Everyone’s shoes are off. Each family has found a spot on the rug, forming a circle. An 8-month-old girl squeals and claps her hands — a skill she’d picked up just a few days earlier — as she bounces up and down. All eyes are on the teacher, Alyson Hayes-Myers, awaiting her notes on the piano, which will signal that class has begun.

Over the next 45 minutes, an otherwise bare room comes alive with sound and feeling. All seven babies are engrossed in Hayes-Myers’ direction and movement, in the songs, in the close interactions the program encourages between them and the adult who brought them. 

Research is clear about the myriad benefits of music in early childhood. It can support , , and . It and . It can strengthen relationships and expose students to languages and customs from other parts of the world. 

In Hayes-Myers’ class, the evidence of the links between music and early development that are found in scientific studies come to life. In the presence of children who are singing or being sung to, who are listening to instruments or playing the instruments themselves, the brain development is obvious — and the joy is infectious.

Her class is in week four of a 10-week session that invites children from birth to age 4 to participate with a caregiver — often a parent, but sometimes a grandparent or nanny. It’s located in Denver, Colorado, at Twinkle Together, a licensed center of Music Together, which is an early childhood music and movement program with locations in over 2,000 communities across 35 countries. 

The program is designed for children, but the target audience may actually be their caregivers, explained Karee Justice-Bondy, director of Denver’s five Music Together locations. “Parents are key,” she said. “They are really our students, not the children. We know children love music.”

So many parents today, Justice-Bondy added, are inundated with information about how best to raise their children, and they end up ignoring their own intuition about how to parent, love and play with their little ones. 

“This can help remind you,” she said of music. 

It can be empowering for families to engage with music, creating opportunities for them to bond and grow together. Many initiatives around the country, including Music Together, are trying to help parents and caregivers tap into that. 

Carnegie Hall’s is another program designed to leverage the power of music in early childhood. The Lullaby Project pairs new and expecting parents with professional artists to write personal lullabies for their babies. The project began almost 15 years ago in partnership with a New York hospital — music was identified as a tool to improve maternal mental health and well-being while strengthening bonds between parent and child — but has since reached families across the globe, in spaces such as refugee camps, opioid recovery centers and neonatal intensive care units, according to Tiffany Ortiz, director of early childhood programs at the Weill Music Institute, an education arm of Carnegie Hall. 

The Lullaby Project worked so well, Ortiz said, that families began asking, “°Âłó˛šłŮ’s next?” In response, staff at Carnegie designed and built out additional for young children and their caregivers, including , a free 10-week music class for infants and toddlers up to 18 months old. 

“People think of Carnegie Hall and these very polished performances, big stages,” Ortiz said. “It’s really these micromoments and the way music can be used every day. … We really are trying to empower families to feel really confident in their music-making, to bolster that bond.”

It’s working, she said. Parents and caregivers have shared with Ortiz that, after participating in a music program, they find themselves singing and making music throughout the day with their child — often during times of transition that can be challenging, such as brushing teeth, mealtime and bedtime. Music takes those tough moments and turns them into something fun and playful, Ortiz recalled families saying. 

“Often, music and music experiences are put on a shelf as a nice-to-have,” Ortiz noted. “It can be a really powerful tool in early development, but it can also help parents and families navigate the more stressful parts of early childhood. I’ve seen it transform so many people’s lives and create a sense of meaning and connection with a child.”

Dennie Palmer Wolf, principal researcher at WolfBrown, an arts research firm that has collaborated with the Weill Music Institute to its early childhood music programs, thinks of music as one of a few “natural resources” every family has (laughing and physical closeness are among the others, she said).

“It can potentially give parents a sense of being effective or capable,” she said. “It’s a source of strength and resilience, in a world that takes that away, grinds it down.”

Of course, this only works if parents are comfortable singing, and many are not. 

Ann C. Kay, co-founder of The Rock ‘n’ Read Project, which leverages music for early literacy, believes that shows like American Idol and The Voice have convinced adults that if they can’t sing well, they should not bother to sing at all. 

“There’s all these messages in our culture now that you’re going to be embarrassed if you open your mouth and sing,” Kay said. 

Susan Darrow, CEO of Music Together Worldwide, made a similar point. Many people now feel that unless they “sound like Lady Gaga, they should sit in the audience and listen.” 

“That might be fine for our culture, but it’s a disaster for early childhood,” Darrow said. “I would love to be able to return music-making to the amateurs. … We want to raise children who are not afraid to sing.”

That starts at home, where the only judge is a benevolent one: To a baby, the most beautiful singing voice is that of their parent or caregiver, regardless of that adult’s ability to carry a tune. 

“We’re not trying to raise the next Yo-Yo Ma,” Darrow added. “We’re trying to raise children who love and participate in music.”

Beyond the benefits to parents, Palmer Wolf expounded on the way that music helps with children’s social-emotional development. When young children are singing and dancing together, they have an awareness of music stopping and starting, of taking turns, of getting quieter and louder, of imitating sound and movement, of self-regulation. 

“It’s an opportunity for kids to learn that your face, your hands, your eyes, your whole body says something to others,” Palmer Wolf said. 

And music can communicate messages far beyond the lyrics of a song, she added. Palmer Wolf has been studying the role of music in some preschools in Boston that have a growing immigrant population, she said, and she’s found that culturally-relevant songs can signal to families that they are welcome in the community. When preschools use music in that way, it helps to build a sense of trust among families who might otherwise be wary, she added. 

“We can’t underplay the signaling power of music,” she said. 

And yet, shows that the skills needed for reading begin developing before a child is born, and that signs of reading challenges can emerge as early as 18 months old.

“People don’t understand that children don’t start kindergarten with a clean slate,” said Nadine Gaab, an associate professor at the Harvard School of Education involved in the research. Learning to read “is a long process with many milestones that unfold over many years, and it starts primarily with oral language. Years of brain development lead up to the point where formal instruction puts it all together and enables them to read. The process starts in utero.”

The human brain evolved specifically for spoken language, said Perri Klass, professor of journalism and pediatrics at New York University and the national medical director of the nonprofit . Every society across the world uses spoken language, but the transition from spoken to written language is a giant leap for the brain.  

That jump, Klass said, requires the brain to recruit structures and networks throughout its many layers and folds just to recognize a letter on a page, involving the vision and memory portions of the brain. The brain then must remember the sound the letter represents and connect that letter with others to make sounds that associate with the picture on a page. Finally, at lightning speed, the brain recognizes that those letters work together to say, “Cat.”  

“Learning to read is a challenge for all children,” she said. “And for some children it’s really a struggle. It’s not that you develop spoken language and then, boom, you get to school and develop written language. Spoken and written language have been developing together directly from birth, and all the exposure to language from the environment — what they hear from their parents, whether they’re read to, talked to, whether someone sings to them or holds them — are there. So, it’s the brain the child takes to school that helps them succeed at this impressive task of learning to read.”

Klass points to the new Harvard research to underscore how early that “brain the child takes to school” begins developing. For years, a prevailing attitude has been that a child starts learning to read in pre-K or kindergarten. A longitudinal study by Gaab and her colleagues using MRI scans and an array of other assessments confirmed that the bases for reading skills begin to develop in the child’s brain by birth and continue building between infancy and preschool. 

“We wanted to see how early the developmental trajectories of children who later develop good versus poor reading skills diverge, because that can give us a really important clue for when we should intervene, as well as what some of the risks and protective factors are,” Gaab said, 

A key finding of the study is that the developmental trajectories of children with and without reading disabilities start to diverge around 18 months, rather than at 5 or 6 years old as previously assumed.  

And yet, Gaab said, a wide gap currently stands between the time children are identified as having a reading impairment and the start of intensive intervention. This is particularly problematic for children diagnosed with dyslexia, she said, adding that researchers call this the The majority of school districts in the U.S. employ a “wait-to-fail” approach, meaning that many children are only flagged by the school system after they have failed to learn to read over a prolonged period of time — often years — even though there’s evidence that reading intervention is most effective earlier. The experience of failure can erode self-esteem, she said, and lead to the higher rates of anxiety and depression that are found in struggling readers.

The Study

The study, “Longitudinal Trajectories of Brain Development from Infancy to School Age and Their Relationship with Literacy Development,” is the first to track brain development from infancy to childhood focused literacy skills — a window into later academic attainment.     

Over a decade, Gaab and co-authors Ted Turesky, Elizabeth Escalante and Megan Loh conducted MRI brain scans of 130 study participants starting at 3 months old. Half of the children had a risk of dyslexia, with either an older sibling or one or both parents diagnosed with dyslexia, which can increase a child’s risk of reading challenges. For the first year of the study, the babies peacefully slept through the scan, tucked into the MRI machine wearing noise protection (“We got really good at putting other people’s babies to sleep,” Gaab said). 

At 18 months old, the babies came back for another scan, though “peacefully sleeping” was becoming a fond memory. By the time the babies were toddlers, the researchers took a break, for reasons any parent of unruly toddlers can understand. The children returned when they were a more cooperative 4 years old and every year after until age 10. 

The study also assessed such factors as cognitive abilities, literacy environment and home language. Funded by the NIH, the researchers aimed to continue for another five years and follow the participants into high school. Though the grant application had received a fundable score at NIH, future funding is uncertain due to the Trump administration’s termination of .

Building the Brain’s Architecture

Babies are born with the raw material they need to hear, see, move and remember. The nerve fibers, or axons, that connect these disparate brain regions don’t grow automatically. They are cultivated by babies’ environments. MRIs of the participants as infants showed predictably smaller brains that appear more solid or smooth in the images. By the time the children were 5, the scans showed a robust network of branching pathways of these nerve fibers, said coauthor Turesky.  

“The infant brain is very different compared to all other stages of life,” he said. “But if you look at the scan of a child at 5 years and then at 10 years, you can see there’s hardly any change in [those pathways]. Those early years are a time of very rapid growth.”

Though the human brain remains plastic and mutable for a lifetime, Turesky said, the scans underscore that earliest years are the busiest for building brain architecture — a fact that has important policy implications for early intervention and improved literacy curricula in preschools. 

Giving Them the ‘Good Stuff’

Some brains are better equipped to build the neural scaffolding that ultimately leads to reading, Gaab said, and some brains are less optimized, which means those children might struggle to read. It doesn’t mean their brains are faulty, or that there is something seriously wrong with them. 

“They’re built differently, and they’re optimized for other things, because every brain is different,” she said. “But it does point to the need for good early pre-reading instruction and the games and good oral language input, and home and school environment interactions that we know build these connections. Some brains just need more of the good stuff.”  

“Call it preventative education, just like preventative medicine,” she said. “Help these kids build these connections before they struggle and prevent them ever seeing a special educator or ever getting a dyslexia diagnosis.” A large number of studies now show that early intervention and prevention are leading to better outcomes for children at risk of dyslexia, Gaab said, and the research has led to aimed at early identification and intervention. 

That includes teaching the specific skills that can close the gap between proficient and struggling readers. Those skills include phonological awareness, letter-sound knowledge, rapid automatized naming, vocabulary and oral language comprehension. This teaching takes place naturally when caregivers read aloud to their children. Reach Out and Read, the nonprofit Klass leads, has a network of clinicians who work directly with pediatric care providers to help them integrate read-aloud experiences into their interactions with parents and provides developmentally appropriate books for caregivers to take home. 

“Our tremendous advantage in pediatric primary care is that the clinicians see the children over and over in these early years,” Klass said. “We see them for a newborn visit and a one-month, a two-month visit … The schedule is sort of engraved on all our hearts, so we get to talk with the parents about reading and early literacy repeatedly during those early years of life. 

“We know that the developing brain is shaped most of all by the interactions with the adults taking care of that child, Klass said. “The wonderful thing about this study is that it literally looks at the building of the brain and says very clearly that it’s not just that the brain is being built, but the specific structures that will allow the child to read.” 

