Infant education catching fancy of young mothers

Chennai: It may not be mere lullabies and feeding bottles for babies any more as infant education is

fast catching the fancy of young educated mothers. The cut-throat competition in the modern world has driven ambitious mothers to start education for their kids right from the infant stage. "With proper approach, a child can begin learning a language from the third month, gain encyclopedic knowledge from the sixth month, understand mathematics from the ninth month and learn the basis of education within a year," says Revathi Sankaran, who runs 'Little Gems,' an infant education centre. Pregnant women and young mothers carrying their newborns, make a beeline to her centre here, where training is provided to stimulate the babies' brain growth using flash cards. Saraswathy Prabhu, a homemaker who has employed the technique on her kids, says her four-year-old son Akshit is now able to identify words and has excellent memory power. Saraswathy says her six-month-old daughter Akshitha is even smarter and very observant. She has already developed a liking for TV and had also appeared in a number of tv programmes. Revathy says flash cards with words written in bold red or black should be shown to infants for a few seconds, accompanied by a loud utterance of the word. This could be repeated thrice a day but mothers should be properly trained before venturing into training their babies on their own, she adds. She says the innovative methodology, developed by Dr Glenn Doman -- the founder of Institutes for the Achievement of Human Potential, Philadelphia, will improve the concentration of the mind by increasing the impulse of sensory pathways in the brain. However, the concept of infant education has not enthused child specialists and psychiatrists, who opine that subliminal messaging will not make much of a difference. "The rate of learning increases naturally with each generation due to the kind of exposure available now. As millions of stimuli bombard the brain at any given second, this kind of artificial stimulation is unnecessary," says Dr Kumar Babu, former head of psychiatry department, Stanley Hospital here. Though sensory stimulation is good for a child's growth, too much of stimulation at an early stage may also lead to complications, warns Dr S Nambi, former president of the Indian Psychiatrists Association. "Infants are defenceless and they should not be used as guinea pigs to experiment with. The post-natal period need not be turned into rigorous learning sessions for babies and it may also amount to child abuse," adds Dr Babu. Bureau Report