Guest opinion: Children’s first years of development are most crucial

A favorite of policymakers, preschool education for 4-year-olds is somewhat late to overcome problems that develop in the first three years. Parents with their first child who think they know everything about raising him or her are foolish. Michael Levine, founding executive director of the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop, observed: “Having children makes you no more a parent than having a piano makes you a pianist.” Caring for offspring for about 7,000 days before they go on their own, parents lead in determining what kind of people they will be.

If they succeed and are good people, take credit. Who is to blame if they don’t do well? It’s not simple. People realize that getting married, earning a degree and a living demand much effort and patience. With all these other adult endeavors, many children are shortchanged.

Too many parents are inconsistent, permissive and mean.

Babies’ awareness of caregivers, surroundings and self quickly develops. Babies learn to discriminate caregivers and objects, and their brains struggle to comprehend. By their sixth month, normal babies learn to discriminate about 50 phonemes. Phonemes are the smallest language sounds that carry meaning, such as discriminating between the sounds of lip and rip and milk and mama. They also discriminate phonemes by facial expressions, i.e., saying yes and mama and papa move one’s mouth and face upward; no, the opposite.

Babies pick up basics of the language spoken around them. By 2 or so, many can speak short sentences. A gift of evolution, infants are born with a magnet-like, mental facility that struggles to understand and use their caretakers’ language. It’s the Language Acquisition Device (LAD). Although babies are helpless and highly dependent, their brains are constantly trying to learn and understand. If a child is isolated and not spoken with by the age of 6, he or she will never learn to speak. That phenomenon was discovered when captive children were found with wolves. They could bark, but after their rescue they never learned to speak as humans.

The importance of good caregiving from birth is that children’s early life experiences begin to shape their entire lives. It should become common knowledge that babies’ first three years are most important for cognitive development, that is, language and senses that promote thinking, reasoning and remembering. I found that to be true through my biographical studies. Neurons are the brain’s workhorses, of which humans have many billions. As the brain produces neurons on a need basis, youths who have loving, interactive and thoughtful caregivers develop brains richly interwoven with neurons. Children raised and taught in negligent conditions during their first three years have fewer neurons and weak cognitive development. Although children with average IQ reached peak cortex growth in their brains at ages 7 or 8, very bright youths reached their peak cortex thickness about age 13 with greater pruning of redundant neuron connections to make way for new neurons.

Mothers are cherished, but they differ greatly in how they raise their offspring. Love alone is not enough. Comparison of good- and poor-quality mother-child relations has found that high-sensitive mothers express unfailing acceptance, cooperation and accessibility in their interactions with infants. The best mothers get to understand their babies so well that they are able to anticipate their wants and needs. Besides handling babies’ physical needs, such as feeding, high-sensitivity mothers treat babies as thinkers. Interacting with their infants, they constantly pour out abundant baby talk and seek responses from their babies. The best mothers use attachment to fully interact with their babies and understand them. Poor mothers express love and care, but they seldom go beyond the physical chores, or treat their babies as thinking beings. Good mothers might say to their babies, “Oh, mommy hears her darling crying. Is that because you’re wet and uncomfortable? Your crying seems to tell me that, right? Would you like me to change you before you get your milk? Can you say yes?  Oh my, what a big smile.  Do you see my happy smile?”

Note the frequent use of questions.