Your baby won’t remember much, if anything, about the first three years of life, but according to researchers, those three years will have a huge impact on the quality of your child’s life—
in some ways more than any of the others that follow.
What makes those first three years—years filled primarily with eating, sleeping, crying, and playing, the years before formal learning even begins—so vital to your child’s ultimate success in school, in a career, in relationships? How can a period of time when your child is so clearly unformed be so critical to the formation of the human being your child will
eventually become? The answer is fascinating, complex, and still evolving. Here’s what scientists believe so far.
Research shows that a child’s brain grows to 90 percent of its adult capacity during those first three years—granted, a lot of brain power for someone who can’t yet tie his or her shoes. During these three phenomenal years, brain “wiring” occurs. (“Wiring” is when the crucial connections are made linking brain cells.) By the third birthday, somewhere around one thousand trillion connections will have been made.
With all this activity, however, a child’s brain is very much a work in progress at age three. More connections are made until age ten or eleven, at which point the brain starts specializing for better efficiency, eliminating connections that are rarely used (this pattern continues throughout life, which is why adults end up with only about half the brain
connections a three-year-old has). Changes continue to take place well past puberty, with important parts of the brain still continuing to change throughout life.
While your child’s future—like his or her brain—is far from fully cast at age three, it does appear that those early years do form the mold that will shape the person he or she will become. And the greatest influence during those formative years is you. Research shows that the kind of care a child receives during that time determines to a large extent how well those brain connections will be made, how much that little brain will develop, how successful, how content, how confident, and how competent to handle life’s challenges that child will be.
Feeling daunted and overwhelmed by the task that’s been handed you? Don’t be. Most of what any loving parent does intuitively (with no training, without the addition of flash cards or special mind-expanding programs) is exactly what your child—and your child’s brain—needs to develop to his or her greatest potential. Consider:
Every time you touch, hold, cuddle, hug, or respond to your baby with warm responsive care (all things you do anyway), you’re positively affecting the way your child’s brain forms connections. By reading, talking, singing, making eye contact, or cooing to your baby, you’re helping your baby’s brain reach its full potential. And through your positive
parenting, you’ll be teaching your child social and emotional skills that will actually boost your child’s intellectual development as he or she gets older; the more socially and
emotionally confident a child is, the more likely that child will be motivated to learn and to
take on new challenges with enthusiasm and without fear of failure.
Children whose basic needs are met in infancy and early childhood (she’s fed when hungry, changed when wet, held when frightened) develop a sense of trust in others and a high level of self-confidence. Researchers have found that children reared in such nurturing
environments have fewer behavioral problems in school later on, and are emotionally more capable of positive social relationships.
By monitoring and helping to regulate your baby’s impulses and behaviors during the early years (explaining she can’t bite, telling him not to grab a toy), you will eventually teach your child self-control. Setting limits that are fair and age-appropriate and enforcing them consistently will enable your child to be less likely to be anxious, frightened, impulsive, or to rely on violent means to resolve conflicts later on in life, say researchers. He or she will also be more capable of intellectual learning because of the solid emotional foundation you have provided.
Likewise, any caregiver who spends a significant amount of time with your child should provide the same kind of stimulation, the same kind of responsiveness, the same kind of positive discipline. High-quality child care will help ensure that your baby’s brain gets what it needs: lots of nurturing.
Routine medical care is important, too, ensuring that your child will be screened regularly for any medical or developmental issues that could slow intellectual, social, or emotional growth. It will also allow for early intervention should a problem be uncovered, which could prevent that problem from holding your child back.
And here’s probably the most important thing to keep in mind. Helping your child reach his or her potential is different from trying to change the person your child is; encouraging intellectual development is different from pushing it; providing stimulating experiences is different from scheduling in the kind of overload that leads to burnout. It’s easy to avoid crossing that line from just enough parental interaction and involvement to too much by taking your cues from your baby—who, when it comes to getting what he or she needs, can be wise even beyond your years. Watch and listen carefully, and you’ll almost always know what’s best for your child.
