, but also defines the limits of research and/or those issues which are still under debate or not yet fully understood, and discusses the evolutionary implications of various developmental changes.”
To read more or to order the book on Amazon, click this link. Costs about $13.60 for the paperback. About $20 for the hardcover.
Related articles
- M Is For Montessori (momblognetwork.com)
- Improve Communication (childrearinghelp.wordpress.com)
- When do human beings start to dream? (scientificamerican.com)
- What Is Brain Plasticity? (brainz.org)
- Small Art for Little Minds (ecofabulous.com)
- Tootling for Right Brain Development. (bagpipeband.wordpress.com)
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