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Our next guest is here with some sage advice for new parents. Get your babies out of the
stroller and get them to exercise. Author Janet Doman, says it could make them smarter.
She is the Director for the Institutes for the Achievement of Human Potential. Her new
book is called How Smart is your Baby? and Janet Doman is here with us now, a pleasure
to meet you. A pleasure to be here. You know I've heard about all the baby einstein tapes
and whatever and its just everywhere for making your baby smarter. How does exercise help
making your baby smarter? You know exercise may not be a big enough word. I need exercise.
We all need exercise. but the baby really needs opportunity to gain the abiity to move
and that's a lot more important than exercise. What do you mean gain the opportunity to move?
We're always waiting for those benchmarks, sitting up, crawling, you know you've said
an important thing we're waiting for the benchmark, but it's really our job to make the benchmark
happen by giving opportunity to the baby . when you think about it, the baby nine months in
utero, the baby is moving. he can kick, he can push, he can even do little summsault,
in utero but then when he's born all of a sudden hes up against gravity, hes in a big
chubby body and hes got one gravity pushing him down, hes got to learn almost immediately
how do I move in this new environment. I've been free for nine months i've been swimming
all around having a great time and all of a sudden he can't move very well and we have
to make an important choice, are we going to help them move. are we going to put them
in a kind of user friendly environment where he can move? and use all that he learned in
utero or are we going to bundle him up are we going to put him in a wheelchair, put him
in a baby carriage, put him in a carseat, so that all day long he can't move it turns
out that if we do that to him, and that's very much the modern practice to bundle the
baby up from the neck down he's swaddled so he can't move, when we do that he loses the
abilities that he had in utero to move. and he puts on weight very rapidly so by the time
hes two or three months he cant move at all. he thinks the only way I move is if the big
ones pick me up and move me. but if right from the birth we give them a chance he'll
crawl in the first 24 hours.
Well I know you were talking about the swaddling that's the first thing you really learn from
the nurses in the hospital. How to swaddle the baby. How do we give the baby the opportunity
to experience almost right after birth. What do we do? Its not like uh you first of all
you don't swaddle him. we get out of his way. you dont pile on heavy clothes we put him
in as little clothing as possible. much better to make a warm environment that's good for
the baby get the baby down on a warm smooth floor or a little matt or a little cushioned
area, but has to be smooth not carpeted because that will be too much friction for him to
move if we do that right from birth, he will begin to use his arms and legs on his belly
to move forward he has to make a thousand experiments to figure out how can I move.
how does this make a child smarter where are the statistics on this? well movement is critical
to all of life. and if you want to develop your vision you need to move through space
to the degree he moves through space he has to look where hes going, he has to use two
eyes together and that's very important in getting depth perception, so movement and
when he crawls he starts to look where hes going then he starts to push himself up to
creep he has to calculate where am i in space or I'm going to hit that chair. So movement
really develops like vision much more rapidly it also helps his respiration. a new born
baby cannot breathe very well. all mothers know this, mothers are very attentive to this
and they're correct to be because breathing is critical to life. the baby who has time
on the floor to move develops much deeper more regular breathing more rapidly. he sleeps
better he even eats better as he gets to be 8 or 9 months old he'll start to eat a little
earlier than the baby who doesn't move. Janet we're running out of time but it also reinforces
the importance of the parent rather than a gadget or an expensive toy being the most
important first teacher to the baby absolutely Mother is the best teacher that the baby will
ever have in his whole life. no one will ever compare to mother she doesn't need the wheelchairs
the gadgets the gizmos, the walkers the jumpers. one mother, one baby, and the floor, as much
time as possible, bundle your baby up only when you absolutely have to . otherwise set
them free and we're not excluding dads but mom is the primary care giver in the babys
first especially in those first couple of months and years. very much so. Janet Doman,
again the author of How Smart is Your Baby, thank you ,, a pleasure.