The Importance of the Early Years
Narrator:
There is a strong relationship between early life experiences and how a baby will develop cognitively, socially, emotionally and physically throughout their lives. This is recognised in the early years framework which states “It is during our very earliest years, and even pre-birth, that a large part of the pattern for our future adult life is set”.
Narrator:
More is known about the developing brain now than ever before as a result of advances in technology and neuro-science. It is known that babies are born with a unique personality and an adaptable brain, with a high degree of plasticity, which is ready to be shaped by relationships and experiences. Babies have already started to learn in the womb, particularly in the last trimester.
Prof. Vivette Glover:
We now know that towards the end of pregnancy babies in the womb swallow the amniotic fluid, which in turn the chemistry of that is affected by what the woman eats. So there has been research showing that if women eat very spicy food the babies when they are born are more likely to the spicy smells they get; they learn to enjoy the food they are going to taste later. It is also known that they can learn to respond to particular music. Again at the end of pregnancy there is one study where women who listened to the soap opera Neighbours a lot, when the baby was born if the tune of the Neighbours was played the baby looked up and alert, and that they didn’t respond to other music in the same way. So there is evidence that – this is really at the end of pregnancy, the last six/eight weeks – babies do start to learn in a way that will prepare them for what they are going to respond to in the world outside.
Robin Balbernie:
The baby is born hardwired, one of the few things we are hardwired to do is relate. Babies are born exquisitely sociable, and you have only got to pick up a newborn baby to see that they seek out eye contact, and that’s hardwired, and to see that they mimic facial expressions, that’s hardwired, so all the fun things like sticking your tongue out, or yawning, or holding your hand up, the baby will respond to. Babies are hardwired to make social interaction, and that is because socialisation is so important for humans; we need to be socialised in order to build the right structures in our brain that we are going to need for the rest of our life. We are not genetically set up for any particular environment, we are genetically set up to be adaptable, and what we adapt to is the first care giving environment.
Lee Walsh:
Within Shotts Nursery Centre we are becoming more aware of the recent research in terms of brain development. We are able to access the new material in terms of the research, the work that’s carried out by Robin Balbernie, Dan Hughes, Helen Minnis, and their work on attachments. So it’s through the work and the ongoing CPD, the work that we have with our psychologists, the work that we have with our learning support teacher, but also in terms of the reflection that we have as a staff team to use within our own development. Because without gaining the information that’s out there at the moment we are not going to move forward, we are not going to enable the staff to become confident in their own learning, and to value themselves as practitioners in supporting the early development of the young infant.
Narrator:
It is estimated that at birth a baby’s brain contains thousands of millions of brain cells, and some of these are already connected and communicating. For example, at birth the most primitive part of the brain, our brain stem, which is at the base of the brain, is already strongly connected, or hardwired. It is the early experiences in developing relationships that cause the connections in the brain to increase rapidly. Forming and reinforcing connections are the key tasks of early brain development. Babies are born with what is referred to as a predisposition for learning. They are naturally curious about the world around them, and especially the people who engage with them. Whilst babies are eager to learn, they require positive and consistent relationships to support them on this journey. Babies are programmed to look to other people to help them make sense of their world.
Robin Balbernie:
Relationships are central; we know that relationships affect the growth of the mind in two different ways. If we see the mind as being psychological, you internalise the relationships that you have had with your parents and care givers, and early years staff, and they go into a sort of mental map that you keep with you for the rest of your life. Bowlby talked about internal working models, but really these are just the unspoken assumptions of yourself within a relationship; what will happen when you relate to people, how they will relate to you, your expectations of whether this will be productive, and fruitful, and caring and loving, or not. And within that mental map of relationships are things like self esteem, confidence, cognitive ability, willingness to explore, willingness to take risks, the capacity for empathy - the capacity for putting yourself in somebody else’s shoes – which is the biggest single inhibitor against violence that we know of. And the other part of relationships is they physically structure the growth of the developing brain, the brain is an organ exquisitely attuned to the quality of early relationships, and this is designed by nature so we can fit into the early mothering environment, which is our first stage into being humanised. The quality of the early relationships that the baby, and then toddler has will leave an indelible imprint on the architecture of the brain, so that the final shape of the brain, if you like, the way the brain is sculpted by early experience, will reflect the quality of that early experience. So good quality early relationships will give the child the optimum start in life.
