Test Your Baby. Rachel Federman

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Introduction

      It’s never too early to start testing your baby. In fact hopefully you’re reading this book in the delivery room, because it can be too late. Gone are the carefree days when all you had to worry about as a new parent was how to feed an inconsolable baby, survive on no sleep, install a car seat, assemble a high chair, change nappies round the clock and treat a potentially infected umbilical cord. No longer can you loll away the blissful early days rocking your howling, colicky infant into the briefest of naps, passively wait for him to reach outdated milestones like holding up his neck and learning to crawl. Playtime is not for playing any more. He needs to hold his own in a debate about foreign policy, not just hold up his neck. He has to learn the back crawl in Baby Swim class, not just the forward crawl on land.

      And forget bedtime stories about anthropomorphised bears getting into their pyjamas. Those kinds of stories simply don’t provide enough intellectual stimulation for today’s child, who should at a minimum be able to identify all eight bear species by paw print and be conversant with the changing hibernation patterns of all before his second birthday. Where once at mealtimes you might have simply narrated in a singsongy voice, ‘The spoon goes in the mouth’, you now need to specify the velocity of the spoon, provide Latin names for body parts and set puréed vegetables in their proper historical context.

      And I hope you’ve already introduced the baby to a range of musical composers and literary genres in utero. Upon arrival, a full-term baby should be comfortable distinguishing between late Baroque and early Renaissance periods of Western music, for example, and between the Enlightenment and Victorian eras of literature, taking into account certain persistent strains of Romantic thought.

      Wait. I know what you’re thinking. You don’t have a spare minute to take a shower let alone conduct elaborate psychometrically sound tests. These tests are simple and quick to perform. You can conduct one, two or a whole chapter at a time – whatever you and your baby have the time and energy for. Just make a note of the results and return to the book when you are ready.

      In the following pages, I’ll take you through the major areas of your baby’s day, beginning with a general overview and moving on to Playtime, Mealtimes and Sleeping. I also want to know how your pride and joy performs in the outside world, so I’ve included all-important questions about library storytime and visiting the playground under the section called Outings. And because I feel that a deep appreciation for arts and literature is fundamental to the proper cultivation of any human whose life is still measured in months or even weeks, I’ve included a chapter on this topic as well. While the questions in these sections ask you to speculate about your baby’s behaviour and responses based on your observations thus far, the final chapter, Activity Exam, requires you to actually set up a trial and observe your baby.