Every loving parent wants their child to become sharper, more intelligent, and to develop the essential skills needed to succeed in life. Science offers several key “tools” parents can use to help their child boost IQ and unlock potential, making them powerful advocates for their child’s future success.
By age four, a child’s brain grows at an astonishing rate, reaching just 10% less than an adult brain’s size before they even start kindergarten. This “period of rapid growth provides an ideal window for learning,” writes WebMD. However, experts caution parents not to push children to speed up this learning process. “Before the brain’s large circuits are formed, the smaller circuits must first develop, and advanced skills are built on basic competencies,” says Dr. Ross Thompson, a psychology professor at the University of California, Davis.
Read to them, then read with them
Parents can gently help their child’s intelligence grow by reading to them, even when the child doesn’t yet understand the words they hear. “At first, the sound of your voice is a beacon of calm, helping the child associate you and reading with safety,” says Jim Trelease, author of The Read-Aloud Handbook. Research by experts at Brigham Young University has shown that children develop cognitive skills faster when parents start reading to them as early as nine months old.
As the child grows, experts advise parents to shift from simply reading to their child to reading with them, actively engaging them in the process.
Your relationship with your child paves the way to success
Beyond reading at an early age, researchers at Brigham Young University have found that mothers’ responses to their child’s emotional cues also support brain development—a finding backed by other experts in the field.
Dr. Thompson likewise emphasises the importance of creating strong bonds with children. Social relationships and language stimulate brain growth in young children by forming essential neural connections, he says. Close parent-child relationships also protect a brain region called the amygdala, which plays a crucial role in emotional regulation. Prolonged stress or feelings of threat from a young age can negatively impact this area, potentially impairing the child’s ability to learn.
Help them discover
Engaging children in various extracurricular activities—such as music, art, science, sports, or intellectual pursuits—can provide them with valuable skills and advantages that will benefit them later in life. These activities help children become more competitive, understand the importance of success, and learn valuable lessons from failure. They also enable children to develop strategies for adapting to new or challenging situations, managing pressure, and using their time effectively and productively.
Research, for example, has shown that music lessons during childhood support brain development and strengthen cognitive abilities. Children who learn to play a musical instrument at a young age tend to have an enhanced ability to process speech sounds. Additionally, those who have taken music lessons often develop stronger vocabularies and nonverbal reasoning skills. These children may also have a greater likelihood of innovating within their chosen field or even starting a business. Moreover, one study indicated that piano lessons could significantly boost a child’s IQ.
However, myths have circulated around the association between music and high IQ, with one of the most famous being the “Mozart Effect.” This idea originated from a 1993 study where researchers observed that students who listened to Mozart’s Sonata for Two Pianos performed better on cognitive tests, even up to ten minutes after listening. Although researchers were unconvinced by the findings, the idea spread quickly and left a lasting impression on the public.
Teach discipline
Self-discipline is often seen as a form of restriction, but in reality, this skill offers “liberating powers” that can lead to personal growth and success. As Roy L. Smith put it, “Discipline is the refining fire by which talent becomes ability.”
A study conducted by experts at the University of Pennsylvania found that self-discipline was a significantly more important factor for academic success than IQ. “Highly self-disciplined adolescents outperformed their more impulsive peers on every academic-performance variable. Self-discipline predicted academic performance more robustly than did IQ. Self-discipline also predicted which students would improve their grades over the course of the school year, whereas IQ did not.… Self-discipline has a bigger effect on academic performance than does intellectual talent,” the authors said.