Prof. Colwyn Trevarthen:
Well the child has a very, very strong instinct to find other people because they are the only thing in the world that can confirm their belonging, their need to be part of a community. They have to be a community with people, so they can form a private world. We all have an attachment to the house we live in, or the room we sleep in, or the objects that we possess, and babies can be like that too, but really they can’t have companionship with an object. So babies are looking for companionship, they are looking for somebody, you just have to have company, good company, and that company can be of any age. And that is something that I would like to emphasise, that certainly by the time the baby is three or four months old siblings, older siblings can be very good companions, and play with the child happily. And I think that by the time the baby is six months old they can get along fine with a group of other kids of different ages.
I agree with Bruce Perry who says that what the human brain is looking for is relationships, or engagements, and it’s not with just one person, so there is a qualification for an attachment; babies do, especially when they are distressed, want the care and concern of somebody who they know well, and who is affectionate, so they do have a strong attachment to their mother who looks after them. But the companionship, having fun, they like to have that with their mother too, but they can have it easily with lots of other people, including their fathers actually.
Because what the baby is trying to do is become a respected member of a community, somebody who knows things, so the main purpose of communication is to belong to a world with other people, with common understanding.
Narrator:
By the end of their first year, with appropriate care and support, babies vastly overgrow the number of connections they actually need. This is to enable them to test billions of different connections, or neuro pathways, for every action they take. Grasping an object has been mastered by this baby, and the neuro pathway is becoming well established. However, retrieving it when dropped by trying to co-ordinate what she sees with controlling her hands and body is a new challenge. But we know the baby’s brain has been preparing for this by vastly overgrowing the number of connections she actually needs, enabling her to test billions of alternative pathways for every action she takes; in this case successfully retrieving the lemon.
An important process of elimination beings towards the end of the first year, as the baby’s brain starts to prune itself, thus creating the most efficient structure to suit the environment and culture. The physical, cognitive, social and emotional experiences a child has will determine which permanent connections are made, and which are no longer needed. In the case of physically retrieving the lemon, whenever the baby gets close the best connections carry the strongest signals and survive. Those connections carrying no signal begin to wither and die. This process remains the same for creating permanent connections in relation to experiences of physical, cognitive, social or emotional development.
Robin Balbernie:
The neurons that fire together wire together, so that whatever a child experiences, and that includes not just the immediate interpersonal experiences, but the whole ambience of the home and the wider culture, will leave an indelible imprint on the circuits of their mind, as the neuronal networks that are responsive to that particular experience wire together. The second principle of brain wiring – this is very crude – is use it or lose it. What the child is not exposed to tells the brain that these aren’t circuits I need to keep, and the brain has to whittle down the amount of circuits it has, because there simply isn’t enough room in any of our skulls for all the potential circuitry that we are born with, so we have to discard circuits, this is a normal process. But the brain discards them on the basis of use it or lose it, so what’s not being used is got rid of, and you can see that most clearly with language development, whereas a child can babble in every language under the sun, they can only talk in one language, and they have got rid of the circuits for recognising and producing the phonemes and the vowel sounds of their other language. Well just as children do that with language, so they do that with an emotional language, and children will keep the emotional language that they are born into, and they will lose the potential emotional language that they have not been exposed to.
Narrator:
Brain development takes place through interactions with others, being active and involved, and learning through exploration and discovery. As babies and young children revisit and practice skills and language they return to previous connections in the brain. Every time the pathway is revisited it is strengthened and the link speeds up. These pathways are strengthened by fatty sheaths being laid down, a process known as myelination. More commonly this process is known as hardwiring, and ninety per cent of the hardwired connections will be complete by the age of three years.
