Baby Rattle – A very simple and basic toy is one of the most important a child should have during first year of his/her development. And as a first time or as an experienced parent “baby rattles” are one of the first in our list of toys.
It is our love for our children that we try to give them the best toys we can afford. But we should also try to give them the toys which aids their physical and mental development and one of the aim this is the aim of this blog it to talk about such toys and their benefits.
Ok, we were talking about baby rattles. Do you know that this simple looking toy is one of the best toy for babies in this age group for their “Cognitive Development”. This is a new term. So lets talk about Cognitive Development first.
What is Cognitive Development?
Wikipedia defines cognitive development as “Cognitive development is a field of study in neuroscience and psychology focusing on a child’s development in terms of information processing, conceptual resources, perceptual skill, language learning, and other aspects of brain development and cognitive psychology compared to an adult’s point of view.”
Wow, that is quite a technical definition. Lets try to put this into a simple language. So Cognitive development means that how a child understands and learns from the environment around him/her. So it is building of childs learning skills such as attention, memory and thinking with the help of what is going around him/her. These are skills are important for the baby to analyze and remember things and take decisions.
So thinking and learning skills can be improved by proper training and practice and this is where toys come in.
There is a very nice article of healthofchildren on this topic. You can refer to this article whet you find some time.
So how does a baby rattles helps?
Baby rattles are simple toys which are
- easy to grasp
- can make sound
- and come in variety of beautiful colors.
So how does they help in learning or rather “Cognitive Learning”. The key concepts in Cognitive learning are Tracking, Perception, Cause and Effect and Object performance.
An infant has the inherent reflex of grasping. It’s a born reflex. But the ability to find the object and then grasp it requires hand-to-eye coordination. That is to recognize the object, track and finally grasp it. How a rattle can help in improving this skill. Just hold the rattle near the babies face and slowly move the rattle. You will notice that you child is trying to follow this movement and may be also try to catch hold of it.The comers perception. Babies need to perceive the world around them to improve their ability of sound, smell, taste, sight and feel of an object. Example when baby holds a rattle it may feel soft or hard based on the type. Different rattles makes different type of sound or may be different color. She/he will try to differentiate rattles based on these parameters. All this is aiding her development. Cause and affect, how does it help there. For example when baby shakes the rattle it makes sound. It is a simple but important learning for your baby. Object Performance is a technical term. It is actually the ability of the baby to realize if something exists or not. It’s like playing hide and seek. Hide the rattle under the blanket and then find and show him/her. This will help her/him to understand when the object exists and when its no there.
The aim of the post was to initiate you towards more scientific thinking while buying toys for your kids. We hope that we have been successful! There are lot of information on internet on this topic if you find this interesting.
Let us know your comments!
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