Parents often desire to raise their children to become confident, intelligent and secure individuals. Such development starts in a child's early years, which are often defined as critical periods for learning. There are a variety of methods which parents can use to stimulate and help boost their children's brains.

A child's early experiences play a critical role in 'wiring' his brain. These experiences are key to the development of emotions, senses, intelligence, language, and memory. With safety, health, love, attention, conversation, and a stimulating environment that is conducive for learning, young children can grow and develop for success.

Parents can set a strong foundation of learning by establishing a safe, secure, and loving environment. They can:

• Respond warmly and quickly to a child's cues for support and attention.
• Provide children with the affection they need to help them form a sense of trust with you and others.
• Create a safe environment for children to explore and discover.

Parents who like more playful engagement with their children can try out games which help children to grow intellectually, socially, emotionally, and physically.

The developmental benefits of play are bountiful. Games involve play which benefit children by expanding their understanding of themselves and others, their knowledge of the physical world, and their ability to communicate with their peers and adults. Through play, children are given an opportunity to match their behaviour with others, and to take into account viewpoints that differ from their own.

As such, games provide great settings for children to engage in brainstorming, predict the consequences of their actions, learn self-control, as well as how to share power, space, and ideas with others and more.

0 to 12 months

Babies from 0 to 12 months learn by using their senses. They love exploring and discovering – touching and mouthing objects, hearing voices and music, and seeing fascinating sights all around. To experience all these and begin to make sense of the world, babies need to interact and experience with loved and trusted adults.

In this first year, babies are ready to learn important concepts such as:

• Cause and effect, when they shake a rattle and hear a sound
• Size and shape, by stacking blocks, mouthing them, and trying to fit them into correctly-shaped holes
• Problem-solving, upon discovering how to get the jack-in-the-box to pop up
• Gravity, when they drop their cup from the high chair and look down to the floor to see where it lands
• Object permanence (that things they can't see still exist), when they play peek-a-boo or crawl into the next room to find you.

As such, playing catch is a game that is ideal for children of this age range. Instead of taking the toys away the next time their children throw it out, parents can encourage this game of catch using a soft ball or a stuffed animal.

In throwing their toys, babies are testing out their cause and effect skills to explore the effect of throwing and what happens when a toy leaves their hands. Babies will be delighted by the simple action of parents tossing the toy back to them every time they throw it out, as it presents a whole new effect that is much more exciting than the previous effect of having the toy just land on the floor.

Another alternative that parents can consider is the simple game of playing 'peekaboo'. The game will help develop the memory and teach children about object permanence.

12 to 24 months

Parents may be surprised at how easily children can be entertained if they try providing them with safe, everyday toys. Parents can experiment along with their children to observe how a wooden spoon and a whisk make very different sounds when tapped on a pot, or feel the difference between using a brush and the spiny teeth of a comb. Through these experiences, children learn to discover the properties and functions of objects, an important part of problem-solving.

2 to 4 years

Playing with crayons, drawing and painting unleash creativity in children, and encourage imagination and exploration. Children learn problem-solving and persistence with simple building blocks, by rebuilding structures when the blocks wobble and fall. Even simple play activities such as reading a picture book aloud with actions can help promote a child's imagination.

Kindergarten

Five- to six-year-olds love action. Studies have suggested a strong link between physical movement and memory, spatial perception, language, attention, emotion, nonverbal cues, and decision-making. To facilitate this process, parents can create homemade dice printed with different exercises to perform and skip, run, jump, and hop their way with their children to physical fitness.

Given the countless benefits that games can present, parents should choose games wisely, to groom their children for a bright future!