Often, some pregnant mothers consult me about some prenatal education problems, and the most frequent questions are:
"Teacher, is prenatal education really useful?" I see that the neighbor's baby has not done any prenatal education, and he is very smart";
"Teacher, I see that my sister has been doing prenatal education, and now the child is no different from other children";
"Is prenatal education useful in the end?"
......
The latest neuroscience points out that the sounds, rhythms, and other forms of prenatal stimulation transmitted to the fetus not only leave an imprint on the fetus's brain, but actually shape the fetal brain structure.
Mario Dimon, a prominent neuroscientist at UCLA who pioneered the study, found through her research on rats that juveniles born in rats living in rich and varied environments have larger brains and are more capable of getting out of complex mazes.
Dimon points out that such a finding applies equally to humans.
Experimental results show that the rich environment can increase the volume of nerve cells in the existing cerebral cortex. Similar changes occur in both the cell itself, the cell membrane, or the dendrites and antennae.
But there will also be some people who wonder, across the amniotic fluid and belly, can the baby receive information from the outside world?
It is common to see people say, "Most of what babies in the womb hear is the sound of the mother's heartbeat and the flow of amniotic fluid, and it is impossible to hear the outside world at all", but Anthony de Casper, a psychologist at the University of North Carolina, tells us that this is not the case.
He once did an experiment in which 16 pregnant women recorded 3 stories they read aloud. In the last 6.5 weeks of pregnancy, each pregnant woman chooses a story to read aloud 3 times a day.
Within a few hours of the birth of the newborn, De Casper and his colleagues provided each baby with recordings of two stories, one that the mother had previously read aloud every day, and one of the other two stories; The results showed that 13 out of 16 newborns adjusted their pumping rhythms after hearing familiar stories.
It can be said that although the fetus is still in the stomach at this time, it can already receive various information from the outside world and store it in the brain.
Whether it is sight, hearing or pain, the fetus's ability to perceive, consciousness and remember is not established after birth.
Of course, many mothers will still have questions about this, "Other people's children have not done prenatal education, I look very good", which is also one of the reasons why many mothers have doubts about the usefulness of prenatal education.
Is prenatal education useful? The source of the problem is that we can't see the effect of prenatal education in the short term, but the journal "China Clinical New Medicine" published a paper in 2019, "The Impact of Maternal Pregnancy Prenatal Education on Preschool Children's Behavioral Problems", which answered our question.
The paper surveyed 289 kindergarten preschool children aged 3 to 4 years old who had behavioral problems, and used a self-compiled questionnaire to investigate their mothers' prenatal education during pregnancy, and found that:
The more frequently musical prenatal education and language prenatal education, the lower the score of the six factors in the behavioral problems of preschool children (character problems, learning problems, psychosomatic problems, hyperactivity-impulsivity, anxiety, hyperactivity index);
The more frequently prenatal education is touched, the lower the score of the two factors (character problems and learning problems) in the child's psychological and behavioral problems;
Lower scores indicate better behavior and fewer behavioral problems in children.
Conclusion: Prenatal education during pregnancy, especially music prenatal education and language prenatal education, is conducive to reducing the occurrence of bad behavior problems in preschool children.
▲ Interested mothers can go to CNKI to search for this paper
These scientific studies tell us without a doubt that "various stimuli in the fetal stage will have a critical impact on the growth of the fetus and the development of the brain", but as a sexual prenatal education teacher who has been practicing for nearly a decade, I still want to clearly tell parents that the role of prenatal education is not only intellectual training or improvement, but more importantly, to cultivate the intimacy, love and trust of the fetus.
Know that the first time your baby experiences emotions of love, rejection, anxiety, and joy is in the first school of life, the mother's womb.
There, the fetus, as the "teacher", needs the acceptance and guidance of the mother, the "teacher". We have to think about whether he likes my way? What kind of life nutrition does he prefer? Is he happy or sad now? Does he feel calm and tranquil, or is he stressed?
If we want to become the nourisher and guide of the life of the fetus, we need to understand the fetus and the content of the prenatal education.
It is necessary to understand the temperament prenatal education, because it is derived from the traditional Chinese culture of the prenatal education system, while integrating western research results in psychology, pedagogy, gestation and so on, which is very suitable for future-oriented Chinese mothers.