Taking Aim at Common View of First 3 Years Being ‘Crucial’

Parents, brace yourselves.

In the interest of nurturing your child’s optimal brain development in the first three years of life, you have played the wee one countless hours of Mozart. You have had “conversations” with your newborn at a pitch high enough to cause nosebleeds. You have shopped for day-care centers that promise an “enriched environment” that builds synaptic strength by stimulating each of your offspring’s senses.

And after all those exertions, John T. Bruer, president of a foundation specializing in education and childhood development, argues in a soon-to-be-published book that the “crucial” first three years of life are not that crucial after all. Bruer dismisses as “myth” the notion that, from birth to age 3, a baby’s explosive brain development presents never-to-be-repeated learning opportunities. And he takes to task the neuroscientists, psychologists and policy advocates who in recent years have made parents believe these things.

It’s enough to make you throw those Mozart CDs right out the window.

In the ongoing battle over what makes children who they are, Bruer’s book, “The Myth of the First Three Years,” takes direct aim at child-rearing views that are at the forefront of voguish policy initiatives and political rhetoric. Even before its planned publication in early September, Bruer’s book is causing a stir among those who research and champion the development of very young children.

On Monday, word of the book circulated among a group of developmental psychologists who were meeting outside Washington to debate another tempest--a renegade scholar’s claim that parents do not matter in their children’s development. Sharon Landesman Ramey, author of “Right From the Start” who is co-chairing the conference, suggested that Bruer’s book has exaggerated the claims of many researchers and advocates just to create a sensation.

“No one has ever said the first three years are adequate to a good outcome” for a child, said Ramey, who has not read the book. At the same time, she insisted that the findings of social science and, more recently, neuroscience, point to an inescapable conclusion: that the amount and kind of stimulation a child gets in the first years of life can determine whether he or she lives up to the “potential” dictated by genes.

Others on Monday saw Bruer’s argument as a healthy corrective to a debate in which science and policy have mingled in a sometimes uneasy mix.

Deborah Phillips, a developmental psychologist, said that much of the public focus on the “zero to three” years has come from policy advocates “who are looking in any corner they can for evidence that can support young children and that is something we should be doing in this country.” But the downside, she cautioned, “is when you use scientific data to support that. The exaggeration of the evidence has gotten to be so problematic.

“It’s about time someone says, ‘Whoa! We have really exaggerated the findings of neuroscience!’ ” said Philips, who sits on the National Research Council’s Board on Children, Youth and Families. “You don’t turn into toast on your third birthday! This is a really important swing back of the pendulum.”

Bruer, who is head of the James S. McDonnell Foundation in St. Louis, said that he welcomes the debate. He said he has watched and approved studies in brain science, child development and education for 20 years and hopes to encourage more work on children’s earliest learning.

But Bruer said he came to believe that the links advocates and scientists have drawn between a child’s early years and later success or failure had “too many gaping holes, too many leaps of faith and monumental extrapolations in the arguments.” This, he concluded “was an interesting case study in how science can be used and abused in policy discussions.”

But Bruer suggested also that he finds many of the claims of “zero to three” advocates a bit dangerous as well.

“It’s an attempt to find a biological basis for a lot of peculiar Western values,” Bruer said. “They tout the effects of reading, music, chess, Mozart--not Buddy Guy or billiards. I think we should be careful of that. It’s a very traditional, upper-class white Western life. And yes, that may have worked well for us for centuries. But it’s not the only way.”