Prenatal music to promote fetal intellectual development? Stop paying the 'IQ tax', the most important thing is yourself

Some time ago, a cousin who was not too close announced the good news of her pregnancy. She had just started to prepare for the baby's prenatal education when she was diagnosed with pregnancy. She asked me if I need to apply for a prenatal education institution?

However, she still prefers to buy prenatal music at home to listen to, saying that this can promote the intellectual development of the fetus.

My suggestion is that it is better to read books and listen to music at home than to do prenatal education specially. A happy mood is better than anything else.

But my cousin was still dubious, and felt that not doing prenatal education was a loss . She couldn't let the baby lose at the starting line. After that, the topic passed by.

Why don't I recommend prenatal education specifically for my baby? In fact, the current public opinion has a tendency to "deify" prenatal education. Is it really so magical? In fact, it is nothing but pseudoscience.

01Does prenatal education really have theoretical support?

When mothers do prenatal education, they always feel that the baby's IQ is developing rapidly. In fact, the real feeling of the baby may not be as beautiful as imagined.

First of all, there is doubt about the claim that prenatal education develops the brain and promotes fetal intellectual development.

The fetal brain is indeed full of potential, but so far, no scientific research has shown that the baby's IQ is linked to the number of synapses, and there is no evidence that external stimuli can promote the development of fetal brain neurons.

In addition to taking this logic out of context, a large part of it also comes from people's brain supplements.

Moreover, prenatal education cannot allow the fetus to learn certain aspects of knowledge in advance. Psychologically, the development of the fetus has laws, showing explosive learning ability for different knowledge in different sensitive periods, but no research has found that when the baby is in the womb The sensitive period has already begun.

What's more, the brain development of the fetus is not perfect and has not been formed. At this time, if you count outside the belly, what can you tell them to understand?

When it comes to the widest audience, it is prenatal music, and many businesses also respect Mozart music.

However, in 2014, John Medina, an authoritative neuro-brain scientist in the United States, pointed out that no scientific experiment can show that Mozart music can promote fetal brain development, and no one has even done a double-blind randomized trial.

In other words, there is a lack of strong evidence on whether prenatal education can lastingly improve children's intelligence level.

And he also pointed out that the role of the uterine environment is to isolate the baby from various external stimuli , including light and loud noise. This environment is dark, humid, warm, quiet and firm, providing the most stable environment for early brain development.

In fact, except for the mother's voice and heartbeat, the baby can't hear any other sounds. No matter how good the melody of the music you are listening to, what your baby hears is a "buzzing" noise.

02Why is prenatal education so popular?

The scientific judge of "The Strongest Brain", Wei Kunlin, a Ph.D. in the field of human brain research at a well-known American university, once gave the following answer to this question:

In the early days of prenatal education, it was just an experiment to study the relationship between music and fetal intelligence, but the subjects were all college students at that time.

After listening to Mozart's music to college students, researchers measured whether their IQ had changed, and found that the dimension of "spatial ability" improved.

But this is the data of college students, and this ability is only improved for a short time, not a continuous impact, it is a bit far-fetched to put it on the fetus.

It is the misreading of this experiment that has gradually led to various prenatal education institutions and claims that parents should not pay the "IQ tax".

From a rigorous point of view, prenatal music cannot be called science , but it cannot be completely said that it is a scam, and it is controversial.

Of course, some treasured mothers will say: I gave my child prenatal education, and I think he is indeed smarter than children of the same age. How can this be explained?

In fact, this is equivalent to the same goal by different paths. The so-called prenatal education, on the surface, sounds like educating the fetuses, but it actually refers to the influence of the physical and mental state of the mothers.

03 Do prenatal education for your baby, the most important thing is yourself

In fact, the issue of prenatal education is really not as complicated as you think.

Many foreign studies have pointed out that prenatal education does not directly affect the fetus, but mainly enables pregnant women to achieve a good emotional state, thereby changing the secretion of hormones and neuromediators in the body, and indirectly affecting the fetus.

In other words, the real role of prenatal education is not to let the fetus listen to music and learn mathematics, but to make you happy.

The book "Freak Economics" records a group of social comparison surveys of American children's education, and such a comparison is quite enlightening.

Under the two environments of "there are a lot of books at home" and "parents do parent-child reading every day", which children perform better in learning?

The answer is more unexpected. Research data shows that children with "more books at home" have better grades.

Later, based on this research, the governor of Illinois in the United States, in order to improve children's learning effectiveness, specially spent $26 million to distribute a batch of books to all children in the state, but it didn't work at all. why?

Because of the books he handed out, not all children are willing to read them.

So why do children who have a lot of books at home get better grades than children whose parents read to them every day?

Quite simply, this is because parents who have a large collection of books at home have relatively high academic qualifications and pay special attention to education and the overall development of their children.

To a certain extent, children do well in school not because they have a large collection of books at home, but because the home education environment is good.

Just as a child of a novelist usually grows up to write novels, and a child of a musician usually grows up to be musically accomplished, just letting a child learn the piano will not make him a famous musician, because There is only one Lang Lang in this world.

Only parents with high musical literacy themselves can make children interested and enthusiastic in the immersion.

04 Write at the end

Therefore, if you lie on the sofa and play music every day just to complete the prenatal education task, while surfing with a mobile phone in your hand, it will not be effective.

Instead, think about what you can do to make yourself happy and create a good atmosphere for your body.

If listening to certain music makes you feel happy, there is no harm in listening to it properly, but don't overdo it.

Studies have shown that the fetus should not listen to music more than 60 decibels, and the frequency of music should not exceed 2000 Hz.

Since most parents have little understanding of volume and frequency, it can be difficult to grasp the correct degree of music playback.

If the volume is too loud or the sound is too stimulated, it may even lead to hearing damage in newborns. There are not many such cases in clinical practice.

Don't count and sing to the stomach specially for prenatal education, because the focus is to regulate the mood, and the fetus can't really learn the knowledge that is too difficult, nor can it withstand too high-intensity stimulation.

Remember, you are happy and positive, which is the best prenatal education for the fetus.