`Brain Nourishment' Essential For A Nation Of Mentally Healthy Children

April 10, 1997|By Joan Beck.

It's only a one-day conference on April 17, limited to the number of influential people who can be packed into the White House's East Room. But the idea President and Mrs. Clinton are plugging is one of the most exciting of the century, its implications are staggering and its promise is mind-boggling.

The title is almost as long as a press release: The White House Conference on Early Childhood Development and Learning: What New Research on the Brain Tells Us About Our Youngest Children.

It's time the idea got a strong presidential push, especially from a chief executive who wants to be called "The Education President" and a first lady who has found a niche as an advocate for kids.

Research accumulating for more than three decades now shows beyond doubt that the quality and quantity of early mental stimulation--opportunities for appropriate learning from birth on--help determine how capable a child's brain will be for life.

Learning stimulation in the first few years of life actually influences the physical make-up of the brain, how the neurons will interconnect, how well the brain will "think," how "smart" the child will be. Educational opportunities later on in life do not affect the brain in the same way or have such an important impact

An environment rich in appropriate opportunities to learn can raise a child's potential IQ by 20 to 30 points (by the inexact measures of intelligence available) because of its impact on the development of the brain. Mental malnourishment in the first years of life can lower potential IQ permanently, beyond what even the best schooling can compensate for completely later on.

Schooling can help a child use the brain he has effectively, give him vast amounts of information and motivate him to learn. But only in the early years of life can mental stimulation actually change the brain to make it a more effective organ of thinking.

Now, the challenge is to identify the kinds of learning experiences that nourish young children's brains best and how they can be made available to all our kids. Some participants in the White House conference will talk about model programs being developed in several communities around the country.

Despite the excitement and promise of neurological research on brain development, early learning ideas have been slow to become part of mainstream child care and education.

Many leaders in the growing field of early childhood education are still too tradition-bound to appreciate the potential of the new neurological research and misunderstand early learning as imposing formal and inappropriate lessons on restless youngsters. Their programs concentrate on emotional development, social behavior and nutrition--necessary, of course. But parents, politicians and donors may be misled into assuming they provide more neurologically based mental stimulation than they actually do.

More than half of all mothers with young children now hold jobs outside the home, limiting the time and energy they can devote to their youngsters. Using early learning strategies can make their time together happier, more beneficial to the children and more rewarding for the parents.

Much of what good parents do by instinct or because it makes their children happy provides good nourishment for their brains. Talking to a baby, responding to his efforts to communicate by body language or by babbling, creating safe spaces at home where he can explore freely, just giving him something new to see or do when he fusses out of boredom all help the brain to grow.

Parents need more ideas about brain-nourishing activities. They need more time and more flexibility in their jobs so their children don't have to come in second so often. Most of all, they need a new understanding and appreciation of how much they can contribute not only to their youngsters' physical and emotional well-being but to their growing intelligence.

Public school systems generally ignore children younger than age five and are too hard-pressed financially to explore the possibilities of reach-out programs. Day-care centers often talk about their learning programs but most provide traditional nursery school fare and lack enough trained teachers to give all of their charges optimal, individual mental nourishment.

Many of the special programs set up to give early learning help to high-risk youngsters in poor areas have had only minimal success. They usually use traditional day-care models and give priority to youngsters' urgent physical and emotional needs.

This is what happens in many Head Start programs, which generally offer too little, too late, in the way of mental nourishment. Early Head Start, begun in 1994, is intended to help children from birth to age 3 in low income areas, but is still too small and too new for good evaluation.

The promises of early learning based on new neurological research are too exciting to brush over lightly or to push aside after the White House conference in the rush of other political matters. It isn't clear yet, however, how best to make the advantages of these new findings available to all our children, especially those in dysfunctional families and those at risk of eventual school failure.

That's where the president and first lady could really make a difference. By sticking with this idea for the rest of his term. By using whatever funding Clinton can bully out of Congress to start and expand model programs. By pestering Head Start administrators to upgrade standard day-care fare with special brain-nourishing components. By generating the national sustained excitement that the promise of the new research deserves.

The idea could do a lot for the Clintons--as well as for the nation's kids.