If doctors can identify young children who are going to struggle more with learning to read as they get older, they can target those families with books and other support early on, Klass added.

“We’re hoping with…the books the caregivers are taking home, the child is learning a motivational lesson: ‘I like books. If I carry a book and give it to my parent, they might sit down and talk to me in that voice,’” Klass said. 

Klass said no one needs to tell parents to “teach” this idea to their children. The children will sort it out if they grow up around books and reading. A baby doesn’t want or need an authority on literacy to walk through the door and teach them how to read, Klass said. A baby wants their parent’s voice, presence and back-and-forth interactions. 

“Your baby wants to be on your lap hearing you read. Your baby will love books because your baby loves you.”

As never before, scientists have access to experimental methods and machines that enable them to understand the neural mechanisms occurring as babies become children and learn to navigate their environment. With every scientific discovery, wonder deepens. The following stories offer a glimpse into some of the extraordinary research at the heart of these discoveries.  

When you see a baby gazing on the world, you might imagine a little sponge passively soaking up information, but what’s actually going on is sophisticated computational wizardry that outpaces any known machine. Millisecond by millisecond, the baby is sorting multiple data feeds and running statistics to analyze the environment. “No computer, no matter how sophisticated, can do what a baby can do in listening to language input and deriving the words, grammar and the sound contrasts that create language,” says language expert Patricia Kuhl, co-director of the Institute for Brain and Learning Sciences at the University of Washington. 

After babies grasp the basics of “mama,” “dada” and â€baba,” and understand that they can summon important people and items with a word or two, they soon move on to two key words in human development: â€°Âłó˛šłŮ’s that?” Babies occupy a world of wonder, and their senses are bombarded with new information at every turn. From their first moments, human infants are driven by the desire to find out. Their investigations are fueled by the same mechanisms that scientists use to develop theories. Babies are exploring their world in ways that are exquisitely intelligent, sensitive and scientific.

Adults are encouraged to get sufficient exercise to support their brain health. As it turns out, cardiovascular health appears to equate to better cognitive function for children as well, with benefits observable as early as 4 years old. Scientists found that preschool children with higher cardiorespiratory fitness scored higher on tasks related to general intellectual ability as well as in their use of expressive language. They performed better on computerized tasks requiring attention and multitasking and showed the potential for faster processing speeds and greater resource allocation in their brains as they performed the tasks.

Fascinating research tells us that the baby isn’t the only one growing and changing when an infant is born. The intense caregiving required for newborns causes observable changes in the brain of the caregiver: They develop “parenting brain.” Those changes aren’t limited to the biological parents, they occur in the brains of everyone intimately involved in caring for the baby. It’s not just that some people are hardwired to be a parent, people become parents by how — and the degree to which — they respond to the child they’re caring for: The act of caregiving, not simply the act of giving birth, calibrates the brain.

Babies are born with brain connections for functions such as hearing, sight and movement. The white-matter pathways associated with language are also present at birth but continue to develop over the years. Scientists have found that these neural connections don’t simply grow, they are cultivated by their environments, and research shows that early interactive language experiences uniquely contribute to the brain development associated with long-term language and cognitive ability. The more back and forth between babies and parents, the greater the growth of the brain in areas critical to the child’s ability to learn language and build vocabulary — effects that carry through early childhood and predict cognitive and linguistic ability into adolescence.

Pediatric surgeon Dr. Dana Suskind, who specializes in cochlear implants and has authored books on brain development and early childhood development, founded the research initiative that would evolve into the  in 2010 after observing the degree to which differences in her patients’ early language exposure led to inequalities in their ability to learn and thrive. These disparities often fell along socio-economic lines. Parents across the board want to help their children get the best possible start in life, Suskind knew, but she saw that they often lack basic knowledge about how to foster early learning. Envisioning a population-level shift in parents’ and caregivers’ knowledge and behavior, Suskind and her team created an asset-based, parent-centered curriculum — Tune In, Talk More, Take Turns — also known as the . 

The program has been in existence long enough now for researchers to study its long-term effectiveness. The conclusion? It works, and it keeps on working. 

When Parents Know More, They Do More

shows that frequent conversational exchanges with adult caregivers promotes children’s language and vocabulary skills, cognitive performance, brain function and even the . A  by researchers with the LENA Foundation (Language ENvironment Analysis), for example, confirmed that the number of two-way conversations with adults that babies experience in their first three years is related to their verbal abilities and IQ in . 

While all families communicate with their children, studies have shown that children in low-income families generally hear fewer words, shorter sentences and phrases, and are less likely to have books in their homes, setting up disparities that lead to later deficits in academic and social achievement. There’s a lack of consensus around this “word gap” though. Some researchers have  the validity of these findings, while  call for more exploration of them, but encourage the idea of supporting families with specialized programs to help their children develop early language skills — which is what Suskind and her team are doing.

The TMW Center has been focused on developing resources and programs to help parents and caregivers understand more about brain development — and the 3Ts have been core. There’s a 3T curriculum for families, a 3T curriculum centered on home visiting, and an online professional development course for educators who want to engage with families about the science of brain development, which are all free to use. 

These resources provide parents and adult caregivers evidence-based information about how their kids’ brains are developing, and the vital role caregivers play in their child’s cognitive and language development. 

The 3Ts Home Visiting (3Ts-HV) curriculum, for example, is a six-month program for caregivers of 13- to 16-month-old toddlers from low-income families that coaches parents in their homes through 12 tutoring modules. One module discusses executive function and presents strategies for using talk to regulate children’s behavior, particularly during tantrums — and offers guidance to help parents recognize their own emotions and tone of voice. Another addresses the difference between issuing directives versus using explanations to foster young children’s ability to think things through. (Think: “Don’t throw the football in the house because you might break something,” rather than “Don’t throw the #$%$# football in the house” — though the latter is a communication style to which any parent can relate.) Other modules discuss how caregivers can use encouragement, storytelling, numbers and patterns when engaging with babies and toddlers.

Through relatable videos (featuring beyond-adorable infants), parents learn that their young children’s brains are like sponges, soaking up words and ideas, then using them to make billions of neural connections. One lesson describes their verbal interactions like a piggy bank, with every word like a penny in their account. “The more you invest now, the richer they’ll be later.” Parents are encouraged to be in the moment with their child and to talk about what they’re focused on and to look for opportunities to talk and interact. The subtext: language learning isn’t something that exists in isolation, but rather it’s a part of daily life. Everything a child sees and hears shapes their experience, and caregivers are the facilitators who help make that happen.

Evaluating the 3Ts Curriculum

A 2018 study published in the evaluated the 3Ts-HV curriculum and found that caregivers who participated in the twice-monthly visits were significantly more knowledgeable about early childhood development and engaged more with their children in the conversational turn-taking that builds language. These caregivers praised and encouraged their children more, explained more, asked more open-ended questions, and used less critical language and physical control in their interactions with their children.

The initial study showed the effectiveness of the 3Ts-HV intervention in fostering changes in parents’ interactions with their children within six months of their participation. A recent  published in October in the Journal of Academic Pediatrics shows that the program not only improves children’s language learning in their toddler years, but offers sustained benefits to their vocabulary and literacy skills when they reach kindergarten and beyond.

According to Christy Leung, the TMW Center’s director of research who co-authored the most recent study with Suskind, this simple intervention with a group of families increased parental knowledge when the child was 26 months old, contributed to more frequent parent-child conversational turns at 38 months, and promoted children’s language skills at 50 months. The study provides empirical evidence that increasing parents’ knowledge and enriching parent-child linguistic interactions during their toddler years promotes language development at preschool age. Mothers who received the intervention continued to provide their young children with enriched language input without showing significant declines even after the intervention’s “honeymoon phase” ended, Leung says.

When designing the curriculum, Leung notes, “We wanted to emphasize that the parent is the best person to educate their small children. They struggled to realize that they are their child’s first teacher, and they don’t have to wait until their child goes to school [for them] to start learning.” 

One of the hardest things, Leung says, is to change parents’ minds about the idea that educational TV is better than they are at teaching their children, especially at an early age. They think they don’t have a good enough vocabulary or education to do so. 

Leung adds: “But we emphasized that they are exactly the best resource for their children, and they know their child best. Once they saw that their child learns best from a real person — and that they’re learning all the time, even if they may not be verbal yet — that was a big realization for them.”

Simply put: What parents know matters, and it shows up in their children’s learning readiness. 

Prevent, Don’t Remediate

Brain development research has shown that the first years of life are when the brain is growing and developing most rapidly and that the . Early deficits in language learning often accumulate and can affect the entire trajectory of a child’s life. We know this. But that knowledge doesn’t jibe with what the U.S. , to help develop those brains. 

Prevention, rather than remediation, is the battle cry for Suskind and her team at the TMW Center, who view parents as an untapped resource in this equation. Their studies point to a doable and easily replicated way of using the  to support families in building the healthy foundations for lifelong learning. (The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention defines the public health approach as one rooted in the scientific method that strives to provide the maximum benefit for the largest number of people.)

According to the TMW Center, 3Ts programs are on course to reach 15,000 families across the U.S. by the end of 2024. Communities and individuals can sign up on the  and receive free resources to implement the curriculum in their schools, museums, libraries, community centers and other organizations. 

“We’ve gotten such positive feedback from the parents, who say having this experience is unique and valuable,” Leung says. “We heard from our curriculum team that one of the moms receiving the intervention saw another mom in the laundromat and said, ‘This is something you really should sign up for. It changed my life.’”

“That touches us so much it brings us to tears,” she says. “It also gives us another idea for how we can spread the word.”

These moments of connection are sweet, emotional encounters, but researchers know they are much more. Research scientists at the University of Washington’s (I-LABS) recognize this “social ensemble” as the nascent that lay down the pathway to language — the gateway to connection, education and the world of ideas. Given that these distinctive interactions appear to be universal and uniquely human, I-LABS researchers wondered what their developmental purpose could be. What they found was not only that the babies’ brains “lit up” during these interactions, but that the degree to which individual babies responded to social interactions predicted the child’s language growth beyond 2-½ years of age.

“What we were trying to see is whether that social ensemble — the parentese, the warm smiles, the touches, and the back and forth that says you’re paying attention — has a (developmental) goal in addition to the emotion that’s connecting these two people,” says Dr. Patricia Kuhl, I-LABS’ co-director, and holder of the Bezos Family Foundation Endowed Chair in Early Childhood Learning, who led a groundbreaking longitudinal study linking infants’ individual brain responses to social interactions and their future language development.

Using a magnetoencephalography () brain-imaging device — a safe, silent, noninvasive technique I-LABS has tailored for studying infants — the researchers monitored the brains of a group of 5-month-old infants during social and nonsocial interactions with an adult. The researchers then followed up with the children at 18, 21, 24, 27 and 30 months. Their findings were published in the April issue of and represent the first such study to track the relationship between infants’ social responses and their language acquisition.

Arriving Ready for Language

Even before they produce their first words, infants are learning phonetic sound patterns. They come into the world able to pick out the human sounds that make up words in any language. Previous independent studies have shown that there is a “sensitive period” for phonetic learning between 6 months and one year when these initial universal phonetic capacities narrow down and become specific to their native languages.

“Testing the babies at 5 months was important because we were trying to establish that this social connection that lights up the baby’s brain and gets them ready to learn comes first and sets them up for when this sensitive period begins,” says Kuhl, the study’s lead author. “The social interaction is of cognitive importance and gets the baby ready for what’s coming around six months. The exaggerated face and silly-sounding speech (the ‘ensemble’) come intuitively and are the original ‘hook’ that pulls them and primes them for the learning to come.”

For the study, Kuhl says, researchers set the infants up in the MEG device and an adult female researcher engaged with the baby, speaking in parentese and reacting warmly back and forth using the tried-and-true adult-baby call and response. For the experiment’s nonsocial control, the researcher would then turn and speak to another adult seated just out of the infant’s view. The intention was to capture typical social interactions that babies experience regularly in their home environments.

