Benefits of Starting Early

Benefits of Starting Early

 

 

By Dr. S. H. Jacob

www.shjacob.io

Author, Your Baby’s Brain, Intellect, and You

Content Writer, SmartBabies App

 

 

The first few years of life are critical to the child’s brain growth, the child’s present and future development, and society. The most respected theorists in history, like Freud, Piaget, and Eriksen, all agree that this period in a baby’s life sets the foundation for childhood and beyond.

 

Decades of rigorous research show that children’s earliest experiences play a critical role in brain development. Here are the highlights:

• Neural circuits, which create the foundation for learning, behavior, and health, are most flexible or “plastic” during the first three years of life. Over time, they become increasingly difficult to change.
• The brain is strengthened by positive early experiences, especially stable relationships with caring and responsive adults, safe and supportive environments, and appropriate nutrition.
• Early social/emotional development and physical health provide the foundation upon which cognitive and language skills develop.
• High-quality early intervention services can change a child’s developmental trajectory and improve outcomes for children, families, and communities.
• Intervention is likely to be more effective and less costly when it is provided earlier in life rather than later.

 

A review of the literature by the Connecticut Early Childhood Education Alliance concludes the following:

 

1. EARLY CHILDHOOD EDUCATION RESULTS IN SUCCESSFUL STUDENTS
   1. Increases in high school graduation rates – Chicago children who attended an early childhood education program were 29% more likely to graduate from high school than their peers who did not attend.
   2. Helps children do better on standardized tests – Michigan fourth graders who had attended early childhood education programs passed the state’s literacy and math assessment tests at higher rates than their peers who did not attend.
   3. Reduces grade repetition – Maryland fifth graders who attended an early childhood education program were 44% less likely to have repeated a grade than their peers who did not attend.
   4. Reduces the number of children placed in special education – Among Chicago children, those who attended an early childhood education program were 41% more likely to require special education services than their peers who did not attend.

 

1. EARLY CHILDHOOD EDUCATION RESULTS IN RESPONSIBLE ADULTS
   1. Reduces crime and delinquency – Chicago children who did not attend early childhood education programs were 70% more likely to be arrested for violent crime by age 18 than their peers who had attended.
   2. Lowers rates of teen pregnancy – North Carolina children who attended early childhood programs were less likely to become teen parents than their peers who did not attend (26% vs 45%).
   3. Leads to greater employment and higher wages as adults – Forty-year-old adults in Michigan who attended early childhood education programs as children were more likely to be employed and had a 33% higher average income than their peers who did not attend.
   4. Contributes to more stable families – Forty-year-old adults in Michigan who attended early childhood education programs as children were more likely to report that they were getting along very well with their families than their peers who did not attend (75% vs 64%).

 

1. EARLY CHILDHOOD EDUCATION RESULTS IN STRONGER COMMUNITIES
   1. Saves money. Every $1 invested in high-quality early childhood education saves the taxpayers $7 – savings are found in the reduction of remedial and special education, welfare, and criminal justice services.
   2. Improves efficiency and productivity in the classroom – Children who attended early childhood education programs such as Head Start centers had more advanced skills in areas such as following directions, problem-solving, and joining in activities, all of which allow teachers to spend more time working directly with children and less on classroom management.

 

The Rand Corporation focused on 20 various early child development intervention programs (pregnancy-kindergarten) and found 19 of them able to demonstrate favorable effects on child outcomes in:

1. reasoning, academic achievement
2. behavioral and emotional capability
3. graduation rates
4. child maltreatment
5. health
6. delinquency and crime
7. the social welfare program use
8. success in the labor market
9. Some of the benefits were immediate.  In other cases, they were observed through adolescence into adulthood.  In the unique case of the Perry Preschool Program, a Piaget-based program, lasting benefits have been measured 35 years after the intervention ended!*

 

Do Early Gains Last a Long Time?

1. Steven Barnett reviewed thirty-eight studies on the long-term effects of early intervention (before the age of five) on cognitive functions or school success through the third grade of children in poverty and found the following general patterns:

 

1. Gains in IQ resulting from intervention beginning in kindergarten tend to fade rapidly upon entry into elementary school. However, gains realized from intervention beginning at least in the first year of life tend to persist well into adolescence.

 

2. Achievement Scores. The benefits from early intervention on achievement scores do not fade out; they tend to persist well into the high school years.

 

3. School Success. Early intervention shows a uniformly positive effect on school success, as measured by grade retention, need for special education, and rate of high school graduation.

 

What is The Best Kind of Intervention? 

 For over fifty years, we have had evidence suggesting that early experiences impact later cognitive, social, emotional, and behavioral functioning. Of particular interest to us here is a specific type of experience that incorporates all these domains into one activity, namely, play.

Recently, Brenna Hassinger-Das, Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, and Roberta Michnick Golinkoff reviewed the current literature on how play impacts a baby’s overall development. Here’s what they conclude:

“A growing body of behavioral research establishes relationships between children’s play and development in several areas, including language (Toub et al. 2016), executive functions (Tominey & McClelland 2011), mathematics and spatial skills (Fisher et al. 2013), scientific thinking (Schulz & Bonawitz 2007), and social and emotional development (Dore, Smith, & Lillard 2015).”

 

How Important is Support from Parents?

A team of researchers at the University of Albany and the University of Michigan found that the more children are nurtured by their parents, the more likely they are to remain physically and mentally healthy through old age. Analyzing a survey of three thousand adults who ranged in age from twenty-five to seventy-four, the researchers found that survey participants who hadn’t gotten enough emotional support from their parents were more likely to suffer from depression or other emotional issues. They were also more likely to report poorer physical health. Ultimately, this means that the emotional support parents provide their babies helps their cognitive development now and promotes their health and well-being throughout their lives.

 

Summarizing the effectiveness of a comprehensive, five-year program of early childhood intervention for low-income children, Barbara D. Goodson and associates (2000) state:

 

“Three linked hypotheses —

• that the child’s early development lays the foundation for his or her long-term functioning,
• that early environmental influences have important effects on early development,
• and that poverty is associated with a variety of material and psychological deficits in children’s early experiences—are widely accepted, supported by research evidence, and have troubling implications.”

 

Can Poor Quality Daycare Harm Children?

Mary Carlson studied young children who were left in poor-quality daycare centers. The children she observed had abnormally high levels of a stress hormone known as cortisol on weekdays but not on weekends when they were with their parents. It turns out that children with high levels of cortisol tend to do poorly on motor and cognitive ability tests. Moreover, the areas of the brain (temporal lobes) that receive input from the senses and regulate emotions had little, if any, activity resulting in emotional problems and deficits in cognitive ability later in life.

 

More recently, Baylor College of Medicine scientists were able to show that children who don’t play much or who are rarely touched develop brains that are twenty to thirty percent smaller than normal for their age! Sterile environments result in brain deficits that affect intellectual development. Very young children who are neglected or abused bear scars that affect all domains of development – physical, intellectual, social, and emotional. To sum it up, poor early experiences produce poor brains; conversely, rich early experiences produce rich and inquisitive brains.

 

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*(Sources: Chicago Longitudinal Study; “State Efforts to Evaluate the Effects of Pre-Kindergarten”, Yale University Child Study Center; The Carolina Abecedarian Project; The High/Scope Perry Preschool Project; “The Head Start Family and Child Experiences Survey”, U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services)