HOME IMPROVEMENT

Centuries ago, midwives and mothers advised pregnant women to stay happy, listen to music, be around nature, and embrace good health. Now advanced research in child development shows that brain development in children does not occur after birth but begins in the womb itself.

So, it is important for both parents but especially mothers to avoid smoking, alcohol, and substance abuse when pregnant and to adopt a healthy lifestyle. It is just not about food and exercise. It is about staying positive in thoughts, keeping a happy frame of mind, exposing the child in the womb to wonderful happy thoughts and music. There are parents who talk to the unborn child and swear that their child is clever and an achiever because of this. Try it, ask your doctors about it.

Changes in Routine Help

Babies as well as toddlers and older kids respond to the stimulus offered by experiences in their home and environment. Did you know that the brain of children is stimulated by the variety of sensations encountered each day?

So, you can set the wheels in motion by introducing activities within the house as well as outdoors. These will promote learning and interactive experiences. Talk to the child as much as you can. Maintain eye contact and allow the child to absorb your facial expressions. Savor every attempt at communication made by the child be it a hand extended towards you, a gurgle, or smile. Create a rapport between you and the child and you will be surprised to see that the child understands and responds.

Food for Thought

It is not just brain-stimulating activities that boost brain power, the food a child eats affects its thinking as well. Did you know, a brain needs plenty of carbohydrates, fats, as well as proteins, vitamins and minerals for both repair as well as function? In fact, many mothers are witness to mood swings and erratic behavior in their children after the consumption of chocolates or junk sugar foods like candy, icing, syrups, and packaged baked products. The sugar highs and lows caused by certain kinds of foods can make a child fidgety, irritable, inattentive, and sleepy.

Sharpen the Intellect

The goal of education is to teach children to be effective thinkers ---as you know, this is what equips them to stay ahead in situations where solutions need to be found at the snap of fingers. So, you must focus on cognitive development and higher order thinking.

As a parent there are a great many ways in which you can work towards the goal of effective thinking and higher reasoning. Technology has made available several computer programs, software CDs, and DVDs that are fun to use and place the children in more and more difficult situations, which they need to solve. The focus of companies such as Smart Neurons are educational teaching aids and toys which fulfill the goal of enhancing thinking, mathematical abilities, and problem solving in children.

As a parent, one issue that is constantly on my mind is that of ensuring my children are properly nourished. Fortunately, my children have the eating habits of J.R.R. Tolkien’s hobbits- they eat at least three breakfasts before lunch. This gives me ample opportunity to ensure that their nutrition intake is set for the rest of the day.

I am sure that other parents have the same concerns, though possibly not the easy time I have with feeding my kids. I would like to share some of the nutrition “secrets” I have encountered in my seemingly endless trips to the refrigerator to keep my little hollowed out munchers happy.

The first secret is that nutrition is not a secret at all. Every container of food you buy has nutritional values listed on a label on the side. These values are very important in determining whether or not the charges of the stay-at-home parent are receiving all the vitamins, minerals, fiber, protein and the hundred other nutritional necessities that keep the mind of the stay-at-home parent occupied.

The second important secret is milk. Milk is the nectar of the gods. By making sure your kids drink just one cup of milk with each meal, you will have taken care of their body’s needs for vitamins A, D and B12, as well as calcium, some iron content and even protein. Other dairy products also help fill these needs, so cheese and yogurt are also good add-ons for snacks or to meals.

Breakfast foods such as oatmeal and most cereals are also chock-full of vitamins, minerals, and fiber. Sugar cereals should be used sparingly, as a treat. There are lots of other ways to add some zing to a cereal that kids may otherwise think of as bland. Breakfast can also include fruit (bananas are an especially good power food) and juice, although too much juice in a day is bad both for a child’s sugar intake and their teeth. Kids should be allowed some juice, though, and the new style fruit and veggie juice is ideal as it tastes just like regular juice but contains vegetable content as well (such as spinach and carrots), and thus is a good equalizer for a child who is finicky about their vegetables.

Whole wheat bread is also very important to a child’s diet. They will only think it is undesirable if a parent or schoolmate points it out to them. Whole wheat bread, specifically Dempster’s brand, is brimming with nutritional goodness.

Recent studies have suggested that vegetables bought frozen may actually be healthier than those cooked fresh. The freezing locks the nutrients into the vegetable immediately, and does not allow the leeching out that otherwise begins as soon as the vegetable is picked from the ground.

There are some foods that may seem like a good idea for a snack or supplement to a meal, but in fact they need to be avoided. Uppermost among these are dried banana chips. These little nuggets are actually deep fried, and just a handful contain more fat than a Big Mac! Make sure that you know how the food you are feeding your kids is processed before considering it a healthy choice.

Prenatal vitamins are an important source of folate and other vital nutrients during pregnancy. And many women, with the popularity of herbal medicine, take other herbs during pregnancy. Some of these herbs they may have been taking before, for an existing condition. Others, they may take to help cope with some of the physical difficulties that go with pregnancy. The following supplements and food additives should be avoided during pregnancy to avoid potential problems with the health of the baby.

• Quinine - Quinine is found in many drinks like tonic water, and these are popular as a result of their slightly bitter taste. But it was found that one woman who drunk more than 1 liter of tonic water a day whilst she was pregnant had a baby that was suffering withdrawal symptoms when it was born. It had nervous tremors within a day of being born, which disappeared two months later. Germany's BfR (Federal Institute for Risk Assessment) recommends that pregnant women treat quinine drinks, no matter how small the amount of quinine in them, as a medicinal product, and avoid them as a precaution during pregnancy.
  
  
  
• Ginseng - One of the more than 20 active constituents of ginseng was found by researchers at the Chinese University of the Hong Kong Prince of Wales Hospital to be a possible cause for concern for pregnant women. These researchers were measuring the effect of this active principle on fetal development in rats. And they found that, relating to the dose, rat embryonic development was affected. Higher doses meant a higher level of abnormalities, according to the markers of development their study used.
  
  Now, this study was one done on rat embryos, and so may not translate into similar effects on humans. And it only studied the effects of one of ginseng's active constituents, which was a ginsenoside called Rb1. Ginseng actually has over 20 ginsenosides, and other studies have found that these each have different actions.
  
  One of the difficulties with studying active constituents in herbal medicine is that the whole herbal extract may have a very different overall effect than a single constituent. This is because of the way active principles both work together and counteract each other. These two aspects, the fact that the study was not done on humans, and does not measure the overall effect of the whole ginseng extract, mean that its results should be treated cautiously. As a safety precaution, at this time it is best to at least avoid ginseng supplements during the first trimester, as the authors of the study suggest, and probably for the whole of the pregnancy. But ginseng should certainly not be branded dangerous as a result of this research as it is only a very preliminary finding in the overall picture, and more points the way as to where further research needs to be done.
  
  
  
• Ginkgo Biloba - Ginkgo biloba is another supplement that is best avoided whilst pregnant. Researchers at Wayne State University in Detroit found one of the constituents of ginkgo biloba in the placenta of women who had taken ginkgo supplements. This particular constituent, an alkaloid called colchicine, can be fatal in high doses, though medicinally, it has great anti-inflammatory effects. Other research has found that cochicine can harm a growing fetus. The potential problem with taking ginkgo supplements regularly whilst pregnant is that colchicine can build up in the womb, like caffeine when taken in excess of the recommended maximum amounts. The researchers did stress that there was no link established in the study between ginkgo and complications in the pregnancy, the study only looked at levels of colchicine in the womb.