Why Start Early
The importance of early experiences on the development of children is beyond dispute. It is critically important to start a development program as early as possible.
THE SCIENCE BEHIND THE APP
Please refer to Your Baby’s Brain, Intellect, and You for a full review of the literature.
One is left in awe as to the explosive nature of its growth. The figure on the right shows how quickly the synapses (connections between brain cells) form. Once born, a baby’s brain grows faster in his first two years than at any other time of her lifetime. By the age of 3, her brain forms approximately 1000 trillion brain cell connections! This means that the experiences a child has in these early years will impact his mind for the rest of her life.
Changes in the structure of the brain affects how one functions. And how one functions forces brain structures to change, making higher order function possible. This reciprocal interaction between brain structure and brain function is at the heart of intellectual development.
Early experience has a positive effect on school success. And ignoring the first two years is detrimental to school success (W. Steven Barnett, 1998).
• Gains in IQ resulting from intervention in kindergarten fade rapidly upon entering elementary school, but gains realized in the first year of life persist well into adolescence!
• Busy regions of the brain become thicker, making it easier to do things involved in those regions. Repeated actions in one domain of knowledge make that knowledge easier to grasp. In short, as neuroscientists like to say: Cells that fire together, wire together.
Here are a few examples:
o Hearing regions of world class violists have twice as many neurons as ordinary people
The primary visual cortex of artists is much thicker than that of non-artists (Arnold Scheibel, 1990).
• London cab drivers who have to study the bewildering streets of their city have thicker visual-spatial brain regions than normal individuals (Ferris Jabr, 2011).
Activity is the engine of brain growth. Children’s play — especially stage-appropriate, guided, interactive play — has a positive effect on scientific thinking, decision making, language, as well as social and emotional development.
Through guided, interactive, and stage-appropriate play, a child has the opportunity to truly reach her intellectual potential. Research clearly shows that this type of play has a significant, positive impact on language, mathematical and spatial relations, decision making (executive functions), scientific thinking as well as social and emotional development.
A recent article by Brenna Hassinger-Das, Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, and Roberta Michnick Golinkoff (2017) entitled Brain Science and Guided Play: A Developing Story, the authors summarize things this way:
“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). One reason that play might be such a valuable pedagogical tool is that it features the precise contexts that facilitate learning. An amalgamated research field called the science of learning has identified four key ingredients of successful learning: learning occurs best when children are mentally active (not passive), engaged (not distracted), socially interactive (with peers or adults), and building meaningful connections to their lives (Hirsh-Pasek et al. 2015).”
A review of the literature points to these 4 important observations:
1. A healthy parent-child relationship can lead to better outcomes for children. This type of relationship is one that nurtures the physical, social-emotional, and cognitive development of the child.
2. Parents who know more about how their baby’s brain develops, are more likely to provide an environment that fosters social and intellectual development.
3. Certain parental attributes contribute to improved interaction with infants. Parents who are aware of a child’s goals and needs in a problem situation; developmentally sensitive understanding of the child and developmentally appropriate child rearing responses; responsiveness to cues from the child; and providing opportunities for the child to be self-directive (Cook, 1991).
4. Parenting programs that focus on improving parents’ ability to understand their children often help parents learn to use observation and comparison to understand their children (Glascoe and MacLean, 1990).
