Discoveries over the past decade – many of them centered in Seattle – have brought more emphasis on the importance of early learning worldwide and more funding for preschools and parent education in Washington state.
“The new research shows that babies and young children know and learn more about the world than we could ever have imagined,” wrote Seattle researchers Andrew Meltzoff , Ph.D., and Patricia Kuhl, Ph.D., and their co-author Alison Gopnik in their seminal 2000 book The Scientist in the Crib. “They think, draw conclusions, make predictions, look for explanations, and even do experiments.”
What is meant by “early learning” depends on who is using the word. It can mean:
- Helping a child reach her greatest potential - Providing her with the skills she needs to be ready for school - Fostering the parent-child attachment and nurturing the child’s emotional development - Creating a smarter, higher-achieving child who will have a leg up on the competition
Whatever your definition, there are some things that foster the development of a baby’s brain in the first two years of life, and some things that don’t.
What Works?
“Babies learn best in interactions with their parents,” summarizes Danielle Kassow, Ph.D., an educational psychologist and research associate with the Talaris Research Institute in Seattle. “The best thing you can do is to spend time with your child.”
Doing what, specifically?
Talking Reading Playing Singing Cuddling
Do those things every day. It’s that simple, Kassow says. “It does not require special or expensive toys.”
As early as the 1960s and 1970s, researchers found that babies can tell the difference between mother and a stranger minutes after birth. Meltzoff, now co-director of the Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences at the University of Washington, discovered that infants begin trying to imitate adults within an hour of birth: He stuck out his tongue, the baby stuck out hers; he opened his mouth wide, and she did the same thing. Just being ourselves – a role model ¬– provides our baby with her best learning tool.
The back-and-forth interaction between parent and child is especially important, Kassow elaborates. “Use turn-taking with a child. If the baby coos, you coo back. Then give the baby a little time to coo back to you – remember that baby’s brain processes information more slowly than an adult’s, so don’t get in his face with responses. This back and forth will make the baby want to be with the parent.”
Research by Kuhl, Meltzoff’s wife and co-director at the Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences, has shown that the more we read to and talk with children, the more they learn. She found that “parentese” – the way parents and caregivers talk to infants in higher pitched voices with longer duration of sounds and exaggerated pitch changes – is universal in English, Russian, Zulu or Mandarin. As we make subtle changes to make sounds more distinct and to stretch out the vowels, babies as young as 20 weeks mimic the vowel sounds and learn to recognize speech patterns.
Dimitri Christakis, MD, MPH, associate professor of pediatrics and director of the Child Health Institute at the University of Washington, agrees that spending time with our children is the best way to help them learn. “They’ll tell you what they need. Find things to do that are mutually fun – doll play, blocks, whatever you both enjoy,” he says.
“The traditional things that we’ve always done are the best things,” he says, and he has begun a series of research studies to “prove the commonsensical.”
He is the lead researcher on a study reported in the October 2007 issue of the Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine showing that playing with blocks may improve language development in toddlers. The pilot study involved 175 toddlers ages 1.5 to 2.5 years. One group of 88 children was mailed two sets of building blocks with suggestions on how to play with them. The other 87 children did not receive any blocks. Parents tracked their child’s activities in a diary and completed a phone questionnaire, including assessments of their children’s language and attention, six months later.
On average, the children who received the blocks scored 15 percent higher on their language assessment than those who did not.
“I expect that anything the parents did with their toddler would help early learning,” Christakis says. “We did blocks because they’re an easy thing that parents and kids like to do together. If you play 10 or 15 minutes with blocks with your child, then in the next 10 or 15 minutes, while he plays alone with the blocks, he will reinforce the skills.”
What Doesn’t Work?
Researchers agree that the biggest detriment to early learning is a lack of proper nutrition, shelter and loving care. Studies on neglected Romanian orphans established that children deprived of human interaction and stimulation fell far behind in intellectual development. Makers of electronic toys and DVDs extrapolated the research to imply that more stimulation makes smarter babies.
The trouble is that these electronic toys, which usually do one or two pre-programmed things, stifle children’s imaginations, according to leading parenting experts from Penelope Leach to T. Berry Braselton. Computer games and many electronic games do respond to a baby’s or toddler’s input, but not in a way that babies’ brains are programmed to receive it – through face-to-face human interaction.
Kuhl found this in her recent research on infants’ ability to learn other languages in the first year of life. A native Mandarin speaker played with and spoke with children, in person, for 12 sessions of 25 minutes each over a four-week period. Later, the babies recognized Mandarin sounds. Kuhl had another set of babies watch a Chinese speaker play with babies on a video and another group listen to audio recordings of the Chinese woman playing; a third group had no exposure to the language. None of the babies in the last three groups could recognize any Mandarin sounds.
Christakis believes that TV and videos are at best useless and at worse harmful for babies, and heartily endorses the recommendation of the American Academy of Pediatrics that children watch no TV up to age 2.
In 2004, he published research showing that the more TV children watch as toddlers, the more problems with attention they have later in life. He and his fellow researchers asked parents how many hours of TV their children watched at age 1 and at age 3. When their children were 7, they were asked a series of questions about how well their children were able to pay attention and focus. The results were startling: For each additional hour of TV viewing before age 3, a child’s chances of later developing problems paying attention increased by 10 percent.
This fall, Christakis incurred the wrath of the Disney Company, makers of Baby Einstein™ videos, for announcing that babies and toddlers who view videos have lower language skills than those who don’t. He and his colleagues interviewed the parents of 1,008 babies ages 2 to 24 months, asking them about the amount of time children spent watching TV, DVDs or videos, and having them complete a short form of the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory. Christakis found that among infants ages 8 to 16 months, each hour per day of viewing baby DVDs and videos was associated with a 16.99 point decrease in the language assessment score. However, no drop was found for toddlers ages 17 to 24 months.
Christakis believes that babies cannot understand the content of what is on the screen. The pacing of TV and video is “supernatural” and “over-stimulating” in his words, causing the brain to be wired for high-impulse, rapidly-changing images and to be less adept at reading and focusing on other tasks. He says parents should resist the pressure of what he calls the “Build-a-Brainier-Baby Industry.”
“The marketing has led parents to believe that DVDs will make kids smarter, and so we are showing that they will not,” he adds. “I ask parents what their motivation is for using a video. Don’t beat yourself up if you need to use it for 15 minutes to collect yourself or take a shower. But if you’re using it because you think it will help your child learn, that’s not a good reason.”
He is most concerned that babies are watching an hour or two of television a day (10 to 20 percent of their waking hours). “What are they not doing in the time they’re watching TV?” he asks. “The best thing for babies’ learning is anything that brings parents and children together. Most video products take them apart.”
“Any parent interaction is better for the child than watching a video.”
Terry Meersman, executive director of the Talaris Research Institute, believes that when it comes to early learning, many parents “aren’t listening to their gut.” His advice: “Do more of the right stuff, but leave out the videos, the flashcards, the advanced academics. Let everyday experiences teach your children, and have fun.”
Wenda Reed is a Bothell freelance writer and mother of two.
