Starting Smart: Giving Your Kids A True Headstart

One of the most interesting educational and child development discoveries in the last ten years is related to brain growth. This discovery identified “windows,” which are times or periods in a child’s life where rapid brain growth makes the brain more vulnerable to influence. The findings are these: (1) brains grow from birth to the early or mid twenties. (2) Part of brain growth includes the creation of neural networks which manage learning, memory, and other important functions such as language, numbers, and emotions. (3) The more dense and elaborate the neural network the more intelligent and effective a person is. (4) Brains are very adaptive and can be influenced by conditions in their environment. (5) The right type of stimulation during the right “window” can result in more elaborate neural networks and affect the hard wiring of the brain for a life time.

This means that inherited abilities like language, emotions, and numbers can be significantly enhanced by bringing children into contact with the right type of stimulation during the appropriate window or period of time. To make this even more understandable, let’s consider an example. Neural networks for emotions naturally grow rapidly the first five years of life. There is a network for positive emotions in the left brain hemisphere and one for negative emotions in the right frontal area. Imagine that a child is brought into parental contact that consisted of abundant love, happiness, comfort, warmth, tenderness, safety, gladness, cheerfulness, hopefulness, and etc. These “environmental stimuli” result in a larger more elaborate neural network in the left hemisphere and a less large or elaborate neural network in the right hemisphere. Or, imagine that during the first five years (the window of learning for emotions) a child is brought into abundant contact with anxiety, anger, abandonment, neglect, abuse, sorrow, lack of security, and etc. This stimulation increases the likelihood that the right hemisphere network for negative emotions will be larger and more elaborate in order to manage these emotions. By the time two children are five and starting kindergarten, for instance, one child upon seeing and meeting the teacher would think,”This is going to be fun” and then feel excited. Another child who had experience with negative emotions might see the teacher and think, “I don’t know her and I had better watch out.”

The truly revolutionary idea is that brains are adaptive and can be influenced by what we as teachers and parents do during these windows of learning. Suppose we wanted to improve a child’s abilities with language and numbers. The window for rapid brain growth for language and numbers is from birth to approximately ten years of age. During that time period let’s suppose we enrich our child’s experience with activities designed to stimulate the areas of the brain which think about and manage language and numbers. We could, according to this idea, significantly enhance their neural networks and “make them more intelligent” in these areas. If you want to try this out click on the “free content” area of this page, register, and then go to brain growth activities for young children Therein are several brain growth activities for parents and teachers. The reason for both is that when teachers and parents both use the activities the child’s brain is more effectively influenced because there are two environments which require and provide similar stimulation. Apparently, we can in fact influence how intelligent our children become, at least in the areas of language, numbers, and emotions.