Engaging in lively activities like painting or arts with parents can make toddlers smarter.
Researchers at The Open University and The Oxford University found that activities like reading, storytelling, shopping, painting and arts could make children happier and help them develop many skills.
On the other hand, passive activities were found harming a child's healthy development. Picture books were not helping the kids at all and TV watching was found to be negatively affecting children's happiness.
To reach the conclusion, researchers used data from the German Household Survey. Nearly 800 parents participated in the survey conducted between 2007 and 2010. Parents answered questions related to their interaction and involvement in their children's favorite activities, children's motor/social skill and their talking ability.
Scientists found that engaging in active stuff helped develop basic skills better in children. While painting or art-related activities helped improve a toddler's movement skills; reading, story-telling and singing were found to boost talking and social abilities. Passive activities were found of little help to a child's development.
"Our results suggest that parents may face difficult trade-offs with regard to time spent actively engaging with their children, versus providing for them materially via the labour market," Dr Laurence Roope of the Health Economics Research Centre at Oxford University said, in a news release.
"Of course parents can't engage their young children in these activities every hour of the day, but it is encouraging that time spent reading books to them, painting or joining in with a nursery rhyme could help their development. It will be interesting to see whether similar results emerge for slightly older children and using other datasets."
The findings were scheduled to be presented at a conference on the economics of well-being in Paris, July 3.
