Do you really understand them?
Research Shows
BERKELEY-- The infant in the cradle only appears to be an innocent, agenda-free creature made of soft down. With a brain that is smarter, faster, and busier than any adult's, it has the greatest mind in the universe and is working to find answers to important philosophical puzzles.
Thus starts a brand-new book by three eminent developmental scientists, whose discoveries in the domains of psychology and neurology combined have made a revolutionary advancement in our comprehension of how a child's mind develops.
The study, which was written up in "The Scientist in the Crib: Minds, Brains, and How Children Learn" (William Morrow, 1999), makes it abundantly evident that how society treats preschoolers will have an impact on not only their lives but also the course of the globe.
Alison Gopnik, a renowned cognitive psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley, Andrew Meltzoff, a pioneer in infant psychology, and Patricia K. Kuhl, a leading expert on language development at the University of Washington, are co-authors of the book. A small group of scientists, including Kuhl, went to the 1997 White House Conference on Early Childhood Development and Learning to brief President Clinton in person on fresh child research findings.
Gopnik, a psychology professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and the book's main author remarked, "It is amazing how much little children know and how much they learn in a short time."
Gopnik, a psychology professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and the book's main author remarked, "It is amazing how much little children know and how much they learn in a short time."
"If you combine the psychological and neurological evidence, it is hard to avoid concluding that babies are just plain smarter than we are, at least if being smart means being able to learn something new," argues the author.
Researchers have found that before toddlers start kindergarten, their brains are more active, more flexible, and have more connections per brain cell than adult human brains. The child's brain is twice as active as an adult's by age three. There are about 15,000 synapses, or connections, in each neuron, which significantly increases over the adult brain.
Gopnik and her co-authors do not recommend new educational schemes for preschoolers, such as flashcards and Mozart tapes, noting that there is no evidence any environment can be artificially created to make people brighter or better.
"But there is plenty of evidence that deprivation makes them worse," she said, adding that it is not enough to just feed children and put them to bed.
Parents and other adults "need the time and energy to exercise their natural ability to help babies learn," said Gopnik. "We should do what we do best - talk, play, make funny faces, pay attention. We just need time to do it.
The scientific lesson is not that we require professionals to advise us on how to raise our children. We simply need the time, space, and opportunity to carry out our normal activities, and that is precisely what we are losing, they write.