Dr Suzanne Zeedyk:
Basically brains are born with all the cells they are going to have. Around the edges a bit it looks like you can create new cells, but for the most part it’s not cells that are being created in brain development, it is cells talking to each other. So, a cell looks a little bit like an upside down hand, and so you get a number of these cells in your brain, and you are born with those, and what happens is that those cells learn to talk to each other, they are forming something called synapses, and it’s the synapses that for the most part aren’t in our brain – there are synapses, but a lot more synapses are going to be generated.
I like to think of it as motorways in the brain. So if you walk across a green field that has grass in it, you will lay down the grass, and if you turn around and look behind you, you will be able to see that grass that’s been laid down, but in a few hours it will pop back up and nobody will be able to see that someone has been walking across. But if you go across it regularly a path gets established, and then if you continue to go across it the council mind need to come along and cobble it in order to prevent erosion. And then before very long perhaps motorcyclists and cars will come along it, and then they will need to tarmac it, and we will have an A class road. And before very long we will have so many cars across it that they will think, we had better put a motorway in here.
So it’s like a transport system; that’s what’s happening with messages, is that they are getting sent. And if they get sent over and over and over again, along that road, it gets more and more robust; so myelination and other processes happen in the brain to really make that a robust pathway, a robust road that can sent messages really fast. But if the council were to have come along and said, we shouldn’t have put the motorway here, we should have put the motorway here, it will cost a lot of money to change the motorway, it will be very hard to do that, it will take a long time to do that; brains are just like that, once your motorway system is in place, once it’s sending the messages that it has figured out it needs to send to survive in this environment, ie, an environment where there is lots of shouting, and environment where adults come quickly when you are upset, an environment don’t come quickly when you are upset, we can cope with all of this because we are developing a motorway system to cope with the particular world that I got born into. But once the motorway system is in place it is very hard to change it, and that motorway system is in place, for the most part, by the time the child is three.
Many people haven’t realised up until now how sensitive the brain is in relation to the environment; that it is really developing in relation to that environment. We are getting brains to develop particular motorway systems, we should be asking ourselves what kind of motorway system do we want our children to develop.
Narrator:
Research has shown that external influences, such as the mother’s experiences during pregnancy, can adversely affect the development of the baby’s brain, and the connections being made.
Prof. Vivette Glover:
Research over the last ten years has really shown that how the baby develops in the womb has a big effect on their health for the rest of their life. And this is true for the physical health – we know that babies that are born smaller at birth are more likely to have vulnerability to cardio-vascular disease, and actually die of cardio-vascular disease in their seventies – but we also know that there is a big effect on neuro development, the emotional state of the mother whilst she is pregnant affects how the baby’s brain develops in the womb. There is research showing that if the mother is more stressed, more anxious, her foetus develops in a way that makes the later child more likely to suffer from anxiety or depression themselves, more likely to have attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, more likely to have conduct disorder, more likely to have cognitive problems; a whole range of different problems that the child will be more at risk from if the mother is stressed while she is pregnant.
Narrator:
Babies are born ready to adapt and create connections in the brain to suit the environment they meet. This ability also makes humans vulnerable when placed in less positive circumstances, where the negative impact may last a lifetime. Babies and young children who have positive emotional bonds with adults produce consistently lower levels of the stress hormone cortisol, it is therefore important that staff recognise the potentially powerful impact that their practice can have in supporting children, so that they can go on to develop positive and healthy relationships throughout life.
Robin Balbernie:
The only relationships that the baby is automatically forced to adapt to by nature, and this has happened to all of us, will tell the brain that these are important circuits, these are circuits you need, or these are circuits you don’t need. So that a baby who has been brought up in loving caring relationships will keep the circuits associated with love and care, and empathy; a baby brought up with secure attachments will keep the circuits to do with making relationships, with being able to explore, being able to be curious, being able to make the best use of their brain. Whereas another baby that has been surrounded by maltreatment – and when I use the term maltreatment I am referring to all forms of neglect as well as all forms of abuse – provide the antithesis of a loving environment, and the brain is forced to adapt to that quality of care giving, so that they will keep the circuits needed for immediate survival, such as hyper-vigilance, a well activated stress response. They won’t need the circuits for empathy, or love, or care, because they haven’t experienced them, so the brain won’t recognise them, and these circuits will be discarded.