Kids Are Our Future

The early years of a child’s life are crucial for physical, cognitive, emotional and social development. Therefore, it is very important that we take every step necessary to ensure that children grow up in environments where their physical, emotional, social, and educational needs are met.

Children grow, develop, and learn throughout their lives from birth to adulthood. A child’s development can be measured through physical, cognitive and social developmental milestones. If children fail to develop properly they may be unable to reach their full potential. Children who grow up in environments where their developmental needs are not met are at a high risk for health and safety, and learning and developmental delays.

We as parents definitely need to invest time and resources on the health care, and education systems during children’s years, which have effects on their whole life. Therefore, it is in the public’s interest especially, parents’ to ensure that children develop in safe, loving, and secure environments.

What is child development? How can parents prevent developmental delays? What are important developmental milestones? How can parents help to improve child developmental outcomes? Let’s discuss these questions parents asked and find the answers.

How well brain develops by age 6 determines a child’s health and performance in school and throughout life. While we know that the development of a young child’s brain takes years to complete and also know there are many things parents can do to help children get off to a good start and establish healthy patterns for life-long learning. “Well begun is half done.”

The human brain begins forming very early in prenatal life, but brain development is a lifelong process, because the same events that shape the brain during development are also responsible for storing information throughout life. The major difference between brain development in a child versus an adult’s learning is that the child’s brain is far more impressionable in early life than in maturity, which means that young children’s brains are more open to learning and enriching influences but are more vulnerable to developmental problems.

Which is more important in brain development, nature or nurture?
Genes or nature and environment or nurture play very different roles while interacting with each other at every step of brain development. Generally speaking, genes are responsible for forming all of the brain cells and general connections between different brain regions; while experience is responsible for fine-tuning those connections, helping each child adapt to the particular environment such as geographical, cultural, family and school. For example, each of us is born with the potential to learn language. Our brains are programmed to recognize human speech, to discriminate subtle differences between individual speech sounds, to put words together, and to pick up the grammatical rules make sentences. However, the particular language each child masters, the vocabulary, and the dialect and accent with which he/she speaks are determined by the social environment in which he/she is raised, beginning even before birth. Genetic potential is necessary, but DNA alone cannot teach a child to talk.

Does experience change the actual structure of the brain?
The answer is yes. Brain development is activity-dependent.
Like computer circuits, neural circuits process information through the flow of electricity. However, the circuits in our brains are much more flexible. Every experience, such as reading a book, riding a bicycle, sharing a story, excites certain neural circuits and leaves others inactive. Those that are consistently used will be strengthened, while the others may be dropped away. This is called “pruning”, which benefits neural processing, making the circuits work more quickly and efficiently.

Our brains are continually evolving themselves to meet the everyday life’s needs, even throughout adulthood. However, there are most aspects of brain structure and functions are developed in early childhood. For example, studies have shown that there are certain windows of time during which the young are especially sensitive to their environment. Babies require normal visual input or they may suffer permanent impairment; language skills depend critically on verbal input in the first few years. The critical period for language-learning begins around five years of age and ends around puberty. This is why individuals who learn a new language after puberty almost always speak it with a foreign accent.Therefore, it is very important to learn languages as early as possible.