Play: How It Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination

As a parent we all want what is best for our children and as a result we find ways to best equip them with the skills they need to succeed in life.


To help achieve this there are a number if topics that we, as parents, need to understand, these being

• Our role as a Parent
• Understanding Your Child's Development
• The importance of play in child development
• Temperament and Your Child
• Developing Self-Esteem
• Essential Parenting Skills
• Emotionally preparing your child
• Chill out time for Parents

to name but a few topics. Hopefully these will get you to start to think how you can help your child develop.

Regardless of your child's age, all parents want to help their children to reach developmental milestones. Whether it be fine or gross motor skills or speech and language development, there are several activities and ways a parent can encourage their child's development.

Child development begins at an early stage as babies, where they simply act as human sponges soaking up everything around them and providing them with the right stimulus can get them off to a great start. As they progress into toddlers and become more independent, choosing the right play will help motor development, eye-hand coordination and vision, cognitive skills, hearing / listening / vocal senses, social / emotional development and potentially unlocking their creative / imaginative skills. Better start putting the paint and crayons away!

As they get older, teaching them how to recognize what they want and how to set goals to achieve what they want is one of the most valuable lesson you can give them to become successful in life.
Like myself and many other parents, after years of parenting, we find ourselves reflecting back over time, wishing "If I could do it over again I would do a better job". If we could only had the experience and wisdom earlier, then perhaps we could have given our children better start. Could I have done this or shown them that, then perhaps they could have ended up being stronger and better persons?  Isn't hindsight a wonderful thing ?

Thanks to the Internet, information for parents is now more readily available making child development simple or at least less daunting.  That information covers personal experiences, good and bad, successes and mistakes and all the stages of child development, from birth, toddlers, teens and through to adulthood. As this information is often widely spread on different web sites all over the Internet and other resources such as books, articles and other 'tools', this often takes a great deal of time and effort to locate and often patience is the key to finding the right resource for your needs. From personal experience, it would have been nice to have a one stop information site that brought together all the information and resources in a single useful location.

For this article I have set two goals. Firstly, to get you to think about what you can do to help your child develop and secondly to guide you to those resources and products that will help to achieve your goal. Being a successful parent doesn't mean having to win awards, it simply means doing the best you can for your child, with the best resources. I hope that by reading this article you are taking steps in the right direction.

Michael J Gettings is an IT worker, who is combining a long time interest in Internet Marketing with information sharing, gained through personal experience and other resources. Visit the first of these information / resource sharing sites at and share your experiences.

Child Development Made Simple [http://childdevelopmentmadesimple.com/]

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