The researchers’ findings showed that at 5 months, face-to-face social verbal interaction between an infant and an adult who’s sensitive to the baby’s cues significantly increases the child’s brain activity in regions involved with attention, compared with a nonsocial control. Even more exciting to those interested in babies’ language learning, the scientists found that babies’ individual levels of brain activity during the social interactions showed a strong positive association with their subsequent language skills.

“Not all children’s brains lit up to the same degree to the social ensemble,” Kuhl says. “Their social attention is different. The ones with more social attention learned language faster.”

The Joy of Face-to-Face

Kuhl says the researchers knew from previous studies that social interaction — rather than, say, watching a video or app — is essential for language learning. The current study shows that parents’ natural use of parentese, coupled with smiles, touch and their warm volley and return captures infants’ attention at an early age and makes them ready to latch onto language when that sensitive window opens around 6 months.

The researchers didn’t use the children’s parents in this study because they were concerned their history of interaction might color the babies’ responses, nor did they have the researcher turn from the baby to use a smartphone or device because they have seen in other research how upsetting that is to the babies. The researcher interacting with the babies had not met them before the experiment began but started the kind of natural interaction with them that might occur in the grocery store or when other adults drop over for a visit. She cooed back and forth with the baby, then, on cue, looked away to interact with another researcher “offstage” for a moment. On another cue, she turned back to the baby and began the social interaction again.

The babies’ little brains loved all that attention and weren’t happy (as observed by MEG’s neural light show) when they were being ignored. Some babies’ brains really sparked at the social interaction and those were the babies who, by 2-½ years, showed the greater vocabularies and more sophisticated use of language.

This doesn’t mean that babies have to be attended to at all times or they’re going to lose out on language skills, Kuhl is clear to state. No helicopter parenting here!

“That would be the wrong message to take from this research,” she says. “Part of these interactions’ special nature is that they only come occasionally. The interaction is there, then it goes away, and next time it comes, it’s like Christmas — something to be anticipated and excited about. So, parents shouldn’t stress and think, ‘Oh my gosh, here’s one more thing I have to think to do.’ Its magic is that it’s unexpected and babies are overjoyed by that.”

More Questions, More Studies

As good studies do, this one has prompted almost as many questions as it’s answered. For one thing, researchers want to know about what’s happening with the brains of babies whose mothers are dealing with clinical depression.

“In mothers who have clinical depression, you don’t see the smiles, the parentese and the warm interactions,” Kuhl says. “There are all kinds of issues with these children, one of which is a depressed affect and a slow growth of language.”

The current study also points to a greater understanding of autism and draws attention to other research, such as that of Dr. Karen Pierce of t he University of California San Diego, et al, showing that babies’ reduced attention to parentese can both contribute to downstream language and social challenges, and help diagnose toddlers with autism spectrum disorder.

“When (Pierce) tests young children who are at risk for autism (because they have a sibling with autism) with a social versus nonsocial stimulus — such as people interacting versus cars or just sound — the children with autism tend not to like social, people-oriented stuff,” Kuhl says. “And the more they tend not to, the more severe their clinical symptoms for autism are.”

Another fascinating study in the I-LABS pipeline is the differences between mothers and fathers in their deployment of parentese. Preliminary research indicates that men are talking to their babies only 25 percent of the time, compared with mothers. They do use the social ensemble to interact with babies, but ongoing research is looking at whether fathers stop using parentese earlier in the child’s development, and if they do, why that may be the case.

°Âłó˛šłŮ’s that about? We’ll have to stay tuned.

Meanwhile, we can go ahead and indulge our impulse to engage in that silly social way with babies and know that we aren’t just forming emotional connections; we’re helping open their pathway to life with other humans.

“I suppose if you were on an island by yourself and had all the survival skills you needed to discover food, water and shelter, you might be able to survive as an isolate,” Kuhl says. “But everything we know about human beings is that we inherently crave connection with each other. And language is the gateway to any communicative connection we have. It’s our social-emotional glue.”

Given that the U.S. is now drenched with advice on how to optimize our children’s learning, language and lives, parents often feel heavy pressure to see that their kids — even at a very early age — are keeping up or even “excelling” (whatever that means for an infant). This can lead to well-intentioned but ultimately unhelpful attempts to steer the young child’s learning.

Observing this overly controlling behavior, even with babies as young as six months, lead researcher Dr. Lucy King, a psychologist specializing in developmental science, to set up a study to observe what factors might influence them to engage in intrusive behavior with their little ones. The study, “,” published in the journal Developmental Psychology, found that caregivers’ goals influence their interactions with their infants and have a direct effect on intrusive, controlling behavior.

“Over the course of doing lots of observations of parents interacting with their babies in our labs, my colleagues and I observed that some parents engage in overly controlling, intrusive behavior, even with babies as young as 6 months,” King says. “We wondered whether that was partly due to a sense of pressure or the need to have their babies perform in a certain way.”

She added, “There’s a lot of rhetoric and advice in our society about how to help your kids develop optimally and a lot of pressure for achievement. We were interested in whether we could induce that (intrusive) behavior in the lab.”

For the experiment, 66 mothers and their 6-month-old infants participated in a 10-minute “free play” interaction, observed in two-minute segments for parental intrusiveness. Before the final segment, mothers were randomly assigned to receive instructions to focus on teaching something to their infants or learning something from them. A control group received no instruction.

Caregiving behaviors that are considered overly controlling are based on the caregiver’s agenda rather than the child’s interests and needs. This can look like taking over the focus of the play or task, interrupting the child’s exploration, or overstimulating the baby. For example, a parent might try to get the baby to understand that the little cup goes inside the big cup and be determined to instill that lesson when the baby is more interested in the cup’s mouthfeel and how it sounds when whacked on the floor.

The researchers found that manipulating the parents’ explicit goals by instructing them to teach their baby significantly increased the degree to which they exhibited intrusive behaviors. Mothers’ intrusiveness decreased when they were instructed to focus on learning something from their infants. Mothers in the control group who received no instructions had no significant change in their degree of intrusiveness.

“It can be tempting as an adult to interfere and show the child the right way to do something,” King says. “That’s how we’ve developed as adults, focusing on getting the right information and doing things correctly. But babies are in a completely different stage of life where they’re just exploring.”

The irony of this push to have the baby master the material is that it can have the opposite effect and shut down the child’s natural drive to learn and understand. Infants are full of wonder — they wonder about everything in this world that is so new to them. Their minds are eager, and their brains are elastic. In fact, the researchers write, there is evidence that young children outperform older children and adults on tasks that require cognitive flexibility. Interesting or surprising events cue their brains: There’s something new to learn here. They thrive on exploration, and when an adult interrupts that process to try and impose a lesson on them, “No, no. You need to push the button, not lick it,” it’s not so fun anymore.

“In my experience of watching a lot of these interactions very carefully — we’ve videotaped hundreds of them — if the parent’s controlling behavior is intense, the child can end up checking out,” King says. “Or they get distressed and upset because it overwhelms them.”

The researchers’ findings extend far beyond the laboratory. As U.S. society experiences greater income inequality, competition increases to make certain one’s children have the competitive edge to be a success story. Our society emphasizes formal education as a primary way of determining success and even economic survival, making it unsurprising that we expect our caregivers to practice in a manner thought to promote a child’s early learning, e.g., teaching colors, numbers and social behavior expected in a school setting.

“Pressure on children to perform has continuously increased,” King says, “and we expect children to be learning really quickly at a younger age and reach a desired outcome. It’s stressful for everybody and parents worry that if they don’t push their kids to learn, they’re failing their children somehow.”

Though it wasn’t the purpose of King’s study, it might relieve those stressed parents to know that their child is learning every minute of the day, and relaxing and following their lead is not only more fun, it’s also better for the baby’s development.

Previous studies have shown that infants and toddlers who experience more intrusive caregiving have been found to have smaller vocabularies, more difficulty solving math problems, and less knowledge of colors, letters and numbers when they reach preschool than children who have been allowed to take the lead in their explorations. Other research has found that families with high socioeconomic status may be especially focused on achievement, which can lead to more intrusive interactions and unintended negative consequences.

Earlier studies focusing on the preschool age have shown that mothers engaged in more controlling interactions with their infants when they were told their child would be tested. Caregivers who were told their child’s memory would be tested engaged in more adult-centered conversations than caregivers who were told their children would be asked later about their perspective. King’s study is the first to investigate how directing parents’ goals regarding infant learning influences intrusive caregiving behavior.

Dr. Alison Gopnik argues in her 2020 study “,” published in The Royal Society’s Biological Sciences journal, that the “extended curious childhood” of primates, in general, and humans, in particular, provides a protected time to extract information from the environment and to explore “unlikely hypotheses.”

“Even very young human children learn by formulating and testing structured causal hypotheses about the world,” Gopnik writes, “updating them in the light of new evidence.” In other words, the baby may look like he’s just gnawing the triangle from his shape sorter toy, but in reality, he’s exploring its physical dimensions, textures and, yes, maybe even its flavor. If you leave him be or ask him questions, you can bet he’ll develop a theory about it — Hmm. Not food — after he’s tested his unlikely hypotheses.

An essential pathway to this learning-from-baby approach is our old friend , that back-and-forth that transpires between adults and even tiny infants that has been shown to grow the “white matter” of a child’s brain.

“It may be obvious to us as adults that this is how you play with this toy with buttons,” King says. “The baby isn’t at all aware of that purpose. It’s OK for the adult to reach out and press the button and show the baby, but then take a moment to see what the baby does next with the toy rather than continue to instruct them to push the button.

“Maybe they just want to touch in different ways or pick up the toy and look at it. You can build off whatever the baby does and have fun with that back and forth.”

Sometimes, following the baby’s lead means noticing that he’s had it with these buttons and wants to go taste the triangle again. It’s all about paying attention to their cues.

Of course, King notes, there are times when instruction is essential. For safety’s sake, children can’t always lead. And sometimes, they just need to get their socks on so you can get them to child care.

“The reality is that it’s just not possible to do this all the time,” King says with a laugh. The good news is that it isn’t the end of the world if a caregiver sometimes takes control of the conversation.

“There are endless opportunities to follow their lead,” she says.

Myelin is the fatty insulation that protects axons, the transmission lines of the nervous system that shoot information-bearing electrical impulses to various parts of the body (which is a much-abbreviated explanation of a fantastically complex process). Myelin helps these electrical impulses to travel efficiently along the axon. This is critical for effectively transmitting information throughout the brain with exquisitely precise timing.

Babies are born with brains full of axons located right where they need to be for various functions, such as hearing, seeing and movement. White-matter pathways associated with language are also present at birth, but their myelin continues to develop for many years after birth. By examining myelin development, scientists have discovered that these neural connections don’t simply grow, they are cultivated by their environments.

Parental input has been considered a key environmental factor for infants’ language development, as shown by a wealth of behavioral research. But few studies have looked at how parents’ verbal interactions with babies affect the physical development of their brains. Given the critical growth in children’s language-related activities in their first two years of life, a better understanding of what’s going on in their brains at this time is badly needed.

Thanks to a long-term intervention study of infant language-learning, researchers at the University of Washington’s  (I-LABS) have a trove of -device home recordings of child vocalizations and parent-child verbal interactions taken at regular intervals throughout babies’ first 24 months.

For their recent study on the effect of language experience on white-matter development, researchers invited all the families back to the lab for an MRI session when the children were around 2 years old. The MRIs imaged the white matter in the toddlers’ dorsal language system, a brain network that is tied to expressive language development and long-term language ability. They found that the frequency of parents’ verbal interactions with their infants, specifically conversational turns, uniquely predicted myelin density in this system.

