Raise your child is uniquely primed to learn during the first three years of life. Interacting with you and the surrounding world helps build your baby’s brain and encourages communication, problem-solving, and other lifelong skills. But raising a smart baby doesn’t mean buying fancy flashcards. Instead, your baby needs to spend plenty of quality time with caring adults. From reading together to applying positive parenting skills, here are a few simple tips to help make your baby smart.
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It doesn’t take a genius to help children reach their intellectual potential – just a loving, involved parent or caregiver. Here are some fun and easy ways to encourage your little smarty-pants.
Baby smarts, explained
Your baby’s brain is a sponge, uniquely ready to soak up information from birth. During the first three years of life, new connections are forming between your baby’s brain cells at a rate of more than 1 million per second. Interactions with parents and caregivers influence which connections get formed – and which don’t.
Babies have up to twice as many synapses – or connections between neurons that send messages in the brain – as an adult. (These gradually get pruned back until adulthood.) An infant’s brain size doubles in the first 12 months of life and will have reached 80 percent of its adult volume by age 3.
Your baby’s interactions with you and the outside world grows their brain and shapes how it processes information, building neural connections that teach essential lifelong skills including communication, self-control, and problem-solving. Encouraging your baby’s learning and development has a profound impact on their intelligence for years to come.
While that might feel like an overwhelming responsibility, the good news is you don’t need fancy or expensive gear to nurture your baby’s brain. What your baby really needs is quality time with you and other adult caregivers to play, experience the world, and explore.
How to raise a smart baby
Encouraging your baby’s cognitive and social development boils down to spending plenty of quality time with caring adults.
Do your best to model the type of behavior and communication you want your baby to learn, and find ways to interact and play together that you both enjoy. Here are a few specific tips and techniques that can help you raise a smart baby.
Bond with your baby
The brain is wired to seek safety; if you don’t feel safe, you can’t learn. Your responses to your baby’s cues actually help foster your child’s cognitive and social development.
Building a strong relationship with your baby creates a sense of security and self-esteem. This helps protect against stressful experiences in childhood, which in turn improves a child’s chances of success at school.
Skin-to-skin contact helps build that sense of safety, as does face-to-face time, eye contact, baby massage, baby wearing, and mirroring or mimicking a baby’s movements and coos. It’s important to respond when your baby is crying (don’t worry, there’s no such thing as a spoiled baby).
Model strong relationships
Modeling a strong relationship with your partner is one of the best ways to make your baby feel secure. Building healthy friendships is also critical. If you’re a single parent, your relationships with friends and family members are beneficial for you and your baby.
That said, it can be tough to prioritize your relationships when you’re a new parent battling sleep deprivation and baby-care responsibilities.
If you and your partner are struggling to manage all your new parenting duties, try to write them down and come to an agreement about how to divvy them up. Try to be supportive in emotionally charged moments.
If you do have an argument in front of your baby, don’t worry, it happens. Just be sure to restore that sense of safety by making up in front of your baby, too. Babies don’t understand the words, but they’re affected by the emotions between you and your loved ones. How you manage your disagreements helps teach your child how to handle conflicts in the future.
Narrate your day
Experts recommend talking to your baby a lot. The more their brain is exposed to language, the easier language learning becomes.
Research suggests that infants who are spoken to more often are more efficient at processing words and have larger vocabularies by 2 years old, and have higher IQs by 3 years old. By the time they’re in middle school, toddlers who hear more language seem to retain better language and cognitive skills as well as higher IQs.
So how do you plant the seed for strong language development? Talk to your baby, starting from birth, as often as possible. You might not feel inspired to talk to an infant who hasn’t started babbling yet, but don’t let your little one’s silence stop you.
Not sure what to say? Try narrating your day. Vocalizing the steady stream of thoughts running through your head out loud boosts your baby’s brainpower, as you’ll naturally use all sorts of words that your baby can connect to the world around them. By sprinkling in colorful descriptors like “red car” and “extremely strong coffee,” you’ll spice up the vocabulary your baby hears.
Use rhymes and “baby talk”
Another way to encourage your baby’s communication skills? Rhyming. There’s a reason so many children’s books, songs, and games use rhyming words: Rhymes help your baby learn language. In fact, research suggests infants are naturally able to perceive rhymes, and that rhyme perception predicts a child’s vocabulary at 18 months old.
The tone of your voice bolsters your baby’s language skills, too. You know the baby-friendly, sing-songy voice that adults tend to use around babies? It’s higher pitched, with exaggerated vowels (think: ‘Helloo, baay-bee!’).
Researchers call it “parentese,” and it’s an excellent way to help a baby’s brain learn language. The tone helps infants to separate sounds into categories, and the high pitch is easier for them to imitate. Research suggests that speaking to your baby in parentese improves language skills in the second year.
That doesn’t mean using nonsensical sounds and words. Instead, use grammatical speech with real words, with exaggerated vowels and tones of voice.
Invest in face time
Feel like making silly faces at your baby for hours on end? Go for it – you’re boosting your baby’s brain development. Research shows that infants begin recognizing facial expressions by 3 months old, with a more nuanced understanding of emotions at just 5 months of age. Plus, babies usually find faces more interesting than toys.
