Concerned about her 3-month-old daughter’s fitful sleep and crying during the night, a worried mother took her infant to a pediatrician. The doctor looked the baby over, said she was fine, and told the mother to let her “cry it out.”
Then he added, “You must remember: Until they are 2 years old, we are just veterinarians.”
Or take the case of the father with a PhD who, when asked whether he talked to his infant son, replied, “Why? He doesn’t talk back.”
Those responses, collected at public gatherings at which child rearing was the focus, are typical of a widespread lack of understanding of early brain development that is harming the future of untold numbers of children. All too many people continue to dismiss infants’ brains as blank blobs that don’t absorb much of what the baby experiences–until the child, miraculously, begins to speak.
That myth, under assault for years, is rapidly being demolished. With an intense push from neuroscience, we now understand more of what a newborn knows, and when he or she knows it, and we are beginning to use this profound information to radically change our early childhood practices and policies.
“We have real hard scientific knowledge about what enhances child health and well-being and what puts it at risk, and our policies and practices are now putting young children at risk,” said Jack P. Shonkoff, dean of Brandeis University’s Florence Heller Graduate School and chairman of an explosive new report by the National Academy of Sciences, titled “The Science of Early Childhood Development.”
The evidence supporting this new push is compelling: Brain cells begin learning during fetal development.
Immediately after birth, for example, a newborn can recognize his mother’s voice, and even the music she listened to during pregnancy.
Connections between brain cells, which allow them to communicate with one another, grow at an enormous rate in the months after birth, zooming up to 100 trillion. These connections use the sounds, sights, touch, smells and feelings of parents and other caregivers to establish neural pathways for emotions, speech and intellectual capacities.
But as fast as neuroscience is moving to shed light on the needs of the developing brain, many parents, future parents, grandparents and others remain confused and misinformed, with sometimes-heartbreaking results.
Just how misinformed many people are was revealed in a new survey, “What Grown-Ups Understand About Child Development,” released the day after the NAS report last month. The survey was supported by Zero to Three, Brio Corp. and Civitas, organizations dedicated to the welfare of young children.
Neuroscience tells us, for example, that a baby’s brain at birth is like a sponge, taking in and processing everything around it.
Yet, when asked “At what age do you think an infant or young child begins to really take in and react to the world around them?” 75 percent of parents of children 3 years old or younger gave the wrong answer, with most saying that babies don’t react to their world until they are at least 3 months, or even a year old.
While 95 percent of parents say it is important to read to children, according to the survey, other studies show that fewer than 1 in 5 parents reads or looks at picture books with their children more than once a day.
The survey found that many parents emphasize flashcards, educational TV and computer time at the expense of play, which is important for a child to build social skills and language and master important intellectual concepts and thinking skills.
It also found that 72 percent of parents were unaware that children as young as 4 months can experience depression, and 23 percent of parents incorrectly believe that a 6-month-old child is too young to suffer long-lasting effects from witnessing violence, such as abuse of a spouse or of other children.
Remarkably, 37 percent of parents said that regular spanking to maintain discipline is appropriate for children younger than 2, although they understand that such punishment can lead to aggressive behavior and that it may not lead to better self-control.
Child-development experts say that very young children cannot be spoiled. Yet 44 percent of parents and 60 percent of grandparents queried in the survey insisted that picking up crying 3- to 6-month-old babies would spoil them.
On the contrary, soothing crying babies calms their heart rate, settles their breathing, lowers their stress hormones and increases their frustration tolerance. Many parents believe that letting babies “cry it out” helps build character. But it may be doing just the opposite–eroding it.
The good news from the survey is that more and more parents understand that they can make a difference in early development. But there are huge gaps in actual practice.
The profound new discoveries about child development over the last 10 to 20 years come at a time when it also has become evident that we are drifting off course in the way we raise our children.
This drifting didn’t happen because we wanted it to, but because the stresses of modern life–single mothers working, both parents working, longer hours, exhaustion, less time for children, and more children in child care–have overtaken us and are dramatically changing our child-rearing practices.
Consider that it was less than 150 years ago that American fathers first left home to take jobs provided by the Industrial Revolution.In the last 20 to 30 years, we have seen a similar exodus of mothers as women entered the workforce in record numbers.
Most young mothers work, and more than half of all children are placed in some type of child care by 6 months of age. Poor child care, in which babies’ brains do not receive sufficient stimulation, can have an effect on the children’s socialization and later performance in school.
But child care is not the problem–provided it is good. Studies show that children do somewhat better if they are in high-quality child care and have loving parents at home than they do with full-time stay-at-home mothers who are equally as loving.
