Babies Blog

Many parents enjoy playing music for their unborn child. So does your prenatal baby hear the songs you are playing for them? Researchers in Hungary believe that the answer is a resounding YES. From Mozart to Metallica your baby does indeed hear what you are playing.

What Your Baby Hears & How It Could Help Doctors

Apparently, even at such a young age your child’s brain has the ability to register rhythmic patterns. Changes in beat and melody are all picked up by your baby even when fast asleep, and they do it automatically. This is all according to a recently released study by The Hungarian Academy of Sciences, coordinated by Dr. Susan Denham, of Plymouth University. When researchers conducted their experiment they could tell whether or not the unborn baby was able to recognize when key beats were missing by observing changes in brain activity.

Why is this good news? Among other things, the ability to recognize musical beats and patterns could help doctors to diagnose potential cognitive disorders in babies before they are born. This type of careful prenatal screening and diagnosis could allow doctors to treat potential developmental issues early on before your baby is even born. Dr Denham also believes that by exposing your child to music at this stage of life will make your toddler more perceptive of rhythmic speech patterns that will assist in developing language skills.

This study seems to validate something that many parents felt they already knew about early childhood development. So sing to your unborn child and play them lots of beautiful music. They are definitely listening to the world around them and what better world than one filled with music!

Where To Find More Info

If you would like to find out more information related to this study you may want to visit the University Of Plymouth page on this prenatal study.

According to an eFlux Media article by Alice Carver on autism , The National Institute on Mental Health or NIHM has decided not to move forward with an autism study that proposed mercury in children’s vaccines was a cause of autism. The main goal of the proposed study was to evaluate the effectiveness of a controversial treatment called Chelation Therapy.

Read the main article from eFlux and the Wikipedia article I linked above for more info.

Finding the right curriculum for infants and baby can be difficult to say the least. The best lessons are those that are geared towards your child’s developement during their second year. Ideally you want to keep everything fun and only do learning projects when your toddler wants to.

When we have been looking for age appropriate learning material for our child the best material we have come across are the toddler lesson plans found here. Take a look through the list, read the reviews and decide what books and curriculum you feel is best for your toddler.

You may find some of the information in this article on Wings Of Ink useful about how television might inhibit toddler learning.

Let us know your opinion.