COMPARING BABIES
“I get together regularly with a parents’ group, and inevitably they all start comparing what their babies have been doing. It makes me crazy—and worried about whether my son is developing fast enough.”
If there’s anything more anxiety provoking than a roomful of pregnant women comparing bellies, it’s a roomful of recently delivered parents comparing babies. Just as no two pregnant bellies are exactly alike, neither are any two babies. Developmental norms (such as those found in each chapter of this book) are useful for comparing your baby to a broad range of normal infants in order to assess her
progress and identify any lags. But comparing your baby with someone else’s child, or with an older one of your own, can only result in a lot of unnecessary fears and frustrations. Two perfectly
“normal” babies can develop in different areas at completely different clips—one may forge ahead in vocalizing and socializing, another in physical feats, such as turning over. Differences between
babies become even more marked as the first year progresses—one baby may crawl very early but not walk until fifteen months, another may never learn to crawl at all but suddenly start taking steps at ten months. Then, too, a parent’s assessment of her baby’s progress is highly subjective—and not always completely accurate. One may not even recognize baby’s frequent coos as the beginnings of language, while another may hear one coo and swear, “He said ‘dada’!”
All of this said, it’s easier to intellectualize that comparing babies isn’t a good idea than to
actually stop doing it or avoid those who do. Many compulsive comparers can’t sit within ten feet of another parent-with-baby on a bus, in a doctor’s waiting room, or at the park without launching an assault of outwardly innocent queries that lead to the inevitable comparisons (“What an adorable baby! She’s sitting already? How old is she?”). The best advice, if you can’t completely manage to
“mind your own baby,” is to remember how meaningless these comparisons really are. Your baby, like your belly before him, is one of a kind.
IMMUNIZATION
“My baby’s pediatrician says that immunization is perfectly safe. But I’ve heard a few stories about serious reactions, and I worry about my daughter getting the shots.”
We live in a society that considers good news to be no news. A story on the positive effects of immunizations cannot compete with one on the extremely rare instances of serious complications associated with them. So it is likely that today’s parents have heard more about the risks of
immunization than the benefits. And, yet, as your pediatrician has doubtless told you, for most infants those benefits continue to far outweigh the risks.
Not too many years ago in the United States, the most common causes of infant death were
infectious diseases, such as diphtheria, typhoid, and smallpox. Measles and whooping cough were so common that all children were expected to get them, and thousands, especially infants, died or were permanently handicapped by these illnesses. Parents dreaded the coming of summer and the infantile paralysis (polio) epidemics that seemed invariably to arrive with it, killing or disabling thousands of infants and children. Today, smallpox has been virtually eliminated, and diphtheria and typhoid are extremely rare. Only a small percentage of children are stricken with measles or whooping cough each year, and infantile paralysis is a disease parents are not only no longer afraid of, but often aren’t even familiar with. An American baby is now much more likely to die because of not being strapped into a car seat than from a communicable disease. Without a doubt, immunization has made childhood safer for children.
Immunization is based on the fact that exposure to weakened or dead disease-producing
microorganisms (in the form of vaccines) or to the poisons (toxins) they produce, rendered harmless by heat or chemical treatment (then called toxoids), will cause an individual to produce the same antibodies that would develop if the person had actually contracted the disease. Armed with the special memory that is unique to the immune system, these antibodies will “recognize” the specific microorganisms, should they attack in the future, and destroy them.
Even the ancients recognized that when people survived a particular disease, they weren’t likely
to contract it again, and those who had recovered from the plague were sometimes called upon to care for new victims. Although some societies attempted crude forms of immunization, it wasn’t until
Edward Jenner, a Scottish physician, decided to test the old belief that a person who contracted the lesser disease cowpox would never get smallpox, that modern immunization was born. In 1796, Jenner smeared pus from the sores of a milkmaid infected with cowpox on two small cuts in the arm of a healthy eight-year-old boy. The child developed a slight fever a week later, then a couple of small scabs on his arm. When exposed to smallpox later, he remained healthy. He had become immune.