10 Steps To Make Your Kid Smarter (Backed by Science)

1) Music Lessons

Plain and simple: research show music lessons make kids smarter.

Compared with children in the control groups, children in the music groups exhibited greater increases in full-scale IQ. The effect was relatively small, but it generalized across IQ subtests, index scores, and a standardized measure of academic achievement.

In fact, musical training helps everyone, young and old.

2) The Dumb Jock Is A Myth

Dumb jocks are dumb because they spend more time on the field than in the library. But what if you make sure your child devotes time to both?

Being in good shape increases your ability to learn. After exercise people pick up new vocabulary words 20% faster

3) Don’t Read To Your Kids, Read With Them

Got a little one who is learning to read? Don’t let them just stare at the pictures in a book while you do all the reading. Call attention to the words. Read with them, not to them. It helps build their reading skills.

4) Sleep Deprivation Makes Kids Stupid

Missing an hour of sleep turns a sixth grader’s brain into that of a fourth grader.

A loss of one hour of sleep is equivalent to [the loss of] two years of cognitive maturation and development, it is said.

There is a correlation between grades and average amount of sleep.

5) IQ Isn’t Worth Much Without Self-Discipline

Self-discipline beats IQ at predicting who will be successful in life. Grades have more to do with conscientiousness than raw smarts.

6) Learning Is An Active Process

Baby Einstein and brain-training games don’t work. In fact, there’s reason to believe they make kids dumber.

The products didn’t work at all. They had no positive effect on the vocabularies of the target audience, infants 17-24 months. Some did actual harm. For every hour per day the children spent watching certain baby DVD’s and videos, the infants understood an average of six to eight fewer words than infants who did not watch them.

Real learning isn’t passive, it’s active.

Our brains evolved to learn by doing things, not by hearing about them. This is one of the reasons that, for a lot of skills, it’s much better to spend about two-thirds of your time testing yourself on it rather than absorbing it. There’s a rule of two thirds. If you want to, say, memorize a passage, it’s better to spend 30 percent of your time reading it, and the other 70 percent of your time testing yourself on that knowledge.

7) Treats Can Be A Good Thing - At The Right Time

Overall, it would be better if kids ate healthy all the time. Research shows eating makes a difference in children’s grades:

Everybody knows you should eat breakfast the day of a big test. High-carb, high-fiber, slow-digesting foods like oatmeal are best, research shows. But what you eat a week in advance matters, too. 

There are always exceptions. No kid eats healthy all the time. But the irony is that kids often get “bad” foods at the wrong time.

Research shows caffeine and sugar can be brain boosters:

Caffeine and glucose can have beneficial effects on cognitive performance… Since these areas have been related to the sustained attention and working memory processes, results would suggest that combined caffeine and glucose could increase the efficiency of the attentional system.

They’re also potent rewards kids love.

So if kids are going to occasionally eat candy and soda maybe it’s better to give it to them while they study then when they’re relaxing.

8) Happy Kids = Successful Kids

Happier kids are more likely to turn into successful, accomplished adults.

9) Peer Group Matters

Your genetics and the genetics of your partner have a huge effect on your kids. But the way you raise your kids?

Not nearly as much.

On things like measures of intellectual ability and certain aspects of personality, the biological children are fairly similar to their parents. For the adopted kids, however, the results are downright strange. Their scores have nothing whatsoever in common with their adoptive parents: these children are no more similar in their personality or intellectual skills to the people who raised them, fed them, clothed them, read to them, taught them, and loved them for sixteen years than they are to any two adults taken at random off the street.

So what does have an enormous effect on your children’s behavior? Their peer group.

We usually only talk about peer pressure when it’s a negative but more often than not, it’s a positive.

Living in a nice neighborhood, going to solid schools and making sure your children hang out with good kids can make a huge difference.

What’s the easiest way for a college student to improve their GPA? Pick a smart roommate.

10) Believe In Them

Believing your kid is smarter than average makes a difference.

When teachers were told certain kids were sharper, those kids did better - even though the kids were selected at random.

Sum Up

1. Music Lessons
2. The Dumb Jock Is A Myth
3. Don’t Read To Your Kids, Read With Them
4. Sleep Deprivation Makes Kids Stupid
5. IQ Isn’t Worth Much Without Self-Discipline
6. Learning Is An Active Process
7. Treats Can Be a Good Thing — At The Right Time
8. Happy Kids = Successful Kids
9. Peer Group Matters
10. Believe In Them

One final note: Intelligence isn’t everything. Without ethics and empathy, really smart people can be scary.