The title of this book can put you off - Your Child can be a Genius. That is the kind of hype publishers resort to in flogging their ware in a saturated market of self-help books. Typical reaction of a skeptical reader could be, ‘Genius? No way, not my brat’.

But then I rarely skip nowadays anything pertaining to children. I have developed a vested interest in reading up on child growth ever since grandson Siddarth came along some nine months back. I keep up with literature on bringing up children, and clogging their Inbox, so much that my son/daughter-in-law may have reason to feel that grandpa-ing is all about backseat driving. A mitigating factor, for them, is that my wife and I live half a globe away from them.

Deccan Herald book reviewer, Kamala Balachandran, bills Your Child can be a Genius by Aruna Raghavan as a must-read for all young parents and new grand parents. Points from Ms. Balachandran’s review:

-         Author who tried out her ideas on her only child Nirupama was astounded by the child’s unprecedented pace of learning.

-         Aruna Raghavan, a New Indian Express columnist, believes that most children have unexplored potential for brilliance; if this were to be nurtured from the very beginning, what we call a genius now would become the norm, rather than a rarity.

-         Greater a child’s physical movement, the faster do brain cells multiply. A toddler needs to be bombarded with visual and auditory stimuli right from the time he is in the crib.

-         A chapter devoted to missed milestones says, for instance, a baby that did not creep or crawl but sat up directly has certain sensory pathways unopened. But a child can be helped, at a later stage, to build what he/she missed out as an infant.

-         To make a genius of him/her the parents need to perspire quite a bit; the author can tell us a thing or two on how a two/three old can be taught to read. The book seeks to create a school in every home. Nirupama, now a brilliant 18-year-old, had her entire ‘schooling’ at home.

-         The author believes that if a hundred kids, with the benefit of home schooling, were to enroll in a school, it would raise the bar - “we all agree  that the (education) system needs overhauling, yet we are reluctant to take the first step”.      

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