Baby’s Brain Begins Now: Conception to Age 3
The fact that children are affected by their surroundings is too obvious to bear repeating. Child development specialists have produced decades of research showing that the environment of a child’s earliest years can have effects that last a lifetime.
Thanks to recent advances in technology, we have a clearer understanding of how these effects are related to early brain development. Neuroscientists can now identify patterns in brain activity that appear to be associated with some types of negative early experiences.1
But the long-term effects of early stress, poverty, neglect and maltreatment were well documented and virtually uncontested years before we could “see” them with brain scanning tools. So why should we need an understanding of brain development to show us how important children’s earliest experiences are for their well-being? Isn’t neuroscience just telling us what we already know?