From Mead (2007):
Over the past decade, it has become conventional wisdom in many education circles that sufficient stimulation in the first three years of life can go a long way toward hardwiring the brain for success. Bookstores are brimming with books with titles like Smart-Wiring Your Baby’s Brain, states have launched Smart Start programs, and a booming, multi-billion dollar industry led by companies such as Baby Einstein and Brainy Baby has tapped into parental angst over doing enough for their kids with foreign-language classes for newborns, toddler day spas, and a host of other products and services aimed at unleashing a baby’s inner genius…
Look in the parenting section of any major bookstore, and you’ll find scores of books that promise to help parents turn their newborns into smarter, happier, more successful adults by providing them with esearch-based stimulation and activities. There’s Smart-Wiring Your Baby’s Brain; Why Love Matters: How Affection Shapes a Baby’s Brain; and Raise a Smarter Child by Kindergarten…
Early childhood development gurus also promised that the right kind of stimulation during the first three years of life would ensure that a child’s brain is properly wired, boosting his or her intellectual potential and preventing the dangerous emotional scars that negative stimulation can cause. They also argued the flipside to this appealing promise: If parents miss this chance to shape their infants’ and toddlers’ brain development, they will lose forever the opportunity and do lasting damage to their children’s potential…
During the 1990s, the importance of a child’s first three years became a widely accepted fact in public discourse. This newfound attention to early learning also influenced policy decisions at the local, state and federal levels. States like California, Georgia and North Carolina passed legislation to provide young children with rich and stimulating learning environments. At the federal level, President Bill Clinton created the Early Head Start program to provide early care and education services to poor children from birth to age three, in response to fears that Head Start, which primarily serves four-year-olds, started too late to significantly impact children’s development. Early Head Start’s funding tripled in the late 1990s, and it currently serves 62,000 children at a cost of $684 million…
Early childhood advocates often assume that findings about the shape, size or activity of brain structures say something useful about how people learn, think or behave. But if the brain shows more activity or growth during a certain activity, it does not necessarily mean that more learning or thinking is going on…
The most significant instance of the form-is-function fallacy as it relates to early childhood involves the rapid growth of synapses. Some early childhood advocates have misinterpreted the significance of the rapid development of synapses, arguing that the increased number of young children’s synapses means that they have greater learning capacity than older people. This is not accurate. While synaptic connections are important, the number of connections does not tell us anything about learning capacity…
It would be foolish to conclude that because one vitamin is better for you than no vitamins, swallowing an entire bottle of vitamins must be even healthier. However, early childhood advocates often make the same logical mistake when they interpret neuroscience findings. For instance, studies show that children who were severely abused or neglected in early childhood suffer developmental delays and other problems.14 But early childhood advocates don’t simply tell parents not to neglect their children; they encourage them to provide their children with extra stimulation in order to promote brain development. “Based in part on such observations,” writes Harvard’s Shatz, referring to research on neglected and abused children, “some people favor enriched environments for young children, in the hopes of enhancing development. Yet current studies provide no clear evidence that such extra stimulation is helpful.”…
The idea of a developmental critical period comes from a series of experiments conducted during the 1960s by David Hubel and Torsten Weisel. As part of the research, the scientists sewed shut one of a newborn kitten’s eyes. A few months later, they reopened the eyes and found that the kittens were virtually blind in the eye, because the parts of the brain that normally receive input from the eye had not developed properly…
Early childhood advocates took this idea and applied it to children, arguing that society needs to provide a rich, stimulating environment for babies and toddlers before they lose their ability to learn. But this is a very dangerous leap. The critical period identified by Hubel and Weisel was a critical period for the development of very specific visual functions in kittens, not a generalized critical period for all aspects of development. Research has also shown that critical periods occur for very specific sensory and motor functions, not for entire sensory systems. And no researcher has found a critical period for culturally
transmitted knowledge and skills such as vocabulary, reading or math…Parents have been the most obvious victims of the zero-to-three hype because it hits them with a striking threat: The experiences you provide your child during the first three years hardwire the brain and forever set your child’s intellectual potential. Fail to provide the right stimulation during early childhood and your child will suffer devastating consequences. Pass on baby water aerobics, in other words, and you can say goodbye to college.
This threat leads parents to waste billions of dollars every year on products that promise to help them foster brain development. The merchandise from Baby Einstein, Brainy Baby and other companies subtly—and sometimes not so subtly—references neuroscience findings about the importance of the first three years. Brainy Baby, for instance, advertises its materials with the slogan “a little genius in the making!” and sells “right brain” and “left brain” educational videos. The Baby Prodigy company explicitly claims its product will help parents raise a “smarter, happier” baby. The text on the back of a Baby
Prodigy DVD case reads, “Did you know you can actually help to enhance the development of your baby’s brain? The first 30 months of life is the period when a child’s brain undergoes its most critical stages of evolution. …Together we can help to make your child the next Baby Prodigy!”For the companies, the products have been a boon. The toys are sold at stiff prices—a set of 12 Baby Einstein DVDs costs $179.99—and there is a seemingly endless demand. The educational baby toy industry, virtually nonexistent a generation ago, is now a multi-billion dollar business and continues to grow rapidly. For parents, however, the money spent on these educational toys might be better off in a college savings account or used to meet other family needs.
Zero-to-three advocates have convinced state and federal lawmakers to funnel millions into early childhood interventions—many of which have shown little result. The Comprehensive Child Development Program, for instance, a federally funded pilot program that used a case management approach to intervene as early as possible in the lives of very at-risk infants, demonstrated no positive impacts for children or their families, even though it cost nearly $16,000 per participating family per year…
Importantly, by misusing the neuroscience research, early childhood advocates might undermine the very thing they so desperately desire: more funding for young kids. By not focusing on effectiveness, early childhood advocates encourage policymakers to make sloppy decisions about how to invest in young children, and over time the failure of unproductive programs may undermine public support for all types of early childhood investments…
Overselling the importance of the first three years also has serious implications for education policy. The key debate of the accountability era is whether or not it is reasonable to expect schools to close the large achievement gaps that currently exist between poor and affluent students and between white and black or Hispanic students. But if, as the supporters for zero to three contend, the brain becomes hardwired in the first three years of life, then schools shouldn’t be responsible for closing achievement gaps: Learning abilities are set in a child’s brain before they enter kindergarten, and little can be done to alter them…
These views are dangerously deterministic—and do not jibe with the research. For one, the door for learning does not slam shut at age three. Indeed, recent neuroscience research has shown that the mind is amazingly supple and continues to develop well into old age… Reviewing the evidence on early childhood intervention programs, economist Janet Currie concludes that it does not prescribe an optimal age for early childhood interventions. In fact, some of the programs with the strongest evidence of positive effects are high-quality preschool programs serving four-year-olds. Some high-quality intervention programs for at-risk youth have shown significant positive impacts even though they focused on children and adolescents well-past the age of three.
Ryan: A post-doc who used to work in my lab wrote a book about emotional development in babies and shopped it around to different publishers. The publisher she choice offered a million-dollar advance. She stopped coming to lab after that.