“Conversational turns” are the back and forth between adult and child that can occur even before the child has actual words, a call and response that speaks “connection” in every utterance. In their study described in a published March 1 in The Journal of Neuroscience, researchers found that parent-infant conversational turns link to white-matter growth (myelination) at age 2 and suggest that early interactive language experiences uniquely contribute to brain development associated with long-term verbal and cognitive ability. The more back and forth between babies and parents, the greater the growth of the brain in areas critical to language ability and sensory-motor integration that affect the child’s ability to learn language and build vocabulary. These effects carry through early childhood and predict cognitive and linguistic ability into adolescence.

In other words, conversational turns are a very big deal, and MRIs show it.

Not Words Alone

I-LABS researcher Dr. Elizabeth Huber, the paper’s first author, says the studies establish that the growth in white matter isn’t related simply to the amount of language a child is exposed to — the number of words that wash over a child — but the amount of high-quality verbal interaction they have with the adults in their lives. The effects of these interactions were apparent as early as six months, when the child is not yet speaking but vocalizes (“babbling”) and the parent vocalizes back.

“Conversational experience as early as 6 months is predicting what the brain looks like at age 2 years,” Huber says. “It was striking to me how early and potentially long-lasting these effects are.”

It is impossible to overestimate the importance of those early years. White-matter pathways develop at their most dramatic rate during these years, though they continue to develop through adolescence. Language exposure during this window has been linked not only to vocabulary building but to multiple aspects of children’s cognitive development. Being exposed to conversational contingency — meaning interactions that acknowledge each other’s presence and take note of what’s happening in their shared physical environment (Do you see that kitty? How does a kitty go?) — encourages shared and sustained attention. If the adult is focusing on something and draws the child’s attention to it, the child is then able to focus on that thing distinct from everything else in the environment. Maybe not for long, but conversational contingency builds the muscle.

Conversational turns have been shown to stimulate more and higher-quality vocalizations from infants, including making sounds that are more consistent with the speech sounds and patterns of the adults around them (phonology). If you keep sharing conversational turns with your child in your Deep South accent, it’s a fair bet that their baby talk will have a drawl.

Through this conversational give and take, babies learn to listen and adjust their vocalizations in response to another person, a critical ability in all human interactions.

So Much More to Learn

Huber stresses that this research really has just begun. The current study was limited to native English speakers and families without known risk factors such as lower social economic status or a family history of dyslexia. The sample size was relatively small, and future work will look at larger and more diverse samples, including a larger control group of families that didn’t take part in an enriched language intervention.

“Right now, we’re really excited about the idea of adding brain scans with 6-month-old, or even younger, infants,” Huber says. “Can we already see these effects (on white matter) at a much younger age? Or is there something special about what’s happening in the brain around 2 years, as toddlers are starting to really use language to communicate in a more sophisticated way? Are there incremental changes in the white matter that connect to what an infant is currently experiencing, or do environmental effects show up at certain points in development more strongly than others? What we see right now is that conversational turns in infancy predict white-matter density in the 2-year-old, but that raises a lot of follow-up questions.”

Another area that’s ripe for research, Huber says, is looking at the effects of environmental factors such as poverty or trauma, which can interrupt the brain’s development, and potential ways to mitigate that interruption. The human brain is incredibly flexible, she says, and if there is some kind of a deficiency, researchers wonder if there are ways that deficiency can be mitigated.

It’s important to avoid thinking that all is lost if a child isn’t exposed to rich conversational interactions in their earliest years, Huber says. People working two jobs and giving their all to keep a roof over their heads and food on the table might not have as much time as they’d like to spend with their children.

“The rich early experience seems to be really important,” she says. “There are moments in development where we’re particularly sensitive to certain aspects of our environments, and where it’s easier to learn certain skills. So, for example, it’s harder to master a second language if you didn’t hear it or have some exposure as a very young child. I studied Spanish for years in college, but I speak it with a heavy Kansas accent, and I have to stop and search for words.

“At the same time, it isn’t as simple as saying, ‘If you have this amount or type of interaction at this exact age, you will excel in learning language, and otherwise you won’t.’ Children learn in different ways, and there is still lots of flexibility to learn and adapt, even later in life.

“Ultimately though,” Huber adds, “it’s exciting to me to think that we are starting to understand more about what matters for different aspects language development. If we can help parents and children so that a given child is coming into school on strong footing, that can make a difference for a child’s whole life going forward.”

It was the year that Dr. Anthony Fauci, America’s most prominent public health authority, declared that the country was “,” as COVID case rates plummeted from their Omicron highs. By the fall, President Biden was with that sentiment, noting that most people had laid down their masks and returned to something like normal. 

And around the possibility of winter surges in American schools, the most visible hallmarks of the COVID era have at last receded. The lurching progression from in-person to virtual classes is over, following an explosion of school exposures last winter. Mask mandates, social distancing, and endless disinfectant wipes are also predominantly a thing of the past, with virtually all children approved to receive vaccines. 

But in terms of the pandemic’s impact on education, it’s still only the end of the beginning. With each month, new findings emerge revealing more about what remote instruction did to learning and how families reacted. The potentially lifelong shadow the virus has cast over K-12 students — from how babies develop speech to what today’s adolescents will earn decades from now — is largely mysterious. 

Previous editions of this list have covered the wider world of education policy and research: issues like school financing, choice, accountability, and testing. This year, ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ is focusing exclusively on the lessons of the COVID era — one that is now passing from the scene — and the questions that remain in its wake.

Here, laid out in charts, maps, and tables, are 14 discoveries that changed how we think about schools in 2022.

The scope of learning loss

By the end of last year, a steady trickle of research had already begun to reveal the harm wrought by prolonged school closures and the transition to virtual instruction. But this fall brought the most definitive evidence yet of the scale of learning lost over more than two years of COVID-disrupted schooling: fresh testing data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, sometimes called the Nation’s Report Card, pointing to severe declines in core subjects. 

The unprecedented drop in math scores, which fell by an average of eight points for eighth graders and five points for fourth graders, was especially disturbing. But reversals in literacy were also notable, with sizable increases in the number of students testing below even the “basic” level of reading proficiency. °Âłó˛šłŮ’s more, the results affirmed dismal findings from NAEP’s “Long-Term Trends” test — an earlier version of the exam that has been administered since the early 1970s — showing that the pandemic set back nine-year-olds’ performance in math and reading to levels last seen two decades ago. 

“We’re seeing a lot of that very long-term progress completely erased over the course of a couple of years,” said Dan Goldhaber, a University of Washington professor, of the long-term results.

As many experts warned, additional research has also made clear that the academic damage of COVID was not shared equally. NWEA, the nonprofit testing group whose MAP exam has proven an invaluable assessment tool throughout the pandemic, released a study in November indicating that already-wide achievement gaps in elementary classrooms have grown between 5 and 10 percent in the last few years. Those disparities grew, NWEA analysts specified, because of slumping achievement among struggling students. 

College entrance exams contributed yet another dispiriting perspective, with average scores on the ACT slipping below 20 for the first time since the presidency of George H.W. Bush. Only about one in twelve test-takers from low-income families met standards of college readiness across all of the test’s four subjects.

In 2022, researchers, educators, and the public discovered the full extent of what COVID did to K-12 learning. 2023 will provide a test of how quickly that learning can be restored — and how seriously we are approaching the problem.

The geography of remote learning

Multiple studies have identified a strong association between academic backsliding and time spent in remote learning. And while different states and districts switched back to in-person instruction at different speeds, a disturbing commonality emerged: The least-advantaged kids were usually the slowest to return to the classroom.

co-authored by experts at NWEA, the CALDER Center at the American Institutes for Research, and Harvard’s Center for Education Policy Research used data from over 2 million students to show that — whether in states that reopened schools relatively quickly, like Florida, or those that stayed remote much longer, like Virginia — schools serving the highest proportions of low-income students spent the most weeks remote during the 2020–21 academic year. Notably, however, the socioeconomic gaps in exposure to virtual teaching were much larger among the group of predominantly blue states that tended to reopen more hesitantly. In those states, high-poverty schools spent more than two additional months in Zoom classrooms than low-poverty schools. 

Harvard economist and study co-author Thomas Kane observed that the greater prevalence of remote learning among poor students, who are already less likely to succeed academically than their better-off peers, could be an additional driver of achievement gaps for years to come. In an interview with ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ, Kane said that the academic recovery interventions planned by school districts were “nowhere near enough” to compensate for COVID’s toll.

“Based on what I’m seeing, most districts are going to find that students are still lagging far behind when they take their state tests in May 2023,” Kane said.

But was the public convinced by the reams of detailed and well-intentioned research on the results of online learning? Public polling suggests that the answer is ambiguous. At least — albeit one conducted before much of the research on learning loss was released — indicated that Americans prioritized curbing the pandemic’s spread over keeping schools open.

Poorer districts lost the most

Few doubt that some amount of learning loss is linked to the hasty and unplanned adoption of remote instruction. How much is still ambiguous, however. released in October — devised by Harvard’s Kane and the eminent Stanford sociologist Sean Reardon, among others — leveraged a combination of state test scores and federal NAEP results to deliver a granular, district-by-district overview of the pandemic’s academic impact.

While the researchers found that academic performance in predominantly in-person districts held up much better than mostly remote districts within the same state, they also stipulated that school closures were not “the primary factor driving achievement losses”; some states that spent much of the pandemic open as usual, such as Maine, sustained far greater score declines than those that saw widespread closures, such as California. And beyond the question of remote-versus-in-person, it is clear that districts with greater concentrations of poor students experienced the worst academic effects over the last few years.

In districts where 70 percent or more of students qualified for free or reduced-price lunch, average math performance fell by 0.66 grade levels. By contrast, in districts where fewer than 39 percent of students qualified for free lunch, only 0.45 grade levels of math achievement were lost. Above all, the ultra-local look at test scores showed a startling amount of variation in how different school districts experienced the same event; in reading, almost 15 percent of all students were enrolled in districts where achievement actually grew during the pandemic.

Enrollment fell as families fled 

The pandemic left an impact on schools far beyond its blow to student achievement. Due to a combination of public dissatisfaction, increased mobility, and economic upheaval, families withdrew from their public schools in unprecedented numbers — as many as 1.5 million during the 2020–21 school year, or about 3 percent of all public K-12 enrollment, according to a 2021 report from NCES.

Further scholarly investigation has unearthed the important role that learning modality played in that flight. According to a comprehensive report from the conservative American Enterprise Institute, the districts that spent the most time remote throughout the first pandemic school year lost at least 500,000 more students than they would have if they had stayed open during that time. And in the period that followed, fewer students returned than did to districts where campuses mostly operated in-person. 

The findings suggested that widespread loss of students was not just “pandemic-related; it was pandemic-response related,” Nat Malkus, AEI’s deputy director of education policy, told ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ’s Linda Jacobson. 

Meanwhile, enrollment trends detected this spring by the data company Burbio showed that major urban districts continued losing students through the 2021–22 school year. Only a handful of states examined by the organization during that time saw an enrollment increase of more than 1 percent compared with the previous year.

The youngest weren’t spared

While we’ve gained a better empirical understanding of how K-12 students’ lives and learning trajectories were altered by COVID, it will be years before we fully grasp the ways in which the youngest Americans were affected. But a provocative study of child development and language acquisition has already given cause for alarm.

Using LENA “talk pedometers” — a that measures the number of spoken interactions occurring in the vicinity of young children, as well as their own vocalizations — researchers at Brown discovered that babies born after July 2020 produced fewer vocalizations and demonstrated slower verbal growth than comparable children born before 2019. The younger group of babies also experienced slower growth of white matter — subcortical nerve fibers that facilitate communication between different regions of the brain — perhaps the result of hearing fewer words spoken and engaging less often with their caregivers. 

If the cognitive development of young learners was slowed by the extraordinary social isolation imposed by daycare closures and lockdowns of public spaces, it will produce unavoidable consequences for schools in the next decade.

