Interaction and the Architecture of the Brain

Similarly, the kind of interaction young children experience with each other offers important developmental benefits. Over time, they learn how to share, how to take the needs and desires of others into account, and how to manage their own impulses. While science doesn’t yet have the tools to quantify these benefits or pinpoint their influence on the brain, they are known to be critically important in early development.

Using Science to Shape Public Policy

If we, as a society, take seriously the science on interaction and early brain development, we should rethink some of the most fundamental public policies relating to our nation’s children, say members of the National Scientific Council. Among them are the following:

Child care: While many communities now enjoy the benefits of top-notch child-care programs, the care across much of the nation is still characterized by high staff turnover, poorly designed programs, or inadequate preparation of caregivers. “We might consider looking at our nation’s child-care facilities as brain-development centers,” suggests Thompson, only half joking. His words reinforce the very real and long-term consequences for society of the care that children get in these earliest years.

Since science tells us that positive interaction is crucial—and that it works best when it’s unhurried and comes naturally, notes Thompson—a science-based approach to child care and early education would shift current thinking about how to define the “quality” of that care. For many policy-makers, quality is seen in terms of adult-child ratios, group size, physical facilities, and, more recently, cognitively oriented curriculum. But viewing quality child care through a developmental lens leads us to place more emphasis on ensuring that relationships in child care are nurturing, stimulating, and reliable; strengthening the knowledge and skills of the caregivers; and improving the wages and benefits that affect staff turnover in an effort to assure more consistent relationships between young children and their caregivers.

Moreover, because science demonstrates that the developing brain is most malleable in the first few years, public policies should capitalize on the important window of opportunity represented by the preschool and early-school years. For child care and early grades alike, that means recruiting and training highly attentive caregivers who understand the value of early-childhood interaction and are prepared to “seize the moment” with the kind of valuable, one-on-one interaction children most need.

Parental leave: Similarly, the scientific knowledge we are accumulating about the importance of a close mother-infant bond beginning in the earliest months of life ­suggests there is a need for a reexamination of today’s parental-leave debate. Under current federal law, many Americans may elect to take limited, unpaid time off after the birth or adoption of a child. While the Family and Medical Leave Act was heralded as an unprecedented, pro-family step forward when it was enacted in 1993, it still leaves most parents of young children with few options. More than 40 percent of the workforce is not covered by the law; of those who are, it is mainly high-income families that can afford to forgo 12 weeks of paid work.

Several proposals before Congress aim to improve the options for working parents of young children in various ways: by boosting the number of eligible workers; lengthening the allowable time off; or by offering a limited amount of paid leave. Some states are already innovating in line with the science. California recently became the first state in the nation to adopt paid family leave, which provides up to six weeks of partial wage replacement for workers who take time off to care for a new baby or sick family member.

Proposals to enact paid family leave have been introduced in at least two dozen other states.

Education for young children: Incontrovertible evidence on the importance of social and emotional development in the early years would suggest ways to reassess thinking about the education of children who have entered school. In the view of Council members, the current emphasis on reading and skills testing for ever-younger students (as reflected in federal mandates under the No Child Left Behind Act) may hold political appeal, but it doesn’t adequately reflect what science tells us about the importance of interaction and high-quality relationships in the early school grades. From the perspective of developmental science, a better approach would focus on the “emotional duet” Thompson referenced earlier: the reciprocal bonding and learning interactions between young children and their teachers, and young children and their peers, which have proved to be much more important than rote instruction at young ages. Similarly, early education should take advantage of children’s natural interests and intrinsic drive to learn, rather than follow an adult-determined agenda that does not take these qualities into account.

Children in poverty or otherwise at risk: If healthy early development relies on close and loving interaction between young children and adults, such interaction is arguably most critical for our most vulnerable youngsters, such as those living in conditions of poverty.

Regrettably, our nation’s main safety-net program for poor families—Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF)—focuses more heavily on the need to get mothers back to work than on the needs of their growing children. Currently, federal rules require states to impose work requirements of 30 or more hours per week. Although modifications are permissible, only about half of the states exempt mothers of children under 12 months of age, and some states actually permit mandated maternal ­employment beginning a few weeks after a baby’s birth. This is particularly striking given the fact that the earliest months and years of life offer a highly promising opportunity for attentive and skillful caregiving to promote the building of sturdy brain architecture. Stated simply, science would suggest that breaking the cycle of poverty may be best achieved by thinking long-term, and focusing on equipping the next generation with a solid base for ongoing achievement, beginning in the earliest stages of development.

The TANF program faces long-overdue renewal in Congress, and a number of proposed reforms would further tighten these restrictions, mandating 40 hours of acceptable employment for a greater proportion of adults in the program. A related debate over the adequacy of child care available to these parents has been stalled in Congress for several years.

Without consistent evidence that maternal employment intrinsically helps or hurts children, science has little to add to the ongoing political debate about whether paid work should be mandated for mothers on public assistance. However, emerging data do suggest that a mother’s employment, specifically in the first six months of her infant’s life, may be associated with later developmental problems. The research raises serious concerns about the potential harm of mandated maternal employment. Emerging scientific knowledge about how early childhood conditions shape brain architecture offers strong evidence that children from all economic levels, as well as the wider society, will benefit from more thoughtful policies toward early childhood development.

Dorian Friedman is the policy editor at The American Prospect, a monthly political magazine, and a former associate editor at U.S. News & World Report. She has worked to advance beneficial social policies and effective communication strategies with the FrameWorks Institute, the Welfare to Work Partnership, and other nonprofit organizations. She is based in Washington, D.C.

For information about commonly used terms in Council publications, see Definitions.