Who do you believe would find this information most interesting and helpful: parents, colleagues, an infant-toddler or preschool staff, doctors learning about young children?
Make a handout for a presentation that you would give on brain architecture and young children that contains a short introduction, at least 10 vital points that you want to make sure your audience understands, and an ending paragraph that summarizes why you believe this information is so important.
NIEER Connecting Neurons, Concepts, and People Preschool Policy Brief December 2008, Issue 17 Acknowledgement: Ross Thompson is grateful to Deanna Gomby for her fine contributions to this brief as an editor and consultant. Policy Brief series edited by Ellen C. Frede, Ph.D., and W. Steven Barnett, Ph.D. National Institute for Early Education Research www.nieer.org Brain Development and its Implications by Ross A. Thompson, Ph.D. The past decade has seen an upsurge in public understanding of early brain development. News reports, statements by policymakers, and commercial marketing of products for infants and young children have all contributed to a widespread understanding of the explosive growth of the brain in the early years and that stimulation acts as a catalyst to brain growth. Beyond this, however, most people are unsure what to make of this new knowledge about brain development.1 This policy brief summarizes what is known about early neurobiological development and corrects some of the common misunderstandings and misrepresentations of the research. What We Know: • The most significant advances in brain architecture occur prenatally. • Brain development is life-long, hierarchical, cumulative, and integrated. • The brain incorporates experience into its architecture. • Critical periods are exceptional, not typical, in brain development. • The developing brain’s flexibility declines over time, but some plasticity endures. • The young mind is astonishingly active, capable, and self-organizing. • Developmental neuroscience provides much greater insight into the hazards to avoid in brain development than opportunities for enrichment. Policy Recommendations: • Government and business should support prenatal and well-child health care, good nutrition, efforts to eliminate children’s exposures to harmful pollutants and toxins, and high-quality preschool programs in striving to support healthy early brain development. • Early prevention is better and less expensive than later remediation. Health care services, early intervention programs, and preschools should ensure that they provide early hearing, vision, language, cognitive, and behavioral screenings, and link children to necessary services. • Sensitive interactions with adults do more to promote brain development than any toy, CD, or DVD. Preschools should deliver services that enable adults to have rich interactions with children. • Preschools should embrace educational approaches that encourage child-oriented discovery over adult-directed instruction. • Since social-emotional and cognitive development are intertwined, preschool programs should recognize and focus on both. • Exposure to chronic early stress is harmful. Mental health experts can help preschool staff work with children with behavioral problems and learn to identify and refer children and families to other services as needed. The Science of Early Brain Development The study of human brain development is still in its infancy. New technologies—electroencephalogram (EEG), positron emission tomography (PET), functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI)—are now permitting more direct examination of brain functioning than older approaches that relied on studies of animals or behavioral studies of humans who had experienced brain damage. Still, the new methods, which are less invasive and can produce images of the brain’s activity, are best used with older children and adults who can sit still for the examination, and they cannot capture completely all the simultaneous processes of growth and change that happen so quickly in young children. As a consequence, our understanding of the developing brain is based on multiple sources of still-evolving knowledge and is likely to change in the next decade. The following summarizes the main principles of early brain development, based on the science at this