Old before their time

Even as social and intellectual growth was apparently slowed for some infants and babies, psychologists warn that the compounded stress of the last few years may have harmfully accelerated the maturation process for older kids.

A slew of surveys highlight newly elevated levels of student stress, the product of public health worries, economic anxiety, and even domestic abuse. But a recently published offers proof that those factors actually changed the neurobiology of some adolescents. Examining MRIs of 128 matched subjects — half measured before and half after the pandemic began — a team of psychologists found that the group assessed after COVID demonstrated higher “brain age” than their chronological age and experienced faster growth in the amygdala and hippocampus, areas of the brain that regulate fear, stress, and memory.

Such sped-up aging has historically been seen in cases of household trauma and neglect, and its consequences can include decreased capacity across a range of intellectual functions. Follow-up scans are already planned to assess whether the process has been remediated.

Teachers under strain

Adults in schools have shown their own signs of exhaustion. In a survey of nearly 4,000 K-12 teachers and principals conducted by the RAND Corporation, about one-third said they intended to quit their jobs, a significantly higher proportion than it found during the chaotic pandemic months of early 2021. 

That figure almost certainly doesn’t betoken a future exodus from the profession; educators have historically been much more likely to say they intend to leave than to ultimately act on those plans. But it could mean that large numbers will stay in their jobs past the point of burnout, their effectiveness permanently dimmed. On average, the poll found that the teachers and principals were more than twice as likely to report experiencing frequent, job-related stress than other workers.

Teachers were also twice as likely as comparable adults to say they were not “coping well” with their stress. While the most commonly cited contributing factor was the task of addressing learning loss, some school employees also complained of staff shortages and the difficulty of managing their own childcare responsibilities. 

Social shuffle

It shouldn’t come as any surprise that young adults’ personal relationships, no less than their academic prospects, were fundamentally changed by months spent away from their peers. 

In some ways, those changes were positive: According to a June poll released by Pew, 45 percent of American kids between the ages of 13 and 17 said they felt closer to their parents after two years of disrupted schooling. But sizable minorities also reported feeling less close to friends, classmates, teachers, and extended family, a web of social connections that might have proven vital during a lengthy period of difficulty. 

Somewhat surprisingly for a survey administered over two years after the emergence of COVID, nearly 20 percent of the teen respondents said they had not attended classes exclusively in-person during the spring of 2022 (a time of somewhat elevated virus case rates). About two-thirds said they would prefer a return to entirely in-person schooling in the future.

Future earnings endangered

The downstream consequences of thwarted or deferred academic success are destined to include financial disadvantages; after all, today’s underserved pupils are tomorrow’s underprepared workers. But until the fall release of NAEP, it was difficult to produce a broadly shared measure of American students’ stifled progress. 

With the arrival of those scores, Harvard economist Kane — him again — and Dartmouth professor Douglas O. Staiger immediately calculated a projection of how much potential income could be lost due to diminished math learning among eighth-graders since 2020. Based on the historical correlation between math gains on NAEP and professional earnings growth, the figure they reached was astounding: $900 billion of future earnings, if the declines in learning were to remain permanent for all students in the United States.

“When there are improvements in scores, those kids coming out of school are going to have better outcomes later in life,” Staiger told ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ. “And we can infer from this recent decline that all the cohorts in school now are going to do a bit worse than we expected.” 

The paper was one of a series of analyses focusing specifically on the drop in math knowledge, which appears to have been particularly significant. But the extended disruption to literacy instruction left a substantial mark as well, particularly among students at the beginning of their reading careers. Amplify, a curriculum provider, released data this fall showing that 4 percent fewer second graders and 8 percent fewer first graders are reaching grade-level reading goals than in 2019; meanwhile, almost one-third of third graders were assessed as needing “intensive intervention.”

Those bleak findings echo the results of Curriculum Associates’ i-Ready assessment, which revealed that the percentage of elementary students reading below grade level grew between 2021 and 2022. That subgroup of students, sometimes called the “COVID cohort,” is running out of time to get back on track.

Costs of recovery

The havoc inflicted by the pandemic is now an inescapable fact for schools, families, and public authorities to deal with. But what’s it going to take to surmount the considerable educational challenges and get kids back on track?

The federal government has allocated roughly $190 billion in relief funding to states for that purpose. But , that amount won’t be sufficient to get the job done. The true cost, they say, will fall somewhere between $325 billion and $930 billion, huge sums that include not only the pedagogical resources to restore lost learning opportunities from the last several years, but also the out-of-school interventions that power so much of the academic growth that goes on inside classrooms. 

There is no indication that anywhere near that level of funding — or even any further money at all — is coming. In the meantime, school districts are only required to spend 20 percent of their federal aid on learning recovery. 

Latino students take a hit

Children of all backgrounds were bruised by the effects of shuttered schools, but among them, Latino students are notable for having recently enjoyed sustained academic momentum. As their share of the national student body has increased to nearly 30 percent, they have also seen rising achievement scores and post-secondary outcomes compared with their parents’ and grandparents’ generations.

COVID put that progress on pause, according to from the advocacy organization UnidosUS. After leaping from 71 percent to 82 percent over the last decade, the on-time high school graduation rate for Latino students fell slightly in 2021. Worse still, the rate of college enrollment for Latino freshmen shrunk by 7.8 percent between the spring of 2020 and 2021. That figure bounced back somewhat over the next academic year — along with rates of college-going for most Americans — but still fell below the pre-pandemic norm.

The particular stumbles experienced by Latino kids have explanations that both precede the pandemic and are directly linked to it, the report found. Long before 2020, Latino households were less likely to report having a computer or high-speed broadband in the home. Meanwhile, Latino students were disproportionately likely to be enrolled in low-income schools, which were themselves more likely to stay remote longer during the pandemic.

Explosion of absenteeism

Along with the surge of full-on disenrollment from schools, a shocking number of K-12 students spent the last few years missing day after day of instruction. Just how many days of absence is difficult to know precisely, however, because of ambiguities in the way attendance figures were collected during the COVID era.

An released this fall indicated that over 10 million students were chronically absent (i.e., missing over 10 percent of the school year) in 2020–21. That would be an increase of more than 25 percent relative to the pre-pandemic norm, but from Johns Hopkins University and the nonprofit group Attendance Works, it is also very likely a serious underestimate. Because of challenges in knowing which students “attended” all of their virtual lessons (versus simply logging into Zoom and then logging off, for instance), statewide absence counts in the NCES figures sometimes vary widely from district-level reporting.

Based on the early release of more detailed 2021–22 figures from California, Connecticut, Ohio, and Virginia, the authors wrote, it is reasonable to predict that as many as 16 million kids were chronically absent last school year, a doubling of the pre-pandemic number. 

The teacher exodus that wasn’t

Were American schools plagued with teacher absences this year, or not? It was a question that captivated news sources, but also divided education experts, because it contained an even thornier question within it: If the supply of teachers remains mostly steady, but demand for them spikes, are they truly at a deficit?

In spite of widespread fears that veteran teachers were quitting in huge numbers as a reaction to the pandemic, no mass departure ever took place, according to a paper by Brown economist Matt Kraft. Turnover actually fell slightly in the summer of 2020 and stayed within the typical annual range the next year. But weak hiring during the first few months of the pandemic may have contributed to higher-than-usual vacancy rates, perhaps triggered by fears of Great Recession-style budget cuts that never materialized.

In fact, a windfall of federal cash followed instead, leading districts to add new jobs in late 2020 and 2021, and the resultant hiring spree has indeed made candidates for teaching positions hard to find. But even that phenomenon isn’t true everywhere, since numbers differ widely across state lines. According to a paper released this summer, Mississippi’s rate of vacancies per 10,000 students is more than 68 times higher than that of Utah. 

Hopeful signs

As the long legacy of COVID grew clearer, research in 2022 gave the education world plenty of reasons to worry. But it has also contributed some hopeful signs of renewed progress in schools. 

The good omens aren’t popping up everywhere, but some are to be found in state-level testing, which has resumed around the country after being suspended for at least the first pandemic year. According to Tennessee’s state exams, the number of students meeting or beating grade-level reading standards rose from 29 percent in 2020–21 to over 36 percent in 2021–22. In all, more than three-quarters of the state’s school districts reported reading scores higher than were seen in the pre-pandemic period. 

“We are seeing this broadly across the state, and across district types — urban, rural and suburban,” Tennessee Education Commissioner Penny Schwinn told ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ’s Beth Hawkins. “We are really, really proud of what our districts have done.”

Several other Southern states have begun to make their turnaround, with Mississippi a particular standout. This of 2021–22 testing data showed average scores in math, English, and science nearing or exceeding 2019 levels, while performance on the U.S. history exam skyrocketed compared with 2020–21 (the first in which it had been given). Just as notably, — a state-mandated test that students must pass to progress to the fourth grade — fell by only .6 percentage points between 2019 and 2022. 

Here’s what happened. While the hospital’s tiny patients slept, a purposeful crew came through with colorful decals, posters, elevator wraps and other materials, transforming the center into a lively, energized space where simple, evidence-based messages offer tips, guidance and support at every touchpoint a family might encounter as they navigate the space. Though the materials for this environmental transformation are eye-catching, their purpose is far from ornamental: They are a dynamic representation of Mount Sinai’s profound commitment to transforming the delivery of pediatric health care itself.

Though the science couldn’t be clearer regarding the difference positive parenting makes for a child’s health and cognitive, social-emotional well-being, pediatricians often have little formal training in child development. An informal survey of graduating pediatric residents reported that most didn’t feel prepared to advise parents on how to foster this healthy development.

“Pediatricians are often asked behavioral questions,” says Ellen Galinsky, president of the Families and Work Institute, a global authority on early childhood and author of the pioneering book “” “But because they have very little training in child behavior, they may end up giving advice based on what their own parents did — or just not giving it at all.”

“There was an urgent need for them to understand how the child’s mind develops, so in 2012, the Mind in the Making team began collaborating with the (MSPC) to develop a curriculum that would start at the beginning — by training pediatric residents in the science of children’s brain development as well as how to deliver and model this information.”

The resulting curriculum, Keystones of Development, is a free, online program funded by the Bezos Family Foundation that provides residents with evidence-based research on how parenting behaviors influence a child’s cognitive and social-emotional development, and shows how pediatricians can weave information promoting these positive behaviors into routine well-child visits.

From the start, the Parenting Center’s aim with the Keystones of Development curriculum has been to transform the culture of pediatric practice. It’s hard to argue with the program’s success: From an initial pilot with eight pediatric residencies in 2018, the curriculum has flourished to the degree that it is now used by 82 percent of pediatric residency training programs and 18 percent of family medical residency training programs in the U.S.

Top staff at the MSPC wanted to expand the curriculum’s reach even further. What if a pediatric practice could be set up so that every one of its interactions with a caregiver fosters those parent-child bonds and helps parents realize the difference they make in their child’s development? What if every moment the parent is in the clinic or hospital is rich with messages that provide them with the tools and confidence to be great parents?

The idea of turning everyday moments into brain-building opportunities is at the core of Vroom, a program of the Bezos Family Foundation that puts early brain science to work through tips that help parents boost their child’s learning when they spend time together.

To adapt and expand these tips for a health care setting, an interdisciplinary working group was formed to design a to create Vroom messages for strategic placement throughout the hospital, easily visible to caregivers and staff. The working group included Dr. Blair Hammond and Dr. Aliza Pressman, MSPC’s co-founding directors; Dr. Carrie Quinn, executive director; Mariel Benjamin, director of programs and a licensed clinical social worker, all from Mount Sinai Parenting Center. In addition, the working group included Jackie Bezos, co-founder of the Bezos Family Foundation, Megan Wyatt, the foundation’s managing director of early learning, Ellen Galinsky, and a team from Johannes Leonardo, a leading creative agency based in New York City. Key stakeholders and staff, including physicians, vetted and helped create hundreds of messages unique to six of the Center’s units — the prenatal clinic, labor and delivery, the postpartum unit, the neonatal intensive care unit, the general pediatric practice and the pediatric emergency department.

