When parents talk or sing to a child, they are providing stimulation that is essential to the maturation of the child's brain.
According to a recent report put out by the Carnegie Corporation, many children suffer permanent intellectual damage before they enter first grade. When the report, "Starting Points: Meeting the Needs of Our Youngest Children," came out earlier this year, I hoped that this finding would be widely discussed and enormously influential, but it seems to have sunk without a trace. Was it too troubling in its implications? Or too politically incorrect? Whatever the reason, its message must be heard.
The report cites recent scientific studies that present a new picture of how the brain matures during the first three years of life. Neuroscientists now believe that a child's future intellectual capacity is shaped during these years by the kind of stimulation the child gets. The Carnegie report compares the brain of a newborn child to a tangled and unconnected mass of electronic circuitry. As a child begins to recognize things around him -- "to make connections" -- the circuitry becomes organized. How much comes into use depends on the kind of stimulation a child gets, and the circuitry that is not used shuts down permanently.
Parents play a critical role in helping a baby organize this neural circuitry. When they talk or sing to a child or play with him, they are doing more than amusing the child; they are providing stimulation that is essential to the maturation of the child's brain. If they or someone else does not provide this stimulation, his development will be permanently impaired.
"Building a Better Brain for Baby," a New York Times article on the Carnegie report (April 17, 1994), cites a series of experiments on kittens that underlines the essential nature of stimulation for the maturing brain: "Some [kittens] were raised with one eye sutured shut or covered by an opaque contact lens. Others were reared in a visual world consisting of nothing but vertical or horizontal stripes." After a time, the kittens were returned to a normal sensory world, but it was too late: "Eyes deprived of light in those first crucial days were now blind. Kittens raised in a vertical world were unable to see horizontal lines .... For lack of stimulation, the neurological wiring -- the connections, called synapses, that pass signals from neuron to neuron -- had not developed."
Most people probably thing that lack of adequate stimulation is mainly a problem for the infants born to poor inner-city parents -- like the harassed single mothers who have to work day and night to make ends meet or the unmarried teenagers who are unprepared for motherhood and often lead chaotic lives. It does affect these youngsters, but the problem is much broader.
In 1991, 53 percent of all women with one-year-old babies were in the workforce (up from 17 percent in 1965), and nearly half of the children under three were being looked after by someone other than their parents. High-quality childcare is very expensive and not very abundant, so many of these babies and toddlers spend their entire day in situations where they get little attention or stimulation. "Starting Points" cites studies showing that the care infants and toddlers get is often "of such substandard quality that it adversely affect[s]. .. [their] development." And after a day at work, exhausted parents may have little time or energy to do more than feed and bathe their child and put him to bed. How many of these babies are failing to get the stimulation they need to develop properly?
These findings also shed new light on discussions of the ability of schools to educate all children. The idea that every child can learn -- and learn to a high level -- is a major premise of many reports on education put out by business groups and others. This is a noble expression of faith and hope in human capabilities, but it may simply not be true. There may be a permanent gap between youngsters who have had the stimulation necessary to their mental development and those who have not -- no matter what schools and teachers do.
If the ideas "Starting Points" presents were generally accepted, caring for young children might get the priority it deserves. Parents might decide it was absolutely necessary to take time off during the first few years of a child's life -- the way a person decides it is absolutely necessary to take time off when he is seriously ill. And we might have legislation that made it easy, instead of punitive, for parents to do that.
We need to rethink our social policies and our attitudes toward child-rearing to bring them in line with what medical science is discovering about how babies develop and what they need. If we don't, we risk squandering the future of our society.