Ever wonder what’s going on in your kid’s developing brain?
As my friends begin to have kids, I watch in awe as they lovingly nurture their children through the tumultuous process of growing up. I can’t even keep a succulent alive for more than a month — forget navigating the complex and rapid development of tiny humans.
While I wouldn’t advise letting me babysit your kids until they’re at least in grammar school, I have learned a lot about how the brain develops, which I’ll cover below. In my next post, I will review when the brain becomes capable of certain cognitive abilities, so you know when to expect certain behavior from your kids, without pushing them beyond their cognitive capacities by mistake. Once armed with the how and the when, you will better understand why your kid can be so exasperating at certain ages, which will (hopefully) help you to preserve your sanity as a parent.
For example, why are the 2’s so terrible? At 2, your child has just completed a period of rapid brain development; however, he/she has no idea how to use these awesome, new cognitive capacities. As a result, there is a huge gap between what your child now wants to do and what he/she can do. Think of a few times in your adult life when you’ve mustered the courage to try something new. In order to succeed, you often have to swallow your anxiety and fear, work hard, stretch yourself; and, try (a.k.a. fail) a lot before succeeding. Well, when you’re 2, EVERYTHING is like that. Plus, you have neither executive functioning (like impulse control), nor wine to help you manage the frustration. As a result, a toddler’s reaction is; well, a bit less dignified at times (or all the time).
But, I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s save the when of brain development for the next blog post. First, let’s set things up properly by exploring how the brain develops.
While in the womb, your little munchkin develops a hindbrain first (which controls critical, unconscious stuff like breathing and reflexive movement); then, a midbrain (to coordinate between the hindbrain and forebrain); and finally, a forebrain (to control executive functions, like cognition and logical reasoning). Throughout this process, your developing baby’s brain is a factory, pumping out cells. As these cells grow, they also move; following a chemical trail that leads them to a part of the brain where they will become a specialized type of cell with a specific function.
The developing brain is most prolific from 1–4 months, during which time, hundreds of thousands of neurons emerge every minute! This cell production dominates for the first 6 months. From 7 months to age 2, your brain shifts focus and starts to build connections between all those fancy, specialized cells it was making in the first and second trimesters.
In order to build these connections, your baby’s brain cells follow a chemical roadmap that gets them to the general area where they should connect with other neurons. This map is about as precise as GPS was in 2008 — not so precise. So, to cover its neurobiological bases, your child’s brain makes many more connections than it will use. If a given connection doesn’t get stimulated by a certain age, the body will kill that connection through a process called apoptosis.
While it may seem harsh, apoptosis makes a lot of sense. You don’t want to invest valuable space and energy to maintain a neural connection that has no use in the environment in which you live. It would be like maintaining a highway that no one drives. Your tax dollars (or, in this case, your glucose) are better used elsewhere. That said, if you fail to stimulate your child in certain ways, he/she may nix a connection that could be valuable.
Unfortunately, from studying severely abused and neglected children, we’ve learned just how important it is to stimulate your child. Without proper parenting, these ‘feral’ children show extreme deficits in language, socialization and other core building blocks of human behavior. Conversely, increasing bodies of research suggest that, even your unborn child is forming neural connections based on in-utero stimulation. For example, babies who hear two languages in the womb will show heightened stimulation to both languages at birth, while a child who heard only one language in the womb, responds only to that one language (1). Net, net — even if they can’t demonstrate it back to us, infant brains are capable of sucking up a ton of stimulation. Want your kid to be bilingual? Listen to that Telenovela while pregnant. Put them in that bilingual daycare. The baby brain is optimized to handle that level of stimulation. Take advantage of it!
As mentioned before, while the majority of the brain’s development happens in the womb; at birth, your child’s brain only weighs 25% of its eventual size. By age 2, it is at 75% of its adult weight! Just as it did in-utero, your child’s brain will generally develop back-to-front once he/she is born. The developmental process will slow as your child ages, with the highest level, executive functioning of the prefrontal cortex reaching a mature state at 25. That’s why they don’t let you rent a car until you’ve been on this earth for a quarter century. They want you to fully develop impulse control first!
While it may not seem like it when they’re teenagers; throughout those 25 years, your kids are looking to you for guidance on how to navigate the crazy world around them. They use special neural groups called “mirror neurons,” which light up both when your kid observes you doing something and when he/she does it him/herself. This system of mirror neurons is already very sophisticated at birth, which makes sense. Your kid is motivated to start making sense of the world immediately in order to survive. At birth, the only way your kid can call for that assistance is to cry! Whether it’s your 2 day-old baby crying; or, your 5-year-old saying “mommy, daddy, why is the sky blue?” — the way you respond will shape both your child’s view of the world, and his/her self view (or self esteem). No pressure, right?
While I can’t make parenting less stressful, I do hope that this post hasn’t increased your anxiety as a parent! Instead, I hope that this sneak peak into the developing brain will help you to best support your kids as they grow. Next week, I’ll cover how your kids develop a sense of self based on the way you treat them; and, when your kids are capable of certain cognitive capacities. As you read this post and future post; please know that, as parents, you don’t have to be perfect — you just have to be pretty consistent at stewarding our children through various life stages.
So, as I leave you to your holiday travel (good luck to those with toddlers on planes); I’d like to offer the following peace of mind: The more I learn about child development, the more I marvel at how great a job my friends and family are doing at raising families of their own. They are crushing it as parents, naturally. Instinctively. That doesn’t mean that things are neat and tidy — they’re often messy; but, one of the greatest gifts you can give your child is the wisdom that life is not perfect (and people aren’t either). If they know that you love them unconditionally, and that you will always be there to help them through that messy thing called life; that’s good parenting. Full stop.
Happy Holidays to you and your family!