“The transformation at Mount Sinai showed that small moments add up to a big impact. It helped health care professionals and staff to be better brain builders and we hope it will inspire other health care professionals, too,” said Wyatt.

These vibrant messages did, indeed, transform the hospital’s physical environment. A far more powerful aspect of the pilot project, however, has been a comprehensive training program designed to reach any staff member who might interact with parents, caregivers and children in any of the six hospital units. The center created a video introducing the basic science of early childhood development, then trained 1,123 hospital staff members in a one-hour, in-person lab to apply these key concepts. A month after the training, staff received reinforcing modules and monthly newsletters to maintain the momentum.

“The training has been the most exciting part of the project to me,” Hammond says. “The interprofessional groups — nurses, security, business administrators, lactation consultants, housekeeping, physicians and more — all receiving the same training is something that occurs so rarely. And the recognition in a non-hierarchical way of the role we all play in a family’s experience was just amazing. The content we delivered is so positive that at the end of the training session, people were always smiling and saying how great it was.”

“In the training, we talked about how we see our roles in helping parents fall in love with their children,” Hammond says. “How can we have parents recognize the amazing impact they have on their child? How can we in the health care industry discuss, model, praise and invite positive caregiver-child interactions in our everyday health care moments?”

In determining placement of the Vroom health care messages and where families were most likely to encounter staff, the planning team walked through parents’ process from their very first interaction to the moment they received their discharge information and beyond. (As an expression of its teamwork with new parents, the Center offers for parents and caregivers — brief videos on babies’ development from zero to 5 years with practical, actionable advice on babies’ behavior, parenting questions, tips and resources, and essential information on babies’ growth and development.)

Transformation in the Day-to-Day

The result of the environmental transformation is an immersive experience that leaves no stone unturned in making sure the brain-building messages reach the families and then reach them again.

Hammond says she’s one of the lucky ones at Mount Sinai who gets to experience the transformation as a clinician — seeing the sign in the postpartum unit that says, “Parents are born here,” or in the staff offices that says, “Parents matter here.” She says she’s had families in her office take pictures of messages to share with grandparents, had children ask about the pictures and what people are doing (playing peekaboo or Simon says), and see families in the elevator read the signage that says, “Over a million neural connections are made every second in the brain in the first few years of life,” then download the Vroom app.

Designed to Be Copied

The intention of the pilot project was that it be scalable, adaptable and free to pediatric educators and practices everywhere, with training modules and materials designed to be practical and easily replicated. To that end, Dan Torres, Vroom’s senior program manager, is creating a digital starter kit and accompanying training resources that will be available by the end of the summer for interested organizations.

“Mount Sinai did a wonderful job of making the training really accessible in how it can be offered,” Torres says. “It can be in person; it can be virtual. They are experts in the space, and they’ve set it up so that it makes implementation a much easier lift for organizations.”

“Vroom has always been a good, easy fit for home-visiting programs, libraries, child care, Head Start, those kinds of areas,” he says. “Not all children have access to all those things though. If we want to reach as many children as possible, health care settings are where, ideally, children are going to go for well-child visits. This program will be an extra layer that will add a lot of value there.”

For Dr. Sarah Milburn, medical director of the Newborn Nursery at Mount Sinai Kravis Children’s Hospital, one of the program’s greatest accomplishments is the way that it levels the playing field for parents who might never have had any information about childrearing and positive parenting.

“Some families had parents who talked to them, read to them, pointed out things and engaged them in conversation,” she says. “But other parents maybe never have had that demonstrated. Maybe their parents didn’t talk to them, maybe they didn’t grow up around younger children and never saw their parents interacting with a child. Regardless of what was demonstrated for them, we’re demonstrating it now. We’re demonstrating it in what’s on the walls, we’re demonstrating it with how the different staff members interact.

“We may just be in there for a moment, bringing them an ice pack, but we can say, ‘Oh my goodness, the baby has their eyes open. They’re really taking it all in.’ You walk out the door after you’ve handled whatever they needed, but in that split second interaction, you’ve made a difference. And it’s cumulative — all the little conversations they have, all the tips they see everywhere — it all adds up for the family to see how many opportunities they have to interact. They may just be here a few short days, but they’ll take that home with them.”

Milburn says she’s seen the difference in staff as well, in the way they view themselves and how they appreciate their own worth.

“It’s so uplifting,” she says. “Those first few days after you’ve had a baby are so overwhelming and stressful, and having everyone here as part of your team makes such a difference. We always have been part of their team, but I think those interactions when we say, ‘Look what your baby is noticing,’ touch them in a very different way.

“Given what we’ve been dealing with through COVID and everything, it would be easy to feel so worn down from what everyone went through,” Milburn adds. “But spirits are high here and people really appreciate each other.

“This is a really beautiful place to work.”

The Bezos Family Foundation provides financial support to Early Learning Nation.

In an experiment that’s the first of its kind in the world, I-LABS, in collaboration with Japanese and Taiwanese brain scientists, conducted a study of the neural connection between mothers and their 5-year-old children using dual MEG brain-imaging devices. , or magnetoencephalography, is a safe, silent, precise technique for investigating human brain activity. The ultra-high-tech device allows brain activity to be measured millisecond-by-millisecond and maps down to the millimeter where in the brain that activity is produced.

Previous research by I-LABS scientists has shown that verbal turn-taking and imitation are essential in young children’s language learning and social development, and that their language learning happens only via social interaction with other people. But how parents and children coordinate their brain activity during these social interactions has been an intriguing mystery. With the development of a dual-MEG setup, it has become possible to observe those interactions in real time right where they’re happening in the brains of mother-child pairs.

“Humans are social creatures, and we evolved to learn from one another,” says Dr. Patricia Kuhl, I-LABS’ co-director, who holds the Bezos Family Foundation Endowed Chair in Early Childhood Learning. “So now the big question is how our brains do that, how they exchange information and learn and feed off each other. Understanding that is complicated from the experimental standpoint.”

In the article “,” published this summer in the journal Cerebral Cortex, lead author Jo-Fu Lotus Lin, a researcher from National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan with an appointment at Japan’s Kanazawa University, details the history of testing two interactive individuals simultaneously. During the last 15 years or so, simultaneous recordings of brain activity have been observed using less precise measuring techniques. The advent of MEG has made it possible to precisely pinpoint the regions of the brain that light up during interpersonal interactions. (Until recently, the MEG lab in Japan has been the only one in the world with two MEG machines; I-LABS has now become the only lab in the world with two MEG machines, one of which is a “wearable” MEG machine, which Kuhl says will open whole new worlds of social neuroscience research.)

For the dual-MEG mother-child study, Kuhl says, each pair of mothers and their 5-year-olds lay next to each other in their respective MEG machines. The mothers then read a phrase and the child imitated the intonation and words of that phrase. As a control, mother and child listened passively to pure tones.

“With the MEG machines, we’re able to see what’s happening in the mother’s brain and the child’s brain during the social interaction,” Kuhl says, “and what we see is neurons firing in areas of the brain related to attention and learning at the same rate in mother and child. The neurons are doing a dance together at the same rhythm at the same time in the same places in these two brains.”

It was a moment of amazement for the researchers, Kuhl says.

Although the study was admittedly “pretty cool,” Kuhl says the research is just getting started. Now that I-LABS has the wearable MEG as well as the traditional one, the plan is to study parents and 5 ½ month-old babies. Fathers will be part of the study for the first time, she says, and researchers will measure the social interaction of mom with the baby and then dad and baby when they are interacting face-to-face.

Another exciting layer to the experiment will be to test the parents’ natural levels of oxytocin before and after the social interaction to see if adults who have more oxytocin have more neural synchrony with their child. Oxytocin has sometimes been called the “love hormone” because of the role it plays in social bonding.

The wearable MEG will allow the parent to interact with the baby in more normal face-to-face interaction. The parent will engage with the child and then turn away to engage with someone outside the child’s periphery to see what happens to that neural synchrony when the parent’s attention temporarily turns in a different direction.

What the study won’t do is have the parents completely ignore the baby and focus entirely on their cellphones. The researchers had considered doing such a study but stopped it before it really got under way.

“Right before the pandemic, we were setting one up with the mom moving her attention completely from the baby to focus entirely on the cellphone,” Kuhl says. “It upset the babies so much we said, ‘Nope. Can’t run that experiment.’ The one we’re setting up now — where the mother rotates to another person — happens all the time in the real world and the baby will try to get her attention back. The phone thing really tended to upset the babies.”

One of the long-term goals of the newest research is to see whether the social connection represented by neural synchrony predicts other positive outcomes in a child’s life, such as mother-infant attachment.

“I think we’ll see that it affects the learning of language,” Kuhl says. “I think we’ll see that social interaction is the seat of language—which is a fairly radical view. I think social interaction is the instigator, and connections between adults and infants precede and predict rapid language learning because language is so necessarily social. What comes first is this attraction between parent and child, this intense attention being paid where the baby is glued to their faces and voices and that input changes their brain.”

In the dual-MEG study, Japanese researchers had the mothers and their 5-year-olds playing an imitation game, in which the mother would change the pitch of her voice and the child would try to mimic it. The role of neural synchrony prompted by imitation is an important one in human evolution, Kuhl says, and the tangible evidence of that dance is thrilling.

“That initial connection is how babies know that they’re one of us, that they have bodies like us and that they belong,” she says. “If you raise your finger and the baby imitates that or open your mouth and the baby does that back to you, that’s the baby relating to members of the group and saying, ‘I’m like you.’ That’s a very critical connection.”

Our society has given short shrift to social needs and the degree to which social interaction influences learning. Kuhl’s hope is that the research she and others are doing on brain synchrony will help put to rest the idea that social connection is “just soft and fuzzy.”

“It’s not just playing. It’s not being nice or just giving hugs,” she says. “Social connection is a conduit for knowledge — all of our cognitive, linguistic and social development, all our cultural institutions come through the social brain.

“There’s so much more to know — about that neural synchrony in other relationships, for instance. If you have a teacher relating to a group of students and for some there’s that ‘Aha!’ moment where they say, ‘Oh, I get it. Chemistry works like this…,’ maybe that’s the same sort of synchrony. Maybe it’s quite common—maybe between husband and wife or two students working on a project together.

“With the new MEG technology, this is a field of work that’s only going to grow,” Kuhl says. “We’re just beginning to chip away at the magic that might be happening when we’re in face to face contact.”

In “,” Paul effectively makes the case that most of the metaphors we have for cognition are not useful because they allude to Western society’s assumption that thinking only happens inside the brain: the ubiquitous admonition to “use your head.” Our scientific journals, she writes, mostly proceed from the “brain in a vat” premise that considers our mental organ a disembodied, asocial entity, a computer encased inside our skulls doing all the thinking for a body that barely registers in the hierarchy of value.

The reality is much richer, more complex and delicious. And while it might seem overblown to call a book on cognition “revolutionary,” the ideas in “The Extended Mind” actually could change everything.

We’ve been led to believe, Paul writes, that like the Mighty Oz, the brain is an all-purpose, all-powerful thinking machine — and it is impressive, what with its lightning processing speed and its magnificent mutability. But it turns out, the brain — not just my brain (huge relief!) or your brain — is limited in its ability to pay attention, to remember, to deal with abstract concepts and even to persist at challenging tasks. So much for bearing down.

The smart move, she writes, is not to lean harder on the brain but to reach beyond it. Replace the brain-as-computer and brain-as-muscle metaphor with a more fitting one that compares our brains to, say, magpies. Like the magpie — famous for building its nest out of an astonishing array of materials it finds throughout its environment — our brains weave the bits and bobs of everything they encounter and turn them into cognition. We think with our bodies, our surroundings, our relationships. We think with gestures, with movement and sensation; we think with natural and built spaces, and the spaces we build with our ideas. We think with the other minds with which we interact — our family, coworkers, classmates, teachers, friends.

