Reading to children at night, responding to their smiles with a smile, returning their vocalizations with one of your own, touching them, holding them - all of these further a child's brain development and future potential, even in the earliest months.
Interpretation
Engaging with children through reading and interaction enhances their cognitive development and future abilities.
This quote emphasizes the importance of nurturing a child's early development through interactive activities such as reading, smiling, and physical touch. T. Berry Brazelton highlights how these seemingly simple acts significantly contribute to a child's brain development and lay a strong foundation for their potential as they grow.
In practice
During a parenting workshop, a speaker might use this quote to highlight the importance of engaging with children.
Every time you give a parent a sense of success or of empowerment, you're offering it to the baby indirectly. Because every time a parent looks at that baby and says 'Oh, you're so wonderful,' that baby just bursts with feeling good about themselves.
To read as if your life depended on it would mean to let into your reading your beliefs, the swirl of your dreamlife, the physical sensations of your ordinary carnal life; and simultaneously, to allow what you're reading to pierce routines, safe and impermeable, in which ordinary carnal life is tracked, charted, channeled. Then, what of the right answers, the so-called multiple-choice examination sheet with the number 2 pencil to mark one choice and one choice only?
Take the example of my daughter. A lot of people were speaking out about education when the Taliban were bombing schools in Swat Valley, but Malala's voice was like a crescendo. It spread all around the world. She was the smallest but her voice was the biggest, because she was speaking for herself.
I went to a segregated school; I was born a Negro, not a black man.
But with the library, it's like catnip, I suppose: you begin to run in circles because there's so much to look at and read.
How absurd that our students tuck their cell phones, BlackBerrys, iPads, and iPods into their backpacks when they enter a classroom and pull out a tattered textbook.
Let us take our children seriously! Everything else follows from this... only the best is good enough for a child.
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