In 1990, three academics, Harold Stevenson, Chuansheng Chen, and David Uttal did a study of attitudes and academic achievement of black, white, and hispanic children in Chicago. They found a disturbing gap between what parents thought their children were learning and children’s actual performance. Teachers in high-poverty schools had given A’s to students for work that would have earned them C’s or D’s in affluent suburban schools. In study, black mothers of Chicago elementary school students rated their child’s skills and abilities quite high and thought their kids were doing well in reading and math. The children thought same thing.

Unfortunately, researchers found that parents’ and children’s self-evaluations of their math and reading skills were way above their actual achievement levels. There was a big gap between their optimistic self-evaluations and their dismal academic performance on independent tests. Public schools were giving these children a false idea of their academic skill levels. In other words, these children were heading towards failure and no one bothered to tell them.

Parents, it would not be wise to trust any claims by teachers or school authorities about your children’s alleged academic abilities, even in so-called “good” schools in suburban neighborhoods. To find out how your child is really doing, have an outside independent company test your child’s reading and math skills.

If you find that your child’s academic skills are far below what your local public-school led you to believe, you might want to take your child out of public school and look for better education alternatives. There is a complete Resource section in “Public Schools, Public Menace” that explores many of these quality, low-cost education alternatives.

7. Encourage your baby to imitate you. Try sticking out your tongue. Most of babies, when they are a couple of weeks old, imitate sticking out tongue after you did so 2-3 times before them.

8. Get a crib mobile and hang it on your baby’s crib. When your baby is quiet and awake, she will gaze at it. This will help arouse her interest in world outside crib.

9. Get a wind chime and hang it where your baby can gaze at it, move and hear pleasant music it plays. Doing so will stimulate her sense of seeing and hearing and she will learn to correlate a pleasant sight with a pleasant sound.

10. Shake a rattle before your baby. Shake it first on left side then on right. Allow your baby time to recognize that rattle is producing sound. This activity will also help your baby correlate sound with sight.

There are many important milestones that must be achieved in first month. Infants experience a wealth of developmental and cognitive achievements in their first month of life. Stimulate your newborn’s sense is also part of this important milestones.