Parents also thought that all they had to do to get children ready for kindergarten was to teach them their ABCs, numbers and colors.
But in the process, many of us were neglecting their emotional development, which now appears to be even more important than learning the 3 Rs. We are discovering that emotions are the most powerful reinforcers of learning.
Largely as a direct result of this neglect, half of our children are starting school unable to get along with other pupils or teachers, they cannot follow directions or sit still, and they are not prepared to learn.
“We’re potentially raising overly aggressive children who react to situations with intimidation and bullying, instead of cooperation and understanding; children who won’t be able to tolerate frustration, wait their turn or respect the needs of others,” said Dr. Kyle Pruett of Yale University’s Child Study Center, and president of Zero to Three.
In an unprecedented report last month, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services said children’s unpreparedness for school is increasing, and they blame it on their lack of emotional development and social skills.
The report, “A Good Beginning,” chillingly points out that children who are not emotionally and socially competent when they begin kindergarten are often not successful in the early years of school–and can be plagued by behavioral, emotional, academic and social development problems into adulthood.
These problems create a quagmire for children in poverty. For the last 25 years, while the nation’s prosperity shot through the roof, 20 percent of children have lived in poverty–and continue to do so even though welfare reform has placed an army of dependent women into the workforce. These mothers may be earning money, but not enough to lift the burden of poverty from their children, who often end up in inadequate child-care facilities.
But the problem is that more and more children, in the middle class and lower middle class as well, are being shortchanged by the absence of loving security and enriching experiences–an absence that may forestall the full development of their emotional equilibrium and intellectual talents.
Child-development specialists used to say they didn’t know what it took for optimum brain development. But we now know beyond a shadow of a doubt that neglect, abuse, lack of stimulation, and other emotional deficits and bad experiences can rewire the developing brain for depression, aggression and failure.
So overwhelming has this knowledge become in the last decade that, in its report two weeks ago, the NAS scolded the nation. America is not helping its children and families prepare for the changing demands and possibilities of life in the 21st Century, the report said. Instead, the United States is becoming a worse place for an increasing number of children, it warned.
It is time, once and for all, the report went on, to get rid of the obsolete notion that brain development is primarily either nature or nurture, environment or genetics. They are both vital.
All children are born ready to learn and wired for feelings. But it is their interaction with the world around them that determines how that wiring proceeds. That’s why negative early experiencescan be so detrimental to personality, temperament, emotions and intelligence, while good experiences are protective and promote successful development.
America needs to overhaul early-childhood policies to make sure that infants and children get an adequate dose of love, warmth, security and stimulating experiences to ensure that their brains reach their full potential, said the NAS report. Every child needs a minimum of one loving, caring person in his or her life, the report concludes.
We now know that among the priorities for improving childhood outcomes are:
– Reducing modern sources of stress in pregnant women, a primary cause of prematurity, which is now known to bea major risk to mental and physical development. The U.S. prematurity rate, which is rapidly increasing, already is the highest in the industrialized world.
– Making sure that high-quality child care and paid parental leave are available for all parents. Both programs are favored by more than 80 percent of adults, according to the Zero to Three survey. Child-care workers need to be better-trained and better-paid.
– Instituting universal, high-quality preschool, which can be an effective means of preparing children for kindergarten and beyond.
– Developing programs to end poverty among children. Just as Social Security has successfully kept older people from living out their lives in penury, we need new programs to prevent children from starting their lives in brain-dulling impoverishment.
The three reports–“A Good Beginning,” “The Science of Early Childhood Development” and “What Grown-Ups Understand About Child Development”–are all independent efforts to confront concerns over how young children are being brought up. Together, they may open the door for dramatic improvement in our slipshod approach to early childhood development, much in the way that the famous Flexner report reformed the disarray that was the practice of medicine in 1910, when anyone could call himself a doctor.
Their message is clear: We need to get better information about early brain development into the hands of parents, future parents and adolescents, probably starting when they are in middle school. And schools of education need to start teaching the elements of neuroscience to teachers of infants and children so they have a better understanding of how young brains learn.
Neuroscience is also showing how new strategies can quickly be developed to promote optimal brain development. Often these strategies are simple, yet powerful, such as enhancing emotional development, through love and hugs, and intellectual skills, through talking and reading to infants right from the start.
Basically, the study is saying we have come to a new definition of a child at risk. It is not just a child who has been abused, it’s one who is not talked to, read to, sung to, touched, hugged, played with and loved.
With the three studies raising parents’ awareness of the importance of these types of interactions with children, now is a pivotal time to take advantage of the widespread support of parents and non-parents alike for new governmental policies that could be of invaluable help to younger children and their families.
