Good news from the told-you-so school of childcare: according to a policy document presented to the American National Academy of Sciences, those Stepford Parents who look at you as though you're betraying your offspring if you admit that you've not invested in Baby Mozart have got it all wrong. It's not gadgets, courses, music lessons nor shiny, expensive toys that make the difference as to whether Little Susie grows up to do well in college: it's good, old-fashioned love and affection, and lots of it.
Hardly rocket science, true. But the paper's findings are backed by good, solid neuroscience, and, if taken on board by Those In Power rather than tucked away to gather dust in the name of tax savings, could have a significant long-term impact (including, it must be pointed out, significant future tax savings) for all of us. Because the thrust of the paper, put together by, among others, a Professor of Medicine at Stanford University, the Chair of the National Council for the Developing Child and a Nobel-prizewinning economist, is that a child's education begins in the cradle, not at statutory school age, and that a child who has had the advantage of much affectionate play with well-disposed adults (and this doesn't necessarily only include parents) will already have the educational edge over less-loved peers in terms of being able to learn and assimilate information by the time they begin formal schooling, and that that edge will last them throughout their lifetimes. And a generation that has been afforded these advantages will cost themselves far less in terms of wasted education dollars, spells of unemployment and so forth, in perpetuity.
The basic scientific thrust is this: a baby's brain is, basically, a bundle of fully-developed neurons. The problem is that the pathways that connect these neurons have yet to be established. Pretty much all your responses to any given stimulus are the product of the way your neurons have been set up to fire messages off to each other, and these pathways, once established, are almost impossible to re-route, no matter how much cognitive therapy you get as an adult.
The only way to set up these neural pathways, or synapses, is by stimulation, and the more, and more varied the stimulation, the more and more varied the synaptic routes will be. A vast number of these complex networks are set up in the first years of life. The average three-year-old, in fact, has three times as many synapses as an adult. These pathways can work in a zillion directions, but if they've not been set up in the first place, then your thoughts, effectively, will be blocked-off from the short-cuts; and will have to take the long route round - for the rest of your life. The more neuronal pathways established in your brain, the more flexible your thinking will be and the more easily you will be able to see the connections between things. And thus, the more easily skills and information can be assimilated as your life progresses. Forget the self-help business books: if ever there was a short-cut to success, it's this.
Ah, but here's the rub. By the second decade of life, we begin to erase synapses our brains have found to be of little use. The more a synapse has been stimulated in early life, the stronger it is and the less likely it is to be erased. So a child who's constantly read to, or talked with, or engaged with in imaginative play, by an adult who does so in an encouraging, enjoyable manner, is going to have far stronger, less erasable, synaptic pathways, than someone who's been slumped in front of the television absorbing everything in the same, passive manner throughout this crucial developmental stage.
A huge number of life skills that most of us take for granted require a vast amount of intellectual dexterity. Remember the first time you got behind the wheel of a car? That sense of utter helplessness, of I'll-never-learn-this, as you tried to depress the clutch, put it in gear, turn the wheel, look both in front of you and behind in the rear-view? Think how much more difficulty people have learning to drive the older they get. That's your synaptic pathways. Feel them working.
Reading is a similar skill. According to Scott McConnell, of the Centre for Early Education and Development in Minnesota; "child language development... involves an interaction of multiple tasks such as motor co-ordination, concept development, categorization, perception, biological growth and social influences." In other words, reading ain't just a question of putting the letters together, it's being able to take-in and recognize marks on a page and relate it, in a concrete way, both to a noise someone makes and to a picture or, later, an abstract concept. Imagine trying to learn to do all those things at once if no-one's spent hours playing peek-a-boo with you and showing you with their laughter that it's meant to be funny, or gone over Dr Seuss again and again, reveling in the words and showing you the pleasure to be had from them, or given you the basic concepts of engineering by helping you build a sandcastle.
So: play is good. Loving adult company is good. Like I say, it's not rocket science. The interesting thing, however, is the pragmatic thrust of this paper. The good professors also suggest something that, to some elements of society, might be rather revolutionary: that this isn't the sole responsibility of parents, nor that parents are the only people capable of giving this healthy stimulation. With admirable realism, they acknowledge that factors such as poverty, with its stressed and distracted concerns, exhausted parents and lack of general stimulus, are in themselves deadening to the development of human intelligence. And that this is the primary reason why problems such as illiteracy are so much more prevalent among the poor than they are among the privileged classes; which in itself is a good reason why poverty and all its related ills are, like wealth, often an inherited condition. Their suggestion is that a great deal of our educational funds would be far better spent on preschool care and education than on after-the-fact mopping-up operations on people who have been handicapped from day-one.
Lovely idea. Makes total sense. So now, back in the real world where no-one wants to give up any of their new-car money to improving the prospects of unattractive strangers' children for the sake of a better society after their death, what does this mean in real terms?
Well, the way I see it is this: if you're working all the hours God gave you to buy your little darlings the newest, shiniest computer-generated Educational Tools, stop. If you've persuaded yourself that keeping the house tidy matters more than going out kicking-up leaves, forget it. If you think Baby Mozart will make them more musical than turning your cooking utensils into a drum kit, start dancing to a different tune. We don't want to teach the next generation to be passive consumers, training them to accept knowledge as something that can only come to them when spoon-fed. Go on. Get down on your hands and knees and pull a face. Show them a stick and get them to imagine it's a dragon. Stop worrying and start enjoying. You won't just be helping your little 'uns invent interstellar travel when they're grownups, you'll also get to have a lot more fun parenting.
