Brain Development

What Parents Need to Know

At birth, the infant's brain has 100 billion nerve cells, or neurons. These neurons will grow and connect with other neurons in systems that control functions like seeing, hearing, moving, and expressing emotion.

How Experiences Affect Brain Development

The brain is the part of the body that allows us to feel joy or despair; to respond to others in a loving or angry way; to use reason or simply to react. At birth, the brain is remarkably unfinished. The parts of the brain that handle thinking and remembering, as well as emotional and social behavior, are underdeveloped. This means that young children are deeply affected by their early experiences. Many experiences affect the way children's brains become "wired": their relationships with parents and other important caregivers; the sights, sounds, smells, and feelings they experience; and the challenges they meet as they are growing up.

Basic principles of brain development:

The outside world shapes the brain's wiring;
The outside world is experienced through the senses -- seeing, hearing, smelling, touching, and tasting -- enabling the brain to create or modify connections;
The brain operates on a "use it or lose it" principle; and
Relationships with other people early in life are the major source of development of the emotional and social parts of the brain.

Simply put, children's early experiences help their brains develop, and this shapes the way people learn, think, and behave for the rest of their lives.

This article can be accessed at http://www.parentsaction.org/learn/parenting/development/braindevelopment/

Brain Development: How Parents can Make a Difference provides guidelines that can help parents raise healthy, happy children.