As Paul explains the new research into these three types of thinking — embodied, situated and distributed cognition — she convincingly and entertainingly makes the case that the research “not only produced new insights into the nature of human cognition; it has generated a corpus of evidence-based methods for extending the mind.”

Then, she goes a step further and lays out the purpose of her book: to operationalize the extended mind. To turn the discussion from something strictly philosophical into something practical and useful. If, when you reach the end of this book, you don’t view yourself and the world at least somewhat differently, well … I invite you to give it another read. And maybe dance more.

Contemplating what this new view of cognition might mean for early learning had me going overboard on the marginalia—with multiple exclamation points (Imagine having kids “act out” the solar system! Children play more imaginatively outdoors—cheers for forest schools!!!). First, as Paul mentions several times, children already come into the world with their thinking extended in these “new” ways. They certainly think with movement and with their relationships — and continue to do so until our education system succeeds in getting them to sit down and stop talking. Children spend an average of 50 percent of the school day sitting, Paul writes. That proportion increases as they enter adolescence; adults in the workplace spend more than two-thirds of the average workday seated — all rooted in society’s erroneous belief that to be thinking, we need to be sitting still.

What this attitude overlooks, she writes, is that human’s capacity to regulate our attention and our behavior is a limited resource and we use it up by suppressing our natural urge to move. In multiple experiments, children who were given license to move were “more focused, confident and productive.” One study of young people diagnosed with ADHD found that the more the kids moved, the more effectively they were able to think. Instead of insisting that children stop moving so they can focus, a more effective approach would be to allow them to move around so that they can focus. Throughout the U.S., recess has been reduced or even eliminated to generate more “seat time” devoted to academic learning. Paul argues that parents, educators and administrators should be arguing for more, not fewer, opportunities for children to be active.

One of the most profound and possibly revolutionary concepts Paul covers is that of interoception, an awareness of the inner state of the body. All of us start life with our interoceptive capacities operating via our onboard sensors taking information from the outside world—our retinas, cochleas, taste buds, olfactory bulbs—which send a constant stream of data to the brain from all over our bodies. Our conscious minds can’t process all they encounter, but the insula, the brain’s interoceptive hub, takes the constant data feed and uses it to navigate the world: the body “rings like a bell,” Paul writes, to alert us with a shiver, a sigh, a cringe.

Research has found that that how caregivers communicate with children about these bodily prompts can strengthen or weaken a child’s sensitivity to these internal signals. Other research has found that greater awareness of these sensations can give us agency in actually creating our emotions. Consider, for example, the difference in a child’s life if their caregivers took their sensations seriously and helped them learn to reappraise their physical sensations—my palms are sweaty; my stomach has butterflies—and label “nervous” or “anxious” as “excited” and “eager.”

Some of the most exciting and potentially transformative research cited in “The Extended Mind” is found in the chapters on thinking with relationships. Humans evolved to learn from other humans and to learn from teaching other people. We are social to our core and a large body of evidence points to the striking conclusion that we think best when we think socially. We evolved to reason, to persuade others of our views and to guard against being misled by others. If you ever wondered why your preschooler can argue you into exhaustion, they’re only fulfilling their evolutionary calling. Humans argue together, Paul writes, to arrive jointly at something close to truth. The key element is learning to argue over ideas with mutual respect. Argument, when done in the right way, produces “deeper learning, sounder decisions and more innovative solutions ….”

Our modern life has gotten too complex, too jammed with information and sensory overload for our brains to manage by themselves. Fortunately, we’re just beginning to realize how far and how well humans can think beyond those limitations. Taking Paul’s information-packed volume as a starting place, it’s thrilling to imagine what futures might be concocted by a whole society of magpie minds thinking together in ways informed by, but no longer bound by, the human brain.

ł§łó´Ç˛Ô°ě´Ç´Ú´Ú’s is called “Re-Envisioning Early Childhood Policy and Practice in a World of Striking Inequality and Uncertainty,” and bears the subtitle “New Science + More Diverse Voices = Greater Impact.” His overarching point is that the existing circumference of early childhood development — what he considered early childhood development or ECD “1.0” is absolutely correct, but drawn too narrowly. The way to build on these foundations, Shonkoff offers, is by embracing contemporary science around the interaction of a child’s body and surrounding environment—including exposure to literal toxins and structural inequities —with their brain development. He calls this both-and perspective “ECD 2.0,” and writes (emphases his):

• It’s still about the brain and it’s also about immune and metabolic systems.
• It’s still about readiness to succeed in school and it’s also about lifelong health.
• It’s still about the hardships of poverty and it’s also about the threats and burdens of racism.
• It’s still about nurturing relationships and it’s also about building a health-promoting society.

In my view, what this implies is that the early childhood field needs to further break down its silos. It should be said that, to its credit, compared to nearby fields like K-12 education, early childhood is already much better at taking a true whole-child approach; so there are certainly places where this is already happening. Child care policy, paid leave policy and home visiting policy — whereby a trained professional provides support to new parents — tend to be cousins, related yet distinct. Maternal and child health policy, such as access to doulas, can be another step removed. An ECD 2.0 lens suggests these are in fact inseparable parts of the same immediate family and should be treated as such.

ECD 2.0 also says that issue areas currently considered far afield from early childhood must be drawn closer in our metrics, advocacy, and philanthropic investments. Young children, it turns out, have gravitational pull: they bring a multitude of satellite priorities into orbit. For instance, mold and lead abatement are generally the purview of the housing sector, but given the impacts of environmental toxins on developing bodies and brains, early childhood stakeholders may need to join forces on a housing quality agenda.

Climate change is perhaps the most striking example. Shonkoff mentions air pollution, one of the more to children supercharged by climate change. With large swaths of America on fire for large portions of the year (witness December’s devastating Boulder County fire and the one currently raging in Big Sur, California), and air pollution trapped by heat, this is not a matter of small concern. And air pollution is only one of a rogue’s gallery of climate-enhanced dangers to which young children are . Again, ECD 2.0 demands an . (For what it’s worth, this should not be a one-way street: other fields need to embrace and invest in young children with far more alacrity than they currently do.)

°Âłó˛šłŮ’s particularly stirring about ł§łó´Ç˛Ô°ě´Ç´Ú´Ú’s call to action is that he is not asking the field to abandon its fundamentals, but instead to acknowledge both the value and limitations of those fundamentals along with the need to evolve. As he concludes: “The early childhood field is at a critical inflection point in a changing world. The opportunity to align new science and the lived experiences of families and decision makers across a diversity of sectors, cultures, and political values offers a powerful pathway forward. The need for shared leadership along that path is urgent.”

Nevertheless, researchers continue to explore how to sustain the benefits that early childhood education (ECE) generates. In Robert C. Carr’s paper, (jointly published in September by the Hunt Institute and the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University) the key word is can. Ample evidence points to the boost children get by starting their education early, but a review of the research reveals “mixed long-term impacts.” A lot depends on subsequent teaching and the environment in which it happens.

To explore these issues, Dr. Dan Wuori of the Hunt Institute moderated an Early Efforts conversation among:

• Dr. Craig Ramey, Virginia Tech
• Dr. Alison Gopnik, the University of California at Berkeley
• Dr. Francis Pearman, Stanford University
• Dr. Robert Carr, Duke University

Here are our takeaways:

1. Early childhood is the brain’s R&D phase. Gopnik described young children as amazing learners. “They explore,” she said. “They consider possibilities. They go out into the world and consider what it is like much more than grown-ups do.” Nurturing adults can make the most of this phase by stimulating imagination, creativity and possibility; adversity shortens it.

Just because the years are a period of rapid learning, Gopnik said, some educators assume pre-K should be more like “school,” but she maintained that social and emotional support is just as important as academic skills.

2. The Abecedarian project continues to yield benefits. Ramey described the as a randomized control trial that measures the impact of providing full-time, high-quality educational intervention from infancy through age 5. The landmark study continues to shape the field of early education.

Last year, filmmaker Carlota Nelson captured its influence in her documentary . “If anything,” Ramey said during the webinar, “we’ve underestimated lifespan long-term effects.” These include functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans of adult brains that show structural changes in the regions for abstract thinking and language acquisition as well as benefits that accrue to the children of the adults who participated decades earlier.

Watch the Brain Matters łŮ°ů˛šžąąôąđ°ů:Ěý

3. We know what produces the greatest results. The original Abecedarian Project, which inspired so much replication, lasted an entire school day and involved highly qualified staff.

Ramey and colleagues studied a replication implemented all across Louisiana and found , among other effects. “The children at the greatest risk derive the greatest benefits,” he stated, “whether you measure that at the level of family resources or at the level of neighborhoods.”

4. High-quality kindergarten is necessary to sustain the advances of preschool. When policymakers discuss early learning, they frequently frame the benefits in terms of kindergarten readiness, but the lasting benefits also matter, and these only develop when quality teaching and school environments remain in place.

“While high-quality ECE programs can promote foundational skills and dispositions for learning,” explains, “children’s acquisition of foundational skills will naturally plateau after they have mastered those skills.”

Therefore, the impact of high-quality ECE on foundational skills diminishes during elementary school (see graph, right). When done right, kindergarten enhances the preschool effect. conducted in Tennessee describes “Sustaining Environments”—involving both highly effective teachers and high-quality schools—and finds that only about 9 percent of children got what they needed in kindergarten, and without it, the pre-K boost faded by third grade.

5. The consequences go beyond education. Gopnik provided further context to the conversation, noting that what happens outside school also affects children’s fates. Policy supports for parents have a symbiotic relationship with education, contributing to “a sense of alternatives and things you can do beyond your narrow experiences.”

Ramey, who began his Abecedarian research in 1972, when he was 26 years old, declared, “This effort is not for the fainthearted or the ill-prepared,” adding that “the future of democracy and our capitalistic competitive economy” were at stake. It’s a life’s mission worth fighting for.

Babies occupy a world of wonder — huge and fascinating — and are bombarded via their senses with new information at every turn. From the very beginning, says Dr. Alison Gopnik, head of the Cognitive Development and Learning Lab at the University of California, Berkeley, human infants are driven by the desire to find out. Their investigations are not random but are driven by the same mechanisms that scientists use to develop theories, she says. Babies are exploring their world in ways that are exquisitely intelligent and sensitive.

For decades, a common understanding was that babies arrive as a “blank slate” that life writes on, creating the child’s reality. Not so, says Gopnik, an internationally recognized authority on children’s learning and development, and her colleagues who have studied babies for decades. Babies are born knowing certain things. From birth, they are aware of some physical properties of objects. Newborns follow objects as they appear in and out of range and they quickly begin to recognize the faces that show up in their field of vision. Very early on, newborns will begin to mimic adults’ facial expressions, such as sticking out their tongue. Consider the sequence of cognitive and physical abilities that have to be in play for just that tiny moment of an infant sticking out her tongue in response to an adult’s action and you might begin to be as blown away by babies’ innate capacities as Gopnik and her fellow researchers are.

Children develop theories, Gopnik says. They develop abstract, coherent systems of entities and rules, particularly as they consider causation — What makes that person come back and feed me? They make predictions based on evidence and they change their minds when they discover new things.

Babies are little trackers for useful information, paying attention to interesting things, and they’re completely intolerant of boredom. They don’t like to look at random things, but when they see a pattern and the opportunity to predict an outcome? They’re all in.

“One of the pieces of conventional wisdom about babies and young children has been that they aren’t good at abstract relational thinking,” Gopnik says. “But we’ve just done a paper that shows even 3-year-olds are very good at solving abstract problems.

“For example, if you say, ‘Look, here’s a wizard. The wizard waved her hand, and it made this little dog into a big dog. Now she’s going to wave her hand one more time at this little toy. What will happen when she waves her wand?’ And the child will tell you, ‘Oh, the little toy will be a big toy!’

