Bookstore shelves are crammed with titles purporting to help you
make your baby smarter, happier, healthier, stronger, better-behaved and
everything else you can imagine, in what I call a shopping-cart approach
to infant development. But experts are now beginning to look more
broadly, in an integrated fashion, at the first few months of a baby's
life. And so should you.
Psychological theorists are moving away from focusing on single
areas such as physical development, genetic inheritance, cognitive skills
or emotional attachment, which give at best a limited view of how babies
develop. Instead, they are attempting to synthesize and integrate all the
separate pieces of the infant-development puzzle. The results so far have
been enlightening, and are beginning to suggest new ways of
parenting.
The most important of the emerging revelations is that the key to
stimulating emotional and intellectual growth in your child is your own
behavior--what you do, what you don't do, how you scold, how you reward
and how you show affection. If the baby's brain is the hardware, then
you, the parents, provide the software. When you understand the hardware
(your baby's brain), you will be better able to design the software (your
own behavior) to promote baby's well-being.
The first two years of life are critical in this regard because
that's when your baby is building the mental foundation that will dictate
his or her behavior through adulthood. In the first year alone, your
baby's brain grows from about 400g to a stupendous 1000g. While this
growth and development is in part predetermined by genetic force, exactly
how the brain grows is dependent upon emotional interaction, and that
involves you. "The human cerebral cortex adds about 70% of its final DNA
content after birth," reports Allan N. Schore, assistant clinical
professor of psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences at UCLA Medical
School, "and this expanding brain is directly influenced by early
environmental enrichment and social experiences."
Failure to provide this enrichment during the first two years can
lead to a lifetime of emotional disability, according to attachment
theorists. We are talking about the need to create a relationship and
environment that allows your child to grow up with an openness to
learning and the ability to process, understand and experience emotion
with compassion, intelligence and resilience. These are the basic
building blocks of emotional success.
Following are comparisons of researchers' "old thinking" and "new
thinking." They highlight the four new insights changing the way we view
infant development. The sections on "What To Do" then explain how to
apply that new information.
1. FEELINGS TRUMP THOUGHTS
It is the emotional quality of the relationship you have with your
baby that will stimulate his or her brain for optimum emotional and
intellectual growth.
OLD THINKING: In this country, far too much emphasis is placed on
developing babies' cognitive abilities. Some of this push came out of the
promising results of the Head Start program. Middle-class families
reasoned that if a little stimulation in an underendowed home environment
is beneficial, wouldn't "more" be better? And the race to create the
"superbaby" was on.
Gone are the days when parents just wished their child were
"normal" and could "fit in" with other kids. Competition for selective
schools and the social pressure it generates has made parents feel their
child needs to be "gifted." Learning exercises, videos and educational
toys are pushed on parents to use in play with their children. "Make it
fun," the experts say. The emphasis is on developing baby's cognitive
skills by using the emotional reward of parental attention as a
behavior-training tool.
THE NEW THINKING: Flying in the face of all those "smarter" baby
books are studies suggesting that pushing baby to learn words, numbers,
colors and shapes too early forces the child to use lower-level thinking
processes, rather than develop his or her learning ability. It's like a
pony trick at the circus: When the pony paws the ground to "count" to
three, it's really not counting; it's simply performing a stunt. Such
"tricks" are not only not helpful to baby's learning process, they are
potentially harmful. Tufts University child psychologist David Elkind
makes it clear that putting pressure on a child to learn information
sends the message that he or she needs to "perform" to gain the parents'
acceptance, and it can dampen natural curiosity.
Instead, focus on building baby's emotional skills. "Emotional
development is not just the foundation for important capacities such as
intimacy and trust," says Stanley Greenspan, clinical professor of
psychiatry and pediatrics at George Washington University Medical School
and author of the new comprehensive book Building Healthy Minds. "It is
also the foundation of intelligence and a wide variety of cognitive
skills. At each stage of development, emotions lead the way, and learning
facts and skills follow. Even math skills, which appear to be strictly an
impersonal cognition, are initially learned through the emotions: 'A lot'
to a 2-year-old, for example, is more than he would expect, whereas 'a
little' is less than he wants."
