Your Child Is Smarter Than You Think

Book excerpt: Dr. Wanda Draper, in Your Child Is Smarter Than You Think!, bridges the gap between how children learn and think and how they feel and behave. She discusses a whole-child approach to articulate the child’s development and its relationship to learning and behavior from infancy through adolescence. This gives the reader a view of transitions from one stage to the next and how adults can enjoy and enhance each child’s unfolding maturation of body, mind, and behavior. The author shows us just how intelligent and intuitive children really are in relation to their respective developmental levels. Instead of trying to control behavior by either promoting or prohibiting the child’s responses and actions, she shows how to interpret both the child’s and the adult’s actions and their responses to one another. Dr. Draper’s writing is based on decades of observing and working directly with children and adults from all manner of lifestyles, circumstances, and physical and mental abilities. She often says, “You can’t send the head to school and leave the body at home—the whole child goes to school, the whole child lives at home, and the whole child participates in the world.”