Sleep-deprived parents rejoice, there is new evidence to suggest that babies who wake up through the night are associated with higher levels of intelligence and better mental health.
According to new research, babies and children who are smarter or more gifted tend to need fewer hours of sleep to operate than other children.
Busy Brains
Gifted kids seem to be able to function quite well with less sleep than their age mates, but they can sometimes have a difficult time getting to sleep. Many kids describe it as being unable to shut off their brains. They simply can't stop thinking.
One of the earliest signs of an intelligent baby is a high level of alertness. Such babies are also very aware of their environments and loved ones, quickly recognising and bonding with family members.
Some of the most common reasons that healthy babies sleep for longer than usual include the following: They may experience a growth spurt or developmental leap. They may have a minor illness, such as a cold. They may have a serious infection.
Here's the deal: It's totally normal for a newborn to sleep a lot. After all, growing is tiring work! But sometimes all that napping can get in the way of baby's healthy growth. Read on to learn how many hours of shut-eye infants typically get, and when you may need to wake baby for a feeding.
Talk to them and read to them.
Playing simple teaching games along the way, for instance asking them to name or count objects, boosts their intelligence even more. "You can raise your child's IQ by six points by simply doing this over a few years when they are young," Roche writes. Start as early as you can, he adds.
Is early language development a sign of intelligence in babies? According to research, babies who experience language development earlier than average grow up to have higher IQ levels. This is mostly noticeable during adulthood.
While genetics play a role in your baby's future cognitive functioning, environmental factors also contribute to intelligence, neurodevelopment, psychomotor skills, and mental health. The good news is, you can influence some of those environmental factors through your prenatal and maternal diet.
Signs of giftedness can appear as early as infancy and continue during the toddler and preschool years. Testing for giftedness and high IQ, however, usually takes place around age 5.
Autistic children can have particular sleep and settling problems, including: irregular sleeping and waking patterns – for example, lying awake until very late or waking very early in the morning. sleeping much less than expected for their age, or being awake for more than an hour during the night.
Most of baby's brain development happens during sleep: literally. This is when the connections between the left and right hemispheres of their brains are being formed. Brain synapses are formed during sleep: more than 1,000,000 million neural connections are formed per second during their first 3 years.
Less sleep lowers IQ scores and grades
According to Coren, scores on intelligence tests decline cumulatively on each successive day that you sleep less than you normally sleep. The daily decline is approximately one IQ point for the first hour of sleep loss, two for the next, and four for the next.
However, the influence of genetic factors should not be underestimated since sleep duration and night wakings are strongly influenced by genetics. In summary, some children are good sleepers and others have trouble sleeping – but all healthy babies have the ability to sleep well with appropriate support when needed.
Reaching milestones much earlier means a child may be advanced compared with his or her peers of the same age. Not reaching milestones or reaching them much later than children the same age can be the earliest indication that a child may have a developmental delay.
Ability to learn new topics quickly. Ability to process new and complex information rapidly. Desire to explore specific topics in great depth. Insatiable curiosity, often demonstrated by many questions.
Empirical evidence suggests that especially parental education, parental income, and maternal IQ are important predictors of intelligence. Parental education together with maternal IQ and the child's sex were found to account for 24% of the variance in IQ at age 5 [6].
Our babies' brains develop at an amazing rate—they fully double in size from birth until one. And a baby's brain has around 1,000 trillion synapses (or a quadrillion, for all you math majors), which is twice as many as a typical adult has.
It might be tempting to let your baby sleep longer than three hours, because let's be honest, having that much time to yourself is wonderful. But naps that go longer than three hours (at any age) are typically an indication that your baby is crashing, either from a night of poor sleep or prior short naps.
Newborns should only be awake for 1.5 to 2 hours at a time during the day, but make sure that she plays during the day. Sing to her, play with her, talk with her and show her around her new environment. Rather than forcing her to stay awake, provide stimulation so she won't want to go to sleep.
The report analyzes data from over 5,000 parents. It found that, over the course of a month, baby girls get an extra 4.5 hours of sleep on average. Plus, at 6 months, baby girls get an average 10 minutes of sleep more than baby boys per night. They also tend to wake up less frequently and sleep longer into the morning.