Emotion is one of the first ways babies communicate with us. Being able to read facial expressions is the cornerstone of strong nonverbal communication skills, setting your baby up for better teamwork, fewer fights, and stronger long-term relationships as an adult.
Limit “bucket” time
Many babies spend too much time in buckets: strollers, car seats, and the like – anything that restricts a baby’s movement. Sometimes this can’t be helped: Car seats are always essential inside the car, and there’s nothing wrong with walks in the stroller or some time in a baby swing. But too much time in buckets can impact a baby’s learning.
Why? Because babies need to be able to respond to the stimuli around them. To do that, they need to be able to move freely and look to the front, to the side, and behind them. This sets the stage for a stronger ability later to concentrate and focus.
To boost physical and cognitive development, it’s crucial to give your baby tummy time multiple times a day and plenty of other opportunities to move freely. For lots of great advice on how you can make tummy time more fun check out Meeting Physical Milestones Through Play, BabyCenter’s premium course about using play to foster your baby’s healthy development.
The World Health Organization (WHO) recommends that babies and toddlers not be restrained for more than one hour at a time.
The group also says that babies under 1 year old need varied physical activity several times every day, and should spend at least 30 minutes doing tummy time (if they haven’t yet started crawling) to help improve muscle strength and motor skills. For kids ages 1 to 4, the recommendation is to spend at least 180 minutes being active every day.
Point and describe
Pointing is an important developmental milestone in your baby’s first year. At around 9 or 10 months old, babies will start pointing out objects to you – it’s one of the earliest ways they communicate.
Pointing is a form of “joint attention,” meaning it gets both of you to pay attention to the same thing at the same time. It means your child is developing the ability to relate to you about something (or someone) outside of the two of you.
What can parents do to build this skill? If your child points something out to you, use words to describe what they want. (“You want a banana!”) Also point things out to your baby and talk about what you see. Your baby may not understand all the words you’re saying, but you’re building your baby’s brain for more complex communication in the months and years to come.
For example, head to the zoo, where you can both give your attention to an animal like a polar bear. Point at it, talk about it, and describe it to promote social, cognitive, and language development.
Know when it’s time to take a break
Every baby has a different personality: Some like lots of stimulation, while others prefer a calmer environment. Watch your baby for signs of being tired or overwhelmed, such as fussing or looking away. If they’re disengaging, don’t try to force their attention. Instead, give your baby a few minutes to process what they’ve learned, or put them down for a nap.
Read together
You can start reading to your baby every day, starting from birth. In fact, the Pediatrics strongly recommends reading to your child starting in infancy – and the more the better. Research shows regularly reading to your baby supports development in parts of the brain involved in language skills, literacy, and imagination. It also strengthens your baby’s relationship with you and boosts their emotional skills.
Some research suggests that children who are read five books per day starting in infancy hear, on average, 1.4 million more words by the time they’re 5 years old than those whose parents didn’t regularly read to them. But every little bit every day adds up: Even kids who were read one book per day heard 290,000 more words by the age of 5 than kids who didn’t consistently read with their parents. So it’s wise to make reading a book together part of your baby’s bedtime routine.
Limit screen time
Any time they’re plopped in front of a screen, kids are inactive and less engaged with the world. While older kids can benefit from limited high-quality TV or computer use, babies don’t learn from sitting in front of a screen. Also, screen time takes away from time that could be spent playing and communicating when their brains are developing most rapidly.
That’s why the WHO recommend babies under the age of 18 months get no screen time at all (aside from video chats with a loved one). The peditrics recommends that kids ages 2 to 5 have a maximum of just one hour of screen time per day.
When you do introduce screens to your child, choose high-quality programming and watch together, discussing and explaining what you watched. Also be sure to continue to incorporate lots of reading and play throughout the rest of your day.
Eat meals together
Kids love routines, from bedtime to mealtime. And some research has found that kids who eat at least three meals per week with their family are healthier – meaning they’re more likely to have healthy (and not disordered) eating patterns and be a healthy weight.
Eating together is also a chance for your baby to watch you and your partner communicate and problem-solve. This supports their language skills, relationships, and social skills for years to come. So designate one room for eating, turn off all screens, and serve yourselves a variety of foods to model healthy eating.
Use positive discipline techniques
Your little one’s social skills are as important to school success as the early learning and literacy skills you’ve been working so hard to build. Positive parenting techniques help encourage your child’s all-important emotional regulation skills.
Positive parenting is a discipline method that promotes healthy emotional development while teaching kids how to behave. In infants and babies, this means setting a good example with your behavior, limiting use of the word “no” to dangerous situations, and choosing positive over negative language when possible (“gently pet the doggie” instead of “don’t hit the dog!”).
As your baby grows into a toddler (and starts challenging your patience with more defiant behavior), you can incorporate other positive parenting techniques. Pay attention to your child, catch them being good, and applaud behavior with specific praise (“I like how you said please!”).
Also set clear and consistent limits and follow through with them. (For example, take a toy away if your child keeps throwing it.) Never use physical punishment: Some research suggests regular spankings may affect a child’s brain development and even IQ later on.
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