Toddling Towards Gomorrah
GOLDBERG, ROBERT M.
Toddling Towards Gomorrah The dangers of the myth that a child's first three years are the most important. BY ROBERT M. GOLDBERG In Baby and Child Care, Dr. Benjamin Spock complained of parents...
...This preoccupation with how baby is doing is nothing new...
...Across America there's a push to educate children earlier and with greater intensity than ever before...
...And because there is no science to prove the connection of rich environments with high brain achievement, the myth's only legacy will be a generation of lost children—emotionally undernourished and isolated in the midst of all their brain-boosting gizmos...
...They have transplanted them into animals and seen them grow and function...
...Indeed, many of the articles used to support the myth of the first three years of life actually demonstrate the opposite...
...What then could be better than a scientifically proven method that triggers adequate synaptic growth during the first three years...
...Worse, it tells children that our love and our time are all for their educational attainment and their neuronal development...
...The origin of the myth of the first three years lies in a 1987 study that showed rats grow more brain cells when placed in cages with interesting (to a rat, at least) environments...
...The advocates of the myth pay lip service to love and laughter and all that, but in the end it's the kid's ability to get into a good college that matters...
...A large study conducted by the National Institute of Child and Human Development found that only 1 percent of the difference in children's verbal skills can be explained by day-care quality...
...Over a million videos that teach infants foreign languages (Baby Einstein), music (Baby Mozart), and words (Baby Shakespeare) have been sold since their rollout in 1997...
...Of course, the scientist who ran the experiments never claimed that toy-filled rat cages are equal to Baby Einstein videos...
...Benjamin Spock complained of parents who "transmit their excessive competitiveness to their children...
...Child-development experts such as T. Berry Brazelton are prescribing preschool to insure kids do not become "stupid, violent or drug abusers or produce stupid children...
...An extreme example is the attempt to teach reading to two-year-olds and, in general, to create 'superkids.'" What Spock saw back in 1985 as the extreme has now become the norm...
...That's simply wrong...
...But there's a difference from the old Freudian analysis, for the new child-development theory asserts that unless you nurture a child's brain properly, it is almost impossible to undo the original pattern of growth after the first three years...
...This finding came one week after the announcement that new, growing cells have been found in aging monkeys' cerebral cortex (the most complex region of the brain...
...In short, the perfect worker bees in the knowledge-based economy...
...For all their talk about warm and responsive care, the myth-makers' obsession with intelligence and academic performance has forced a competitive model of childhood upon more children at an earlier stage in life than ever before...
...You can be a flop at five and a success at fifty...
...In fact, intellectual or emotional ground "lost" in early childhood can be regained in adolescence or adulthood...
...Kids force-fed excellence often excel, but the emotional toll it takes on their underparented and unloved lives is considerable...
...Thereafter, nannies, schools, tutors, coaches, therapists, and college-placement counselors can finish the job...
...which children themselves, through their innate temperaments and talents, help shape their own environments...
...But will they be good citizens, spouses, friends, and neighbors...
...Certainly such studies don't prove the necessity for massive governmental intervention...
...Armed with a collage of brain scans and one-shot studies with results that have never been reproduced elsewhere, let alone published in peer-reviewed science journals, the actor and director Rob Reiner established the "I Am Your Child" organization to mobilize the media and politicians...
...It's true that the time from birth to three years old is a critical period, but advocates of the myth—a well-meaning mixture of Hollywood types, child-development experts, and activists— have either misunderstood or misrepresented the brain's plasticity during this critical period...
...Reiner is fond of telling audiences that "by age ten, your brain is cooked, and there's nothing much you can do...
...The job of parents and adults is not to raise kids like thoroughbreds but to provide opportunities for children to grow into responsible, caring citizens with talents and virtues finding full expression...
...William Greenough, one of the neuro-scientists often cited by advocates of the myth, notes that his research shows that the plasticity of the brain persists into maturity...
...Will they fear God and cherish life...
...Packing children off to school while they are still teething is being promoted as the way to boost performance and social competency in the later grades...
...As Bruer points out, beyond telling us that we can teach kids regarded as highly unteachable by advocates of the myth—no small thing—neuroscience can tell us little about child development...
...When you add the ongoing plasticity of the brain to a model of child development that emphasizes the emergence of individual differences, you come up with a view of children quite different from that held by advocates of the myth of the first three years...
...This is the thesis fueling the rapid explosion in parental priming of the early developmental pump, and it is at the heart of what John Bruer calls in his careful and calm new book, The Myth of the First Three Years...
...nearly 40 percent of the difference is associated with the mother's intelligence and the home environment...
...Anxious parents are starting toddlers in on academics, music, dance, art, and language lessons before they enter kindergarten Robert M.Goldberg is senior research fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center...
...Recent research suggests that brain cells are generated all the time, that the plasticity of our brain is greater than imagined...
...And it is a myth, as Bruer notes, precisely because there is, in fact, no neuroscience to support the claim (as the New York Times editorialized) "that the way in which billions of brain cells make connections and develop into networks that enable children to become smart, creative and adaptable depends, to a remarkable extent, on how an infant is nurtured...
...In return for this limited investment, parents and society will receive children who are (again in the words of the New York Times) smart, creative, and adaptable...
...The myth doesn't fit all that extra credit stuff in its parenting model...
...Neurosci-entists at Rockefeller University have also found that rats learn faster when confined to narrow cages for short periods, but no one seems to be recommending confining children to their cribs to stimulate learning...
...Children need to be allowed to grow through trial and error as they make their way through the world...
...Now this same cause-and-effect relation is being extended to brain growth, with proponents claiming that neuroscience proves a connection between how children are reared, how well their brains develop, and how successful they are in life...
...Kids who will do well on the SATs, who will be accepted at the top law and business schools, who will assemble impressive PowerPoint presentations and garner six-figure incomes...
...Scientists have even found and grown neural stem cells: master cells that can generate any kind of brain cell...
...That modesty in the application of brain research is telling...
...Similarly, the aging brain appears able to compensate for age-related deficits...
...Stripped of its junk science, the myth simply embodies a child-development process that allows parents to impose their goals on their children as efficiently as possible and frees up private time for work and vacations...
...Child-development theorists have long argued that secure attachments in infancy are the key to emotional well-being later in life...
...Research by such behavior geneticists as David Rowe and Robert Plomin has stressed the extent to The myth is a means to transmit competitiveness to our children, and it tells them our love is merely for their educational attainment...
...The myth is nothing more than a means for transmitting excessive competitiveness to our children...
...in hopes of getting better test scores and a shot at more prestigious colleges...
Vol. 5 • November 1999 • No. 11
