What Babies Need From Caregivers to Structure Their Brains for the Future

J. Ronald Lally, Ed.D.

Peter L. Mangione, Ph.D

Center for Child & Family Studies

NAEYC, Atlanta, GA

November 2012

The Right Context

Care provided in safe, interesting, and intimate settings where children have the time and opportunity to establish and sustain secure and trusting relationships with knowledgeable caregivers who are responsive to their needs and interests.

The Right Policies for Care

• Primary Care

• Small Groups

• Continuity of Care

• Personalized Care

• Cultural Responsiveness

• Attention to Special Needs

Importance of Caregivers

The quality of the care babies receive from their primary caregivers influences babies ability to successfully or unsuccessfully:

•attach to other humans,

•regulate their impulses,

•learn how to communicate with others, and

•search for an intellectual understanding of the world into which they are born.

Early development is directly influenced by the tenor of babies interactions with their caregivers. The quality of babies’ experiences during day-to-day care is of prime importance to future functioning.

Caregivers With a Clear Understanding of Infant/Toddler Development and Their Role

• A baby is clearly not a “sponge,” merely soaking up input from caregivers. Both babies and caregivers call forth, give, and receive messages, with babies just as capable of initiating interaction as caregivers.

• Driven by a built-in learning agenda, babies search out lessons on topics they are genetically predisposed to learn.

Babies Are Active Learners

Rather than being a passive recipient of care, babies actively elicit it. They respond to those around them in ways that elicit interest and increase the likelihood of continued contact and closeness.

Marvin & Britner, 2008

Babies are preprogrammed to learn from those who care for them; their inborn gene and neuron systems wait to be activated by experience. During interactions with other people sets of neurons cluster, fire, and eventually wire together to help babies to react and respond appropriately to similar future events, even in a caregiver’s absence.

The Young Infant’s Early Brain Shaping

• Babies are born wired with the expectation that familiar adults will be available to them and care for them.

• They pay great attention to differences in treatment from what they expect.

• When early expectations are violated, the brain reacts to these violations by structuring itself to anticipate this unexpected treatment.

What’s New

Intellectual and language development are stimulated by and cannot be segregated from early emotional development and, in fact, build on and are informed by the first interactions babies have with their primary caregivers.

What’s New

During the first two years of life a brain structure is created that influences children’s approach to learning including:

• a child’s use of relationships in learning,

• the child’s confidence to engage in the challenge of learning,

• the child’s ability to persist while learning, and

• the child’s eagerness to use adult models for learning.

What’s New

Early relationships are so crucial to the map of the brain that they are the primary environmental ingredient for healthy brain development.

Emotion Regulation of Infants

“. . . Effective regulation of the infant is only possible within a supportive caregiving system. . . . By providing appropriate and changing stimulation in response to perceptions of infant state, moods, and interests, caregivers not only help keep arousal within manageable bounds, but they also entrain the infant’s own capacities for regulation.”

Sroufe, L. A., Egeland, B., Carlson, E. A., & Collins, W. A. (2005). The development of the person: The Minnesota study of risk and adaptation from birth to adulthood. New York: The Guilford Press.

Emotion Regulation of Toddlers

“. . .the adaptation of the toddler period remains fundamentally a dyadic adaptation. . . . as [is] true for infants, toddlers require responsive and consistent involvement by caregivers to remain regulated. . . . [Toddlers] are not capable of self regulation, but within a supportive relationship, they are capable of ‘guided self-regulation’.”

Sroufe, L. A., Egeland, B., Carlson, E. A., & Collins, W. A. (2005). The development of the person: The Minnesota study of risk and adaptation from birth to adulthood. New York: The Guilford Press.

The Infant As Scientist

• Both form and test hypotheses

• Both are making sense of the unknown.

• Both investigate, with focused attention, the world around them.

• Both rely on a supportive place to study and work.

• Both use their senses to understand their world.

Emotional Exchanges Drive Learning

Emotional competence establishes the foundation for success in all other developmental domains. It is the pleasure and delight that babies get from interaction with people that drive them to relate to people more frequently and more skillfully. Emotional motive drives skill development.

Stanley Greenspan

The Mobile Infant

As babies reach their seventh month or so, they enter a second stage of experience that influences brain development, during which their efforts become more coordinated and purposeful. With increasing physical skills, they gain greater independent movement.

As babies distance themselves from caregivers and become absorbed in exploring an object or mastering a skill, they do a lot of “checking in,” looking at their caregivers from afar to see if the caregiver is watching and acknowledging their efforts.

The Mobile Infant

The Mobile Infant

It’s common to see 9- to 15-month-old babies in motion throughout the day, repeatedly setting out on “adventures” in their environment, returning to the “home base” that their caregivers provide, and then leaving again. They move away to pursue self-directed interest and return for support and connection, learning a great deal about how to separate and stay connected.

The Mobile Infant

The brain is preparing for life that doesn’t revolve entirely around caregiver support, a time when, for example, eventually children will have to use the lessons they’ve learned from caregivers to identify risks on their own, such as a poisonous berry on a bush or an un-gated stairway.

During this stage, babies also start to use messages from caregivers to develop perceptions of whether they are lovable or unlovable based on how caregivers have responded to them up to this point and develop internal working models for how to engage others based on those perceptions.

The Older Toddler

The Older Toddler

With the help of their caregivers, and based on their relationships with others, including peers, older toddlers are learning to process information that will prepare them to develop moral and ethical codes, to better control their impulses and emotions, and to learn the rules of the culture, society, and family into which they were born.

