What is SmartBabiesTM

Program Description

SmartBabies is a cognitive development program that is designed to help you engage your child so she can grow to be a problem solver, creative, imaginative, curious, interested in discovering, and yes, inventing. The overall goal is to enrich the inventive nature of your child. With over 110 brief animated videos covering explanations and intellectually enhancing activities, SmartBabies offers a balanced and accessible program for infant and toddler development based on the six recognized stages of early intellectual growth.

  • Stage 1 – Birth to 1 Month
    Newborns are restricted to the use of reflex actions. Because their knowledge system is tied to such ways of knowing as grasping, sucking, eye-movements, etc., things are known only if they trigger these reflex actions. For example, when a nipple touches the area of a baby’s mouth, sucking begins. Such knowledge, or more precisely, such adaptations, are simply survival instincts. Moreover, these reflexes are not integrated with one another. They act independently from one another. Sucking and grasping, for example, are not put together into a coherent single action.
  • Stage 2 – 1 to 4 Months
    Stage 2 babies develop a way of knowing that is superior to the rigid, fragmented way of knowing of Stage 1 babies: they learn to coordinate one reflex action with another, creating new action patterns that are more organized, elaborate, and complete. Stage 2 ushers in the possibility for acquiring new patterns of behavior because of integrating one act with another, then undoing the integration to coordinate acts in an entirely new way. The ability to coordinate and differentiate actions enables the baby to construct new ways of doing things, new ways of organizing and adapting to reality. This expands the realm of learning, enabling the baby to start “playing” and “imitating.”
  • Stage 3 – 4 to 8 Months
    The ability to exercise skills by manipulating the external world of objects is the distinguishing characteristic of the Stage 3 baby (four to eight months). Baby can now reproduce an outcome that she had caused accidentally and found interesting. For example, when she thrashes her legs around in her crib, she notices that the mobile suspended above her moves. She thrashes around again, trying to make the mobile move once more. If she is successful, she will repeat the process again and again. She enjoys repeating the pattern of behavior she has just learned. She is forming a practical understanding of cause and effect, or the means-ends principle. Doing this, she had learned, produces that!
  • Stage 4 – 8 to 12 Months
    After the rapid learning of Stage 3, the Stage IV baby (eight to twelve months) is busy consolidating her past learning and applying it to new situations. This is a time of reconciling the attainments of the past and extending them to new and different situations. In this stage several major attainments are being perfected, beginning with the concept of means-ends relations. The infant now knows an intentional, as opposed to accidental, selection of means to accomplish pre-established goals, and is developing his concept of space and time more fully. On a practical level only, concepts such as “in”, “out”, “behind”, “through”, etc., are understood. This helps the infant attain understanding of the concept of the permanence of objects. In the previous stage, baby could only search for a disappearing object visually; now, he begins to search manually! This important development shows the child’s advancement in understanding that objects can go out of sight without totally vanishing from the world.
    Peek-a-boo becomes intensely interesting in this stage; the game gives the baby a chance to confirm this new understanding. Imitating has progressed to the point where the baby can reproduce an action that involves parts of her body she cannot see. Anticipation – associating certain events when they are preceded by others – is also being perfected. When a sequence is disrupted, the element of surprise enters her world.
  • Stage 5 – 12 to 18 Months
    Now a toddler, the Stage 5 child (twelve to eighteen months) can experiment and solve problems, initially through trial and error, but later, quite efficiently. She intentionally and systematically varies an action to discover how changes in her actions effect outcomes. She understands that not only she, but other people and objects can cause things to happen. She has constructed some idea of time, of space, and of how objects fit in and out of things. She knows that if an object has been moved from one hiding place to another, she’ll find it by looking where it was last seen. And she can imitate novel acts – acts that she has not imitated before.
    Because she is beginning to develop the capacity to represent objects and events mentally through images, words, and abbreviated actions, she is freed from a knowledge system that was restricted to what she could touch, see, hear, smell, and taste. Now she is able to know things by imaging them. When it is completed, what an incredible accomplishment that will be! Stage V is the beginning of the end of sensory-motor intelligence. Over the next year or so, the symbolic system will have evolved to the point where an entirely new age of knowing becomes possible, the age of the wonderful, magical, make-believe world of early childhood.
  • Stage 6 – 18 through 24 Months
    In this last stage of the Sensory-motoric period (eighteen to twenty-four months), the symbolic system is so well developed that children can solve problems without resorting to the trial-and-error experimentation of the Stage 5 child; they can run through the solution to a problem mentally and then solve it. Stage 6 is a transition period, one that, upon its completion, will hurl the child into the world of thought. Parents delight in witnessing phenomenon of insight. when confronted with a problem, the child shows little or no physical groping before hitting on a solution. As this period ends, a new mode of mental activity characterized by a magical, intuitive, and egocentric kind of thought begins – the thought of the preschooler.