Why travel long distances with such a small baby? The hearts of the parents and parents have been hesitant to fill the question mark, and the grandparents have listed many reasons for opposition: such a small child can't remember anything, and there is no use in traveling; children who spend too much time on the transportation will cry; they are not used to eating when they go out; they are not used to eating; sleep time is disrupted; children are too hard, or comfortable at home; in case they are sick, they are in trouble; and so on. In fact, it is not wrong to say that these are all possible situations, and they are also the places that parents who travel with children need special attention. But these are not insurmountable difficulties, and they are not a reason for keeping children at home.
1, do not evaluate the child's growth utilitarianly
Now every time I encounter a problem in early childhood education, I always hear words like "useful" and "useless". Traveling is not like a baby learning a song or knowing a word, there are visible "results". Some babies learn English words, memorize ancient poems, and perform their various skills at family gatherings, and parents are proud of the atmosphere of praise for their children. We often focus on teaching children an obvious skill, but the "big education" that really affects the baby's temperament, personality, and way of dealing with people is often overlooked.
English words can not be learned again, ancient poems memorized but can not understand, and eventually will forget; and the baby lives in a big environment, all people and things have a subtle impact on them, although subtle but can follow them for a lifetime. During the trip, the baby met adults and children of various types and even different cultural backgrounds, communicated with them in their own unique way, learned about others, and knew themselves. Travel is more of a reflection of lifestyle, and babies are more focused on observing life and more willing to explore the unknown world.
These may sound mysterious to a one- or two-year-old baby, but the old saying is brilliantly said - three years old looks old. Early education today is very different from what it was two or three decades ago. Babies don't just need to eat and drink Lasa, and a growing body of research shows that early education has an irreversible impact on a person's life. So, don't dwell on the question of whether it's useful or useless to travel with your baby, and take your own faith on the road!
2, the stimulation of the brain is never too much
Since the birth of the baby, every time I do child care, the doctor says the most is "stimulate the brain". The way to stimulate the baby's brain is to let them feel more things with their senses, see more, listen more, smell more, and touch more. Living in a fixed environment, it is difficult for babies to see and hear big changes every day, and everything exposed to during travel is completely new, and the stimulation of the brain is all-round. In terms of my experience traveling with my baby, Bubao's cognitive abilities grow rapidly during the trip, and every time I come back from a trip for about ten days, there will be a big change. Don't underestimate the babies at this stage, they often have amazing performances.
When my baby was 1 year and 5 months old, I took her to Guangzhou Chimelong Wildlife Park. Chimelong tickets are expensive, and many of them are designed and popular science education is more suitable for older children, which is not within my options for taking Bubao out. But at that time, I was in Guangzhou, and in order to accompany two friends who had come from afar and brought their children, I took Bu Bao with me.
There are more than a dozen species of monkeys and orangutans in the zoo, their coat color is different, the shape and size are very different: the big orangutans are much larger than the adults, and the small monkeys are even the size of the palms. Such complex and changeable appearance characteristics, let adults to judge the type of must think about it, we did not deliberately teach her the difference between the signs of the orangutan and the monkey, I think she will not understand.
However, the baby can summarize through observation, and when he goes home to see the photos, he can accurately identify which monkeys and which are orangutans. What surprised me even more was that in her picture books, such as the book "Got on the Bus" in the "Crackling Series", monkeys and orangutans with small appearances appeared on the bus at the same time, and she was still able to clearly identify, and even saw orangutans doing a hands-pounding action, which is exactly what we saw in the safari park an improvisational performance of many tourists.
Speaking of which, my focus is not whether the baby can remember this "knowledge", but whether she can understand more than other babies, but the strong self-learning ability and self-development ability she shows during the trip, which will make her useful for a lifetime. Imagine that the baby can constantly receive more brain stimulation, is it a state of winning at the starting line? I'm a little utilitarian again, but what I want to say is that traveling must be very beneficial to the baby.
3. What scientists say
If individual, simple empirical arguments are not convincing, let's see what scientists who have long studied infant cognitive development have to say.
There are many people who study early infant cognition and early education. In the 1950s, Swiss child psychologist Jean Piaget proposed that babies go through a period of inability to think before the age of one and a half to two: they can recognize things, laugh at them, crawl toward them, fiddle with objects, but they do not form concepts, nor can they describe the world with abstract symbols. They can neither imagine objects they can see nor recall the past. This theory has dominated the field for many years, but now, such a theory has been completely overturned by more research!
The Czech psychologist Wertheimer concluded through experiments that babies can turn their heads to find the source of sound from birth, although it does not mean that they have a special desire to see something when they hear foreign sounds, but it shows the mechanism by which they can make themselves learn quickly.
In fact, the rapid development of the brain nervous system in infancy and the continuous improvement of the information processing system have laid the foundation for the development of infants' social cognitive ability. At the beginning of the 21st century, researchers Liston and Kagan showed that infants' memory capacity and spatial localization ability developed very rapidly between 1 and 2 years old, which was closely related to the maturation of the anterior frontal lobe brain region of the brain.
Every child has great potential. This potential is determined by genes, manifested as individual differences in infants, providing premise and possibilities for children's development, and the environmental impact and educational guidance in infancy can bring these potentials into play. A growing body of research shows that education in infancy is of great significance in promoting the development of infant temperament and intellectual development.
As a result of focusing on early education, infants' rhythm, adaptability, response intensity, and persistence can be enhanced; their sensitivity to external stimuli is reduced, their adaptability is enhanced, they are more regular, their attention is focused, and they are more willing to accept new things. At the same time, the brain is the fastest-developing and most malleable in infancy.
Under the guidance of early initiative, the baby's intelligence and cognitive ability can be rapidly developed. Infant cognition and judgment ability are formed and improved in continuous social interaction, which is also the process of infants using others and external social understanding to form self-cognition.
So, back to the point, infancy is not just about eating and drinking Lasa. Every trip they make will be deeply imprinted in the brain, and even if they do not form a long-term memory, they will certainly play their due role in the formation of their temperament, intellectual development and cognitive ability development.
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