The Older Toddler

The child at the older toddler age is very sensitive to the judgments of others. Based on their interactions with others they will form opinions of themselves and their worth, begin to judge the behaviors of others, and feel shame and embarrassment with regard to their behaviors and appearance.

The Caregiver’s Role: Creating Responsive Relationships

Throughout the birth to 3 years, effective caregiving includes:

• sensitivity to the needs and messages of the baby, • timeliness in responding to those messages

(particularly messages of distress),• accurate reading of a child’s cues, and • the provision of appropriate levels of stimulation.

Belsky & Fearon, 2008

Responsive Relationships are Spontaneous and Resonant

“Two people become companions on a mutually created journey through time. Interpersonal communication can be seen in spontaneous, resonant communication that flows freely and is balanced between continuity, familiarity, and predictability on one side and flexibility, novelty, and uncertainty on the other. Neither partner of a dyad is fully predictable, yet each is quite familiar.”

Source: Siegel, D. J. (1999). The developing mind: How relationships and the brain interact to shape who we are. New York: The Guilford Press.

The Importance of Responsiveness in Relationships

“‘Feeling felt’ may be an essential ingredient in attachment relationships. Having the sense that someone else feels one’s feelings and is able to respond contingently to one’s communication may be vital to close relationships . . . .”

Siegel, D. J. (1999). The developing mind: How relationships and the brain interact to shape who we are. New York: The Guilford Press.

Infant Learning…

…begins in relationships, is

informed by relationships, and is

facilitated by relationships

“We are mirrors for a baby that tell him who he is. We are also windows that let him know what he can expect.”

Jeree Pawl, 2011

Relationships With The Young Baby

Because very young infants can’t physically move to adults, it’s important that caregivers make themselves available and stay close in the early stages of this relating process. Adults need to take responsibility for ensuring closeness: listening for messages from the baby, providing for the baby’s physical needs, and keeping the baby out of harm’s way.

Marvin & Britner, 2008

Relationships with the Exploring Mobile Infant

Based on adults’ reactions to children’s actions, children are gaining an understanding of which independent explorations are socially appropriate and which dangers they should avoid in the environment, from the point of view of their caregivers.

Relationships With The Exploring Mobile Infant

As children learn about what they are and are not allowed to explore, they also begin to understand what types of help they can expect in exploring and whether or not certain caregivers will be available to offer support when solo exploration becomes frightening.

Early interactions with caregivers around exploration influence children’s sense of security in engaging the ever-expanding world around them, which leads to building new brain structures as children work both to explore new things and stay connected.

Relationships With The Exploring Mobile Infant

Relating to the Older Toddler

“He has just begun to be aware that you and he are separate people; he does not yet take it comfortably for granted. Some of the time he asserts this new-found individuality, yelling ‘No!’ and ‘Let me!,’ fighting your control and his own need for your help each time an issue presents itself. But some of the time he clings to you, crying when you leave the room, holding up his arms to be carried, demanding with open mouth that you should feed him.”

Penelope Leach, 2012

What We need to Remember

Whether through intentional choice or not, parents and other caregivers shape the day-to-day emotional climate that babies experience. Their methods of expressing their emotions and responding to situations act to socialize children into understanding which emotions are appropriate to express in various situations and how vociferous they can be in expressing themselves.

Denham, 1998

What We Need to Remember: Provide Emotional Predictability and Intellectual Novelty

• Young children are wired emotionally to expect that they will have their needs met by those who care for them and that their signals will be understood and addressed.

• At the same time children are wired intellectually to respond to experiences that violate their expectations. The new, the novel, the surprising grabs their attention.

The answer to the question…

“How is learning and development best facilitated by adults?”

…is always influenced by the answer to the question:

“How do infants learn and develop?”

PITC Philosophy Statement

Infant care teachers do not focus on teaching specific lessons. Rather, the focus is on facilitating natural interests and urges to learn.

• Teaching and caring occur together right from the beginning of life.

• Every moment in which an adult provides care to a young infant is a moment rich with learning.

• Above all, young infants learn about how people respond to their communication and behavior.

Infant Care Teacher

Each child is unique and the protagonist of his or her own growth. Children desire to acquire knowledge, have much capacity for curiosity and amazement, and yearn to create relationships with others and to communicate. Children are open to exchange and reciprocity. From early in life they negotiate with the social and physical worlds - with everything the culture brings them.

Loris MalaguzziFounder of the Reggio Emilia Schools

Sharing Meaning withBabies and Toddlers

Sharing meaning is how we create relationships with babies and toddlers. We join with them in their active engagement in learning by following their lead. Through sharing meaning, the baby learns about self and connection to others.

How to Facilitate Development I

• Focus on helping the infants learn their curriculum

• Plan learning opportunities rather than develop lessons

• Plan environments to maximize opportunities to learn through discovery

• Select, place, and rotate materials based on observation of children

How to Facilitate Development II

• Watch child’s cues for signs of interest

• Ask what the child wants

• Adapt your behavior to child’s signals

• Look for ways to expand rather than interrupt spontaneous learning

• Bathe child in language

• Concern yourself with identity messages

Responsive, Reciprocal Relationships with Young Children

The adult focuses on:

• Dialogue that fosters sharing attention with the child

• Dialogue that is not intrusive or demanding, but gives the child time and space to solve problems

• Dialogue that engages the child in learning and meaning making

• Dialogue that communicates respect