Learn How Your Baby Learns
Learn \’lərn \
[Parent function]:
to observe, to know what to expect from your baby, when to expect it, and what to do about it.
Learn \’lərn\
[Baby function]:
to stare at, wonder about, poke, shake, experiment, smile at, taste, and drop. Several times per day, during the first three years of life.
To a child development geek like me, the word “learn” has fascinating origins. The ancient languages that gave us this word first described learning in terms of footprints, furrows and tracks. Considering the process by which experiences shape the brain, and leave a physical trail of life’s experiences, it is clear that the old schoolers were intuitively aware of principles of neuroscience that would not be (could not be) confirmed for centuries.
Here are some images that remind me of how new experiences stimulate the infant brain: Envision walking along, leaving your footprints on a soggy beach when the tide is coming in. The faint impression is there, but shallow, and not necessarily permanent. Now think of a well-worn path that suggests itself as the best way to cross a yard, or hike a hill. Those repeated trips across the terrain are analogous to how repeated experiences shape the brain. On the beach or nature trail, our feet make the journey. In our brains and bodies, electrical impulses carry information between brain cells (also called neurons).
The path of great persistence wins out in neuroscience. Experiences make impressions, but repeated experiences lay down tracks and become more deeply grooved/organized with more and more usage. Conversely, lack of stimulation leads to weak neuronal connections, and eventually a winnowing away of what could have been a connection. And all of this happens incredibly quickly:
- Hundreds of millions of cells are made in baby’s brain before birth.
- At six months of age, baby’s brain is 50% of what the adult size will be.
- At three yeas of age, baby’s brain is 80% of what the adult size will be.
Most of the learning (brain development, really) that happens to your child, will happen with you as the teacher. Under your tutelage, she will learn the life skills of walking, asking for help, self-dressing, self-feeding, curiosity, how to make friends and how to keep them, crying her heart out — but somehow smiling again. Before her first day of formal schooling, she’ll already need to understand rules, responsibilities, the surprisingly complex business of using a bathroom, that fork vs. spoon thing, and how to love herself and others.
Your baby’s first classroom will be the world that parents show her. That classroom will be as interesting or as boring, as authentic or as artificial, and as large or as small as the world you help her to experience.
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Carly Jennings | Cognitive Development | 
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