Baby’s Developing Brain

Over at the Science of Learning blog, Dr. Martha Burns has just completed a two part series on the development of the infant brain. The good news and bad news for parents is that we play a significant role.

In August, Dr. Burns described the infant brain as a learning machine: working to determine the relevant information about language and the environment, while designing itself, quickly, to become an expert in said language and environment. The parents’ role is to provide an environment that fosters the development of skills that will be helpful later in life.

In her recent conclusion, Dr. Burns provides some more detail on how parents can help the developing infant brain, especially with the goal of developing the kind of sustained attention skills required in a classroom. The brain, says Dr. Burns, wires itself for learning based on early stimulation and experience. To facilitate this development:

• Parents of infants can build sustained attention to speech by ensuring that children are seeing and hearing speech at the same time. In other words, get in their face!
• Parents of older children should set aside time for reading together or talking about the highlights of the day.

Getting a child accustomed to sitting for 30 minutes and listening to songs or stories will establish the attention skills required in school.

Oh. And unfortunately, while this probably goes without saying, lay off the TV:

The American Pediatric Association has recently published research indicating that too much exposure to television during the first two years of life seems to increase the likelihood that the child will be diagnosed with Attention Deficit Disorder in the early school years.

We have previously posted about the importance of engaging children with language. From that posting:

Particularly in the critical stage of brain development (when only stimulation is required to develop neural pathways), continuous exposure to language is of utmost importance. The differences in students early experiences with language and literacy are meaningful: by first grade, children whose parents have engaged them with language know twice as many words as those whose parents have not. And it continues: high school seniors near the top of their class know four times as many words as their lower-performing peers, whose vocabularies are equivalent to high-performing third graders.

Tags: ADD/ADHD, auditory processing, brain fitness, language, memory, perception, research, working memory