How to Enhance Your Baby’s Visual

Stimulating your baby’s visual development in their first year of life promotes eye and brain development. Parents can do various activities to encourage their baby to reach for and grab objects, along with helping them become more focused and interested in patterns and colors. A newborn baby can focus on objects approximately twenty centimeters away. Objects that become closer or further away than this become blurry to your baby.
When focused however, your baby’s eyesight can be very sharp, viewing objects in three dimensional. Teaching baby visual development activities helps baby to follow or track moving objects with her eyes. This is an essential skill needed to read words along a line or down a page. The following activities can develop your baby’s visual tracking and promotes your baby’s emotional development.
Baby Visual Development Activities:
Ensure your baby is happy and relaxed and looking at you. Spend some time looking at each other, pull all sorts of different facial expressions, smile, raise your eyebrows up and down, poke your tongue out and wave it around. Do this regularly, for example once or twice a day to enhance baby visual development. Your baby may start to imitate you – watch for them to try to start poking out their tongue to you;
Spend some time each day encouraging visual tracking. Hold a brightly colored toy or rattle about twenty five centimetres away from your baby’s face, slowly move it up, down and side to side. Your baby will become better at tracking the object the more you do this;
If it’s a nice day outside and a safe environment, show your baby objects as they blow in the wind, for example leaves on trees, washing on the line, leaves blowing on the ground. Talk to your baby about what is happening. You can also do this through the window if it’s not so nice outside;
Hold a soft, brightly colored feather or scarf approximately twenty five centimetres from your baby’s face. Gently wave it, moving towards your baby, then away. Repeat this until your baby loses interest or if they get tired;
Talk and sing with your baby at various nappy changes. This will encourage eye contact and help your baby to relax. Pull funny faces when you’ve finished or shake a rattle approximately twenty five centimetres away from their face. Spend lots of time singing and talking;
Hold your baby in front of a mirror. Point at your baby’s reflection and ask Who is that? Name and touch parts of your baby’s face while they’re looking in the mirror;
Hold a bright piece of clothing, teddy or object at baby’s eye level (particularly good if baby is sitting up). Say ‘Where’s teddy?’ and drop the teddy into a washing basket. Do it slowly enough for baby to watch it fall into the basket. Gradually increase the speed. She may learn to predict where it is going and start to want to drop it into the basket herself.;
Remember to watch for tired signs and only spend approximately five to ten minutes per day doing focused activities so to not overstimulate your baby.