Smart Baby, Clever Child: Brain-Building Games, Activities, and Ideas to Stimulate Your Baby's Mind Paperback – January 1, 2003

One of the best books I have read to help baby's development. a must have to new parents who don't know how to "play" with a baby.

I returned this book because it was outdated and had a .50 cent sticker on it

After raising my own children from birth and then teaching school students for over 30 years, I must confess that  Smart Baby, Clever Child: Brain-building games and activities  provides excellent activities to prepare a newborn for experiences s/he must undergo to be prepared for life's challenges. My very first teaching assignment was a classroom filled with second graders. I could easily pick out the children whose parents had spent precious time interacting with them.Valentine Dmitriev's guidance book can provide new parents with very basic games and activities necessary to "build the brain" of a newborn. Upon leaving the womb, the basic instinct for an infant is to suckle at its mother's breast. This is an extremely critical time for mom and dad to bond with the newborn. During this time, if parents talk or sing to the baby and touch its forehead, face, or stroke its tiny limbs, the infant will develop a loving relationship with both parents, not just mother. Even at this early age (4 weeks), an infant can be trained to follow both the mother and father's face from side to side provided their faces are relatively close.Toward the book's beginning,  Smart Baby, Clever Child  provides a fascinating lesson exploring "How Baby Learns." When parents realize the critical stages of brain development that are taking place within their baby's skull, they can follow many of the book's suggestions to encourage their child to reach out for rattles, toys, mom and dad's faces. It talks of ways to encourage gross motor development by taking the baby's hands and pulling slightly to reach a rattle or favorite toy.What is extremely critical is this: from birth onward, parents must start verbal communication with their infant. As their baby begins to follow their faces up or down--side to side,  Smart Baby, Clever Child  suggests saying or singing little ditties to accompany the activity such as: "Baby, baby, what do you see? I see you and you see me."Along with parents own simple rhymes, Dmitriev suggests using durable books (plastic or cardboard) with pictures of animals, apples, teddy bears, baby dolls, and other playthings that are becoming familiar. It is critical that books be introduced at an early age even if the child does nothing more than hold the book and mouth its pages. It is equally important that a parent or caregiver points to each word. Smart Baby, Clever Child  talks about over stimulation, particularly by electronic toys because a very young child can be easily overwhelmed. This can lead to an unhappy crying baby that literally shuts down and withdraws from the world. Dmitdriev suggests that, buying anything electronic, be bought with great care. Instead, she would suggest that parents play interactive games involving language with the child when the opportunity arises.Often, when driving with baby confined backwards in the rear seat (by law and for safety), this is the perfect time to sing or talk with a youngster about what they will see at the zoo, or at grandpas or about lights or colors. Later when the seat faces the front, a parent can introduce STOP signs and red and green lights, or the simple sign BORON.I would highly recommend,  Smart Baby, Clever Child  to any parent of a newborn because the book does exactly what it claims. It teaches parents and caregivers how to use powerful brain-building activities and games, to prepare an infant for the next stage in life in a linguistic way.Yes, a parent must devote a lot of time to daily interaction with a newborn, and yes, at times it may seem a bit repetitive and boring to a parent accustomed to driving off each day to work as a valued business person in an office, but the first few days, months, years of a developing child are so thoroughly critical that I would think the former far more important. This stage lasts only a few years. Why not enjoy it?This review was composed by Regis Schilken, author of CIPHER.

This book came across to me as common sense ideas, nothing that I, as a first time parent wasn't already doing. I read the first 100 pages or so and haven't returned to it. Great for the clueless.