Pregnancy Exercise Makes the Child Smarter

The baby’s intelligence is beginning to evolve right from the start, and for those who want their children to manifest prowess in this sphere, there’s a book by psychologist Richard E. Nisbett entitled Intelligence and How to Get It that disposes with some misinformation and proffers a few fresh tips on mothers’ ability to rear a brainy kid.

Nisbett’s initial advice is to get moving when pregnant. It’s customary to believe that exercising when you’re past the first trimester can constitute a certain risk for the fetus, but there are recent studies that tend to disprove the established fact. Nisbett, for one, states that children get up to 8 points of standard IQ tests if their mothers were known to spend about half an hour a day working out! There are exercises which pregnant women are allowed to do, like stretching, running, and even lifting light weights.

It is the British government’s official recommendation for women with a child to maintain physical activity; they are better off active, which helps their bodies adapt to pregnancy changes and will ease up their labor.

The book says that as the woman exercises different groups of muscles, neuron growth increases, as well as the blood supply to the brain. Therefore, workouts during pregnancy and subsequent breastfeeding for 9 months minimum can bring the baby’s IQ results by 14 points on the average.

Another sound way of enhancing the kid’s intelligence lies in a special type of his or her interaction with the parents. It’s a mind-stimulating habit to ask the children questions they can answer and then inquire how they came by the knowledge. When children learn the procedure of an analysis of their information, they start learning how to get the information on their own.

Important mental exercises are attempts to predict how things will be getting along, which Nisbett dubbed “anticipation exercises.” Children are asked to make guesses in situations related to the work of most obvious laws of physics, for example, or to the passing of time.

According to the psychologist’s study, it is the mother who exerts the greatest influence on the mental development of the child, while the father’s input is considerably smaller. Fathers were discovered to contribute to the development of mathematical frame of mind, but not to the overall IQ criteria.