Title: Baby Minds: Brain-Building Games Your Baby Will Love
Author: Linda Acredolo, Susan Goodwyn
Category: Nonfiction
Rating: 5/5
Summary: Two professors of psychology summarize research about how babies’ minds develop, then suggest ways of incorporating brain-building games into your baby’s life.

Review: This book is similar to another book I read this year: What’s Going on in There? How the Brain and Mind Develop in the First Five Years of Life.

Although I enjoyed What’s Going on in There?, I loved Baby Minds because it focused more on what you can do to help your baby’s brain grow. And not in a baby-flashcards sort of way, either. The games they suggest are fun and easy to incorporate into your routine. For example, they recommend modeling some pretend play starting at around 6 months to foster creativity. So we’ve instituted a 3:00 Puppet Show in our house. Abby loves it of course, but so do I! 3:00 is about the time I start counting down the minutes til Erik gets home from work so it takes my mind off the clock for a bit.

I also preferred how this book summarized the relevant research studies in an accessible way. The research they highlighted made me that much more motivated to try the corresponding games. And this book was much lighter on the biological details of development, which I didn’t mind at all considering those were the parts of What’s Going on in There? I found myself skimming.

Both books had needed reminders to parents that there’s no way to be a “perfect parent.” The message in Baby Minds is: Just do what works for you, and don’t stress out if you’re not doing every single game they recommend because every single game won’t work for everyone.

This book also has a handy list of all the games at the back, which I find myself using a lot lately. On the weekdays when I’m at home with Abby all day, I use up all my tricks by the early afternoon—we read books, we take a walk, we have a tickle fest, I feed her solid food. Then I’m bored and she’s bored, and that’s not good. So the list at the back is helpful for jogging my memory about other things we can do together that will be fun for both of us. In fact, that’s exactly how the 3:00 Puppet Show came into existence!