Understanding Child Development through Brain Development

Most parents want to give their child an extra edge in life and wait for kindergarten to begin their formal education. However, the first three years are the most formative years of a child’s life and to understand why, we need to know more about how a child’s brain develops. 

By the age of 8 months, a baby’s brain has about 1,000 trillion nerve connections. By the age of ten years, that number reduces to just 500 trillion or less. Early experiences impact the reduction in nerve connections as the brain operates on a ‘use it or lose it’ basis. In a report titled Rethinking the Brain: New Insights into Early Development, Dr. Rima Shore arrives at two important conclusions:

"By the time children reach age three, their brains are twice as active as those of adults. Activity levels drop during adolescence", and "Early interactions don't just create a context; they directly affect the way the brain is 'wired'".

Dr. Shore, the Adelaide Weismann Chair in Educational Leadership at Bank Street College of Education, prepared the report based on proceedings from a national conference. 

Anyone interested in learning about the process of child development must know how the human brain develops in the first few years after birth:

• In the prenatal stage, the fetus’ brain produces more neurons than it requires. All these neurons are not preserved. Later the axons branch out and again some are lost. At the prenatal stage nothing can be done to reduce the atrophy (loss) of the axons. 

• After the child is born, the brain experiences another spurt in growth because of the sudden increase in sensory stimuli. The good news is that this time a larger number of the newly formed dendrites can be preserved. The way to preserve them is to provide the brain with more stimulation. This will ensure that more electrical signals are sent through the axons to the dendrites. If a child can be given the required stimulation, more dendrites will be conserved. Everything a child learns later grows from the patterns established during this period of brain stimulation. 

How to boost the development of the child’s brain? 

Therefore, the process of making the most of a child’s brain development should begin in the first three years of life. One of the ways a child’s brain can be stimulated is learning how to read. It develops their vocabulary, pronunciation, listening skills and imagination and can be a great bonding experience between parent and child.