By Natasha Josefowitz, Ph.D.
LA JOLLA, California–Just what we need: another difficult, if not impossible, dilemma for working parents! As if juggling home and career is not frustrating enough, research has uncovered the importance of staying home with a newborn or at least providing one-to-one contact on a daily basis by a good childcare person.
From birth, a baby’s brain cells keep making new connections and discarding others. This will shape a lifetime of experience, making the first three years critical. The question of nature vs. nurtur–does heredity shape a person, or does the environment have more influenc–is now finally answered. It is both. Experience (nurture) shapes the brain (nature) and this in turn influences how we react to future experiences.
Some of the most recent discoveries coming out of neuroscience are about the formation of the brain. A brain at birth contains over 100 billion neurons, as many nerve cells as there are stars in the Milky Way. The pattern of wiring between these nerve cells is shaped by what the baby encounters.
This is how it works: a baby is stimulated by a voice, a mobile hanging over its crib, a touch. This stimulation produces electrical activity in the brain cells. Continued activity reinforces specific neural pathways, which in turn change the structure of the brain. If these connections or synapses are not used they wither away.
The best example of this is language. An infant’s brain is wired to learn all the sounds of human language. The sounds that are never heard at an early age cannot be reproduced correctly later. This is why people have accents when learning a new language as adults. Their synapses for those sounds specific to the new language have been lost at a young age. This is similar to the mechanism which make it best to learn music when young, as well as many other types of learning.
What wires a child’s brain is repeated experience. The electrical charges flowing from axons that transmit the signals to the dendrites receiving them become synapses that permanently connect the two. The more synapses in the brain, the more intelligent and well-functioning the child can become. A brain wired for musical talent will need opportunities in the environment to fulfill itself. Thus nature influences nurture, which influences nature–ad infinitum.
Unfortunately, if there is heredity for aggression and the child is abused, he may well become an aggressive adult. With good, early parental care and love, such aggressive tendencies may never surface. On the other hand, there are abused children who never become aggressive. Their brains were not wired towards that tendency. So you need a certain susceptibility in the brain to begin with and life experiences that exacerbate it to produce specific behaviors.
What all this means is that the more positive experiences we can give our babies and children, the better developed their brains will be. Change the mobile hanging over the crib, provide new toys, play with your children, hug them, kiss them, hold them in your arms so they can see and interact with the world around them, talk to them, and read baby books and then children’s books to them even though they can’t read or understand the words yet. Interact a lot, learn the emotional cues and respond to them. Babies of depressed mothers are depressed, so be joyful with your child and have fun together.
Children who are not played with or touched develop brains that are 20% to 30% smaller than normal for their age. Remember the orphaned children of Romania, some of them so damaged by neglect that by the age of three they could not recover normal function. Emotional deprivation early in life or physical abuse has resulted in abnormal brain-wave patterns in these neglected children¾often irreversible.
Because of this we must rethink policy by providing adequate preschool programs that can boost the brain power of children under the age of three who live below the federal poverty level. We must re-think the cost of putting welfare mothers of infants and toddlers into the workforce without providing adequate daycare.
The rise of single parent households and the decline of community all point to grave consequences for the future of our children. Defective adults–either emotionally deficient or intellectually incompetent, due to lack of early care and stimulation–will be a burden and a danger to our society. Knowing all this, parents need to consider with utmost care, the staying-at-home option or research in great detail the daycare their children attend.
A child thrives best in a one-on-one situation, if that is not possible, there should be at least a high ratio of the number of caregivers to the number of children, so that each child can get some individual attention. Whatever the level of daycare you can find for your child, get in the habit of interacting with your child when you are together. Instead of trying to keep them quiet and “out of the way” while you cook, eat, keep house, and relax after work, involve the child in your activity as much as possible. Let dinner be ten minutes late if it means your baby’s brain is getting the stimulation it needs.
I know this all adds to the burden working parents already carry, but it is best to worry now and do something about it, than not to know and pay a high price for ignorance.
So hold your infant a lot, sing to your baby, listen to music and dance together, and read often to your child.
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Natasha Josefowitz is a freelance writer based in La Jolla, where her column appears in La Jolla Village News. She may be contacted at Natasha.josefowitz@sdjewishworld.com
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