Leaning how kids learn is important for two reasons. The first is direct and obvious; if you know how they mentally develop, you should be able to help guide them through their mental growth. You may not make them that much smarter, but you can easily prevent them from staying dumb or getting dumber. The second is a selfish reason; if you know how kid's mentally develop, you can better understand why you do all those dumb things that you do. You might just be able to prevent yourself from continuing to make those dumb mistakes (and getting dumber).
This is my all-time favorite book about child-rearing and developmental psychology. I will warn you; it is a completely difficult read. It is written by a neuroscientist, and she doesn't water things down that much or pull her punches. I still don't think I completely understand the beginning. It starts with conception (actually I think it starts even before conception) and explains all the hormonal reactions that take place in a women's body. These, it ends up, are important, because they can affect early fetal development. It then walks you through what develops throughout gestation - and I was never good at biology, so I got a little lost. I then goes on to talk about all aspects of the brain and mind development for the first five years of life (including developing motor skills, language, sensory perceptions, etc). Not only is it good to know this stuff - but knowing it allows you to better understand all the other stuff you read about development. And it will help you to understand what advice/information is truly important from a developmental standpoint and what is likely to be more trivial. This book is worth the effort.
OK, this book is an easier introduction about the mind. Like the first book, it is written by scientists; so you know they aren't just making stuff up. This one is written by developmental psychologists and is a much easier read. In fact, even thought this book takes place slightly later in the chronological development of a child (it really isn't as concerned about pre-birth) this book might help ease you into the topic and provide some frameworks for the book above. The authors do a great job really explaining not only what and when and why a child learns stuff, but also how scientists figured these things out. Usually, a clever experiment has to be designed to test for all this stuff since if you ask an infant a question, they don't tend to provide a comprehensible answer (and their tiny fingers aren't that good at holding the pencils required to fill out surveys).
By this point, you're probably worried that there is so much to know and so much you should be doing that you are guaranteed to f**k up the life of any small child you come in contact with. That is where this book steps in. This book makes you feel better by realizing that children are hardwired to learn (and we are hardwired to teach them) and the best thing we can do is just get out of our own way and play with them. And it uses science to back this up. And it gives you reasons why you should hate Baby Einstein and all those early educational toys. It's a win-win.
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