Your Baby’s Brain: Nurture Is as Important as Nature

When a mother first holds her baby, whether she bonds with the infant or not, she sets in motion a powerful force of neural development. Specifically, that interaction sparks the growth of neural connections establishing the foundation for the child’s future.

The power of that experience cannot be over-emphasized. Neuroscience, epigenetics, and technology tell us what parents and educators have long suspected: that children need to bond with other human beings, from the first moment of life in order to develop normally.

Scientific studies support the balance between nurture and nature.

Current scientific data have finally settled the question of whether a child’s genes or her environment affects the outcome of her brain’s development. A child’s brain development is influenced almost equally by both his genetic predisposition and heightened experiences that impact how his genes express themselves. Studies indicate that a child’s genes can be both suppressed and enhanced through interactions with his environment.

Animal studies going back to the 1940s indicate that primates deprived of a mother after birth will fixate on any available object as mother, and if further deprived of social interaction, will develop mental illness and depression. Mice that are isolated from their mother and denied her instinctive and constant licking overproduce the stress hormone cortisol, which, circulating in their blood, distorts the natural expression of many genes and changes the structure of their developing brain. The changes not only negatively affect their IQ but also make them more highly strung and less able to handle stress.

In a human study, 13 infants with borderline intellectual disability (ID) were placed in an orphanage shortly after birth. While under adult supervision, the babies were also assigned to a specific ID teenager, who was asked to hold and cuddle her baby daily. By the end of one year, 13 of the 13 newborns were no longer borderline ID.

Eleven were adopted out and their progress followed longitudinally for 30 years. Many of them went on to white-collar careers, such as teaching and accounting. However, the two children left behind in the orphanage slipped back into intellectual disabilities.

Nature provides a blueprint, nurture lays the foundation.

Though genes layout a blueprint for a child’s potential development, they do not determine the direction in which a child will grow. The environment instructs a child’s genes by stimulating some and suppressing others. Thus, a child may have the genetic predisposition to be long and lean, but if he eats a high-carb diet and fails to exercise, he may grow up overweight.

The proverbial shy child can, with early intervention, become socially functional and healthy. The same full expression of possibility is also true of a child’s capacity for memory, learning, hearing, emotional disposition, and coping skills.