When It Comes to Babies, Common Sense Rules
In some ways, new parents are so lucky. Almost every day, a new scientific discovery is being released about what makes a baby tick. (Just this spring, researchers at UC Davis announced that singing to babies might help their intellectual growth.) On the other hand, the information can be overwhelming--Mozart, baby massages, flashcards, cue cards? What’s a new parent to do?
Three people from different disciplines--the president of Families and Work Institute, a child development researcher and a neuroscientist--discuss how to give your baby the best start.
This country is ready to ask: “How are we taking care of our children?” says Ellen Galinsky, president of the Families and Work Institute. The institute hosts symposiums, bringing together neuroscientists and child development researchers to talk about children. It has also collaborated with corporations, research centers, and Rob and Michelle Reiner on the “I Am Your Child” campaign.
From these meetings, the institute has put together a list of 10 things to help your child along. They are:
* Be warm, loving and responsive.
* Respond to the child’s cues and clues.
* Talk, read and sing to your child
* Establish routines and rituals.
* Encourage safe exploration and play.
* Make TV watching selective.
* Use discipline as an opportunity to teach.
* Recognize that each child is unique.
* Choose quality child care and stay involved.
* Take care of yourself.
Some of these points seem self-evident, Galinsky says. Being “warm, loving and responsive” seems like a primer for parents, but brain researchers have found that such a relationship helps a child grow. “That give and take acts like a hidden regulator that helps the brain organize itself,” she says.
Other research shows that by responding to a very young baby’s cry, the parent is helping the child deal with stress later in life. “By your comforting them, they learn to self-comfort,” Galinsky explains.
The I Am Your Child campaign has a Web site at https://www.iamyourchild.org.
Craig and Sharon Ramey, directors of the Civitan International Research Center in Birmingham, Ala., have been charting child development for more than 30 years each.
Their work encompasses public policy, neurobiology and child development studies. And after 30 years, Craig Ramey says, “common sense has prevailed.”
It’s not the flashcard, mobiles or music that matters most to an infant. A parent’s job in a baby’s first 18 months is to teach these two lessons: how to trust others and that one’s own needs matter.
Ramey says the last 30 years of research in as varied fields as neuroscience, biology and anthropology have confirmed what most parents already knew: “To nurture social development, do what you enjoy most--play, talk, be affectionate, prompt and pay attention to your baby in ways that feel good to you.
“Young children would get very little from a traditional museum--the ‘look but don’t touch’ is not what early childhood is about,” he says. “Common sense has been affirmed.”
A parent’s job, Ramey says, is to encourage joy and relieve distress.
The Rameys have collaborated on an easy-to-read child care book, “Right From Birth: Build Your Child’s Foundation for Life (Birth to 18 Months)” (Goddard Press, 1999).
The book outlines seven parenting essentials that can last through each stage of childhood from infancy to graduate school.
These essentials are:
* Encourage exploration.
* Mentor in basic skills.
* Celebrate developmental advance.
* Rehearse and extend new skills.
* Protect and comfort.
* Communicate.
* Guide and limit.
The Rameys have both done long-term longitudinal studies, following all sorts of children for almost 30 years. They’ve found that children from the least stimulating home environments benefited the most from early education intervention--not just from preschool programs such as Head Start, but even earlier, from good child care.
“Nonparental child care can be wonderful for you and a benefit to your child. But only if the quality is high,” they write.
These are exciting times, Craig Ramey says. We understand so much more about children and nutrition than even 10 years ago and all kinds of foods are readily available. For the most part, our children are enjoying the civil rights and handicap access victories won by their parents and grandparents. And they have access to more information and life experience than any previous generation.
Still, he says, it’s important for parents to be vigilant throughout a child’s life. “Until you get children quite far along, they need good nurturing experiences. . . . We must dispel the notion that there are invulnerable children. The data just do not bear that out.”
We asked researchers at UC Irvine to discuss their findings on how playing Mozart can stimulate a baby’s brain, and they sent us to someone they really admired--neuroscientist Bill Greenough of the University of Illinois’ department of psychology and Beckman Institute.
Greenough’s research with rats and mice establishes that stimulating and challenging environments can help brain development, and that learning doesn’t end at youth.
He says, “The work that I’ve done has always said that nothing ends at the equivalent of age 3. The brain can benefit from experience through the entire life span.”
“The broader the range of experiences, the more capable the child will be of coping with new situations and learning later in life,” Greenough says.
This can be as simple as a trip to the mall or a walk in the park.
His experiments illustrate his points. The first, a complex environment experiment, looked at rats of all ages, from newly weaned to old age, placed in an environment where play objects were changed and rearranged. Each day the rats had to learn a new living environment. As expected, these rats were smarter in the sense that they learned complicated, problem-solving tasks easier than the control group, which were dubbed “caged potatoes.”
Other experiments measured how animals’ brains changed with physical exercise and new motor skills. The results: “You can exercise some parts of the brain with physical exercise.”
Greenough measures brain development by nerve cell interactions and embellishments and increased blood cells and tissue to the brain.
“Assuming, and I have to assume that humans basically work like rats, we would expect that what is optimal is a combination of mental and physical exercise,” he says. “And learning of new things would optimize brain function.”
And, the good news is that this approach can help at any age. “There’s no point that we’ve seen in animals where the brain suddenly turns off.” The learning process slows down, he says.
In addition, research both before and after adoption on Romanian children--many of whom were neglected from birth-- proved that it’s never too late. Once they become active, their “metabolism changes in a turned-on kind of [way].”
His advice to parents would be “that they should do everything that they can . . . to make their children’s mental and physical lives active and stimulating.”
Of course, he warns, don’t overstimulate. “Another thing that is important, one has to focus not just on intellectual developmental,” he says. Emotional stability is especially important in the first three years.
“Interactions between parent and child and between other children are very, very important.”
