Why Teach Math at an Early Age?

You can begin teaching mathematics to your baby from the age of four months, and if you do so, you have the opportunity to provide an intuitive understanding of a core skill that will be used for the rest of your child's life as well as develop and enrich her brain, allowing your child to understand anything quickly and easily.

These benefits alone should be powerful motivators for teaching mathematics, but perhaps the most important reason is:

Your child's early years present a most important and unique opportunity to not only learn the language of numbers, but also to improve her chances of excelling in life with ease and confidence.

How Does it Work?

It's all down to a very special phase of development; up to the age of three and a half, small children perceive the world largely through the dominant right hemisphere of their brains. This right-brain dominance allows several curious things to happen - children are able to learn new facts and skills effortlessly with minimal repetition, directly storing the information in their long-term memory. In this manner, young children can develop amazing abilities, such as perceiving the number of dots on a flash card in an instant without counting them, just as some savants can.

In other words, children can develop and have demonstrated the ability to instantly differentiate, for example, what 48 is versus 49. Children who are able to retain this ability can perform seemingly complex mathematical equations without a calculator, even after their left brain begins to assume dominance. (For the rest of us though, numbers will have to remain abstract concepts, with a calculator almost certainly required for tasks such as multiplying two three-digit figures.) This fluency in what Glenn Doman refers to as the "language of numbers" can give your child the keys to understanding (and enjoying) a topic that, for most of us, is a lifelong frustration!

Benefits for a Lifetime

But it's not just about being able to excel in math; there are many, many other benefits to be gained. Other abilities, such as effortless, rapid learning also directly relate and transfer to anything your child may be presented with, be it reading, physical activities, encyclopedic knowledge, even spatial and logical reasoning.

This is because teaching math to your child exercises the right brain during its dominant phase in your child's development, and in doing so you are maintaining and enriching neurological pathways that would otherwise be unused and eventually destroyed. By enhancing your baby's brain, you not only teach your baby math, but you also make learning easier; arguably an even more enticing benefit for spending a few minutes a day with your child cycling through flash card presentations!

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