“That’s the kind of thinking that’s tested on fancy IQ tests: ‘This is to this as this is to that.’ And it turns out that even very little children are surprisingly good at solving those tasks if you ask in the right way.”

Babies can also do a primitive kind of addition and subtraction, Gopnik says. If you put one toy behind a screen and then another one, they’ll be surprised if you lift the screen and there’s one toy or three toys, but not if there are two toys. They may not have the language to say one plus one equals two, but they put the idea together through observation.

During a child’s early years, their is chugging away, observing, connecting the constellations of neurons that make up the baby’s brain, driven by curiosity and learning about their world through experience and practice. In this wide-open state, babies and young children are easily distractible, and all options are open — which accounts for children’s incredible ability to make up wildly creative play at the drop of a hat. Nothing is ruled out, nothing is too illogical to fit.

This whole paradigm of curiosity — where it comes from, what fuels it, how it can be nurtured — is so complex that it’s one of the conundrums computer scientists working on artificial intelligence have not been able to crack. Gopnik has worked with researchers who are delving into machine learning and artificial intelligence. Some of the new computers are ridiculously smart, she says, and great at problem solving. But no one has cracked the code as to how to train them to be curious.

Humans’ unbound curiosity is a great evolutionary strategy for learning massive amounts of information, Gopnik says, but at some point, it becomes a detriment for success in daily living. At some point, humans have to take all the information they’ve amassed and put it to work to get on in life. Our survival depends on being able to stop wondering and know unmistakably that the knife is sharp, that berry is poisonous and the A train won’t get us to the Bronx.

Around the age of 5, she says, the connections that are formed get stronger and more efficient as others are pruned and disappear. At this point, the brain’s executive office begins taking over, developing the prefrontal control that allows us to ignore distractions, focus on individual tasks and plan for what’s coming next.

A significant key to this developmental trajectory, Gopnik says, appears to be having a safe, secure, caring environment in which to do all that early exploration.

“I don’t know that we’ve proved this yet,” she says, “but we can see from some ongoing research that the context of being cared for actually helps children to be curious and find out about the world. Children are born with the same kind of curiosity, but their environment can either be one where they can be safe to explore or one that says, ‘This is rough and difficult;  you should just concentrate on being safe.’

“Children are really good at being curious; it’s hard to stop them. But having to do too many things to survive, having those strong demands on their attention can destroy a child’s curiosity. The good news is, we’ve looked at children in Headstart programs, children in third-world countries and they’re all capable of curiosity and learning.

“It is important to say, however, that the 20% of American children who are growing up in poverty and growing up in isolation do not necessarily have the basic conditions for that curiosity. We have a lot of work to do there. But once you have those basic prerequisites in place, let the kid loose and you’ll see curiosity and learning.”

The ironic quality about curiosity and learning, Gopnik says, is that grownups can’t make their children be curious any more than scientists can teach computers curiosity, and, unlike computers, adults can’t actually make children learn.

“One thing that I observe particularly with middle-class parents here in the Bay Area is that they take this kind of approach like, ‘I really, really want my child to be curious and explorative and literate, so I’m going to sit there and make sure he’s curious.’ I think that, especially in these very high-investment parenting situations, just chilling out and practicing a little benign neglect is probably the best approach.

“Leave them alone, let them know they’re loved; make sure they have the resources they need and then leave them alone and let them explore. Adults are not good at making children learn. They just learn, so let them do it.”

Gopnik stresses that parents do have a role to play in their children’s education about life but would like them to stop seeing themselves as “just another school.” Children don’t need to be taught so much as included. They learn more naturally from watching people do what they’re good at and that they want to do.

“My favorite example is cooking with children — they love to cook with grownups. When you’re cooking with children, you’re actually doing something useful. Cooking, gardening, going out shopping, talking with your friends — if you’re doing all the things that are a part of your child’s life and are a little bit patient (because it takes twice as long if you’re cooking with a child), your child from an early age is learning to do things, learning to be confident.

“Babies and toddlers are maximum scientists, at a point where curiosity is the most important thing. Then, children are like little apprentices, learning from the adults in their lives how to put all those theories together in a social world and be effective human beings.”

Doctoral student Shelby Keye and professor Naiman Khan, of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, conducted a study to see if 4- to 6-year-old children participating in a timed test to estimate cardiorespiratory health would also do better on cognitive tests and other measures of brain function. Their study, published in the Journal of Clinical Medicine, suggests that the link between cardiorespiratory fitness and brain health is apparent even earlier than previously thought.

“The relationship between cardiorespiratory fitness and cognitive function has been seen in adults as well as older children — elementary age children and pre-adolescents,” Keye says. “The main reason for doing this study was to see if the same correlation could be seen at an earlier age.”

Keye says that a large body of research has consistently found a positive relationship between people’s aerobic exercise capacity and their academic achievement and cognitive health. In multiple studies, higher cardiorespiratory fitness in older children and adults has been found to correspond to the relative size and connectivity of brain structures essential to cognitive control. Some studies have shown that children with higher cardio fitness showed physical changes in various portions of the cortex and demonstrated superior arithmetic performance. Other studies done in preadolescent children have shown that children who were fit were better at paying attention than children with lower levels of fitness. What isn’t yet known is at what point in a child’s developmental trajectory this correlation begins.

One test in the University of Illinois study looked at how far children could walk during a timed test (six minutes, so not precisely a marathon, and the participants could choose to wear little capes and masks, an incentive any runner would appreciate).

The researchers put 59 preschoolers through their paces, then gave them a test to measure cognitive and academic development to assess each child’s intellectual abilities and a different test, called a “flanker” test, to measure how well the child was able to focus on the important part of an image while ignoring distracting information. The test was kid-friendly, with little fish serving as the target of their attention. Another computerized task asked the children to alter their responses on whether hearts or flowers appeared on the screen, which measured their mental flexibility.

Though the study doesn’t prove that a child’s cardiorespiratory fitness increases their cognitive abilities, it does add to a growing body of evidence that the two are closely linked, even at an early age.

As fascinating as this finding is, it is also somewhat troubling, says researcher Khan, who is a professor of kinesiology and community health, because reports suggest that preschoolers are failing to meet daily recommended guidelines for physical activity, just as older children and adults in the U.S. are. Brain development of core processes connected to cognitive control begins in early childhood. Cognitive control, an important component of executive function, refers to the brain processes such as working memory, inhibition and cognitive flexibility that underpin the ability to choose and plan.

“We know from the epidemiology data that children tend to become less and less active as they get older,” Khan says, “so intervening early has become increasingly important.” Studies of this age group are important in helping develop approaches to improve children’s aerobic fitness, in part because of its importance on their cognitive development.

A subset of the children in the study took part in an auditory task in which they responded to certain sounds while wearing an electroencephalogram (EEG) cap that measured electrical activity during the task. The cap offered a noninvasive way to measure the children’s ability to pay attention despite distractions and to process information as they completed tasks, Keye says.

Statistical analysis revealed that the preschool children with higher estimated cardiorespiratory fitness scored higher on tasks related to general intellectual ability as well as in their use of expressive language. They performed better on computerized tasks requiring attention and multitasking, and showed the potential for faster processing speeds and greater resource allocation in their brains as they performed the tasks.

Just how much exercise is the right amount for a preschooler? Keye says the latest physical activity guidelines for Americans don’t offer particularly specific recommendations. They advise having children be as physically active as possible throughout the day, with a reasonable target of three hours of physical activity. It is also recommended that parents and caregivers be active along with their children and engage in a variety of activities with them.

Physical activity is the watchword here, she says. Sitting and playing video games or watching TV with your child might be fun, but it isn’t building cardiovascular fitness in either child or adult. The study was conducted pre-COVID, and Keye acknowledges that the pandemic has complicated the task of everyone, adult or child, getting sufficient exercise and interaction.

As soon as it’s possible to safely return to playgrounds and parks, the researchers say it’s important to get children interacting and playing with their peers. Parents should make sure their children’s preschools and kindergartens are encouraging activity throughout the day, and that the children’s environments generally support play and physicality.

Khan says the next study the researchers hope to do will be aimed at developing intervention approaches to determine if children’s cognitive function can actually be improved by improvements in aerobic fitness. One study indicated that an 8-week exercise program with kindergarten children increased brain function, but there is a paucity of data on the topic.

“Once we have a more robust clinical trial that looks at those potential improvements, we may be in a better position to advocate for those changes,” he says. “We do know from other work that physical activity is important for a variety of different health outcomes and cognitive development at various ages, and that it should be encouraged in children of preschool age.”

The researchers’ paper, “,” is published in the open-source Journal of Clinical Medicine.

Cardiovascular fitness alone isn’t the whole story of cognitive function, the researchers report. Other studies of older children and adults have shown that excess body fat negatively affects both cardiorespiratory fitness and cognitive control. Likewise, previous research has shown that school-aged children, 7 to 9 years old, whose diets most closely adhered to the recommended Dietary Guidelines of Americans as assessed by the Healthy Eating Index, showed greater cognitive control, even after adjusting for excess body fat and cardiorespiratory fitness. An extensive study of more than 5,000 school-aged children showed that dietary quality related to greater academic performance.

Still, even adjusting for all these factors, the University of Illinois researchers found that the cardio fitness of the young children in the study was strongly correlated to their performance on cognitive tasks. Given the increasing prevalence of poor fitness and physical activity in young people not only in the U.S. but throughout the world, developing interventions as early as possible could help set our children up for a better future.

Our pre-K kids might not fully appreciate the relationship between the playground and their future math scores, but they will likely welcome any old reason to go out and play.

Unless someone like you
Cares a whole awful lot
Nothing is going to get better.
It’s not.

Hanna-Attisha’s riveting first-person account of the public health catastrophe that has become known as the Flint water crisis not only lays out the facts of how a government poisoned its own people; it lays open the heart of a doctor who swore an oath to protect the health and lives of the children affected.

The Flint water crisis began in April 2014 when the Michigan city changed its water source from Detroit Water and Sewerage Department — which it had been using for over 50 years — to the Flint River. Elected officials, including Gov. Rick Snyder’s administration, made the switch as part of a budget-slashing, austerity initiative, despite the fact that the Flint River had been an industrial dumping site for decades. The move was made without properly training water-treatment staff or upgrading the plant.

Almost immediately, residents began to raise alarms about foul-smelling, filthy water. As a busy professor and pediatrician at Flint’s Hurley Medical Center as well as a mom of two young daughters, Hanna-Attisha was aware of complaints about the water, but water wasn’t foremost in her mind. She assumed — with the rest of the community — that city and county officials, the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality (MDEQ) and Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) were serious about their job of protecting water quality. She thought they had this.

A casual family barbecue with long-time friend Elin Warn Betanzo, an environmental engineer who had worked at the Environmental Protection Agency, changed all that. “What are you hearing about the Flint water?” her friend asked. Hanna-Attisha said she had heard complaints, but that the state said the water was fine.

No, Betanzo said, it’s not. Flint was not using corrosion control, she said, and lead from the city’s old pipes was leaching into the water. Betanzo told her that a , led by municipal water-quality expert , had found “really, really high” levels of lead in Flint water. (Edwards’ team ultimately concluded that at least a quarter of Flint households showed lead levels as much as 65 times the federal action level of 15 ppb. Health advocates say that allowable number should be 0 ppb. Some homes Edwards’ team tested showed lead levels of 13,200 ppb.)

Loopholes in the EPA’s Lead and Copper Rule allow for utilities to game the regulations and manipulate the data, Batanzo told her. The agencies test for the results they want, not what’s best for the health of the community.  

Lead in the water.

Hanna-Attisha’s fate suddenly hit a hairpin turn. All pediatricians know about lead, a powerful neurotoxin that disrupts brain development and is especially harmful for young children, potentially causing life-long, irreversible brain damage, developmental delays, speech problems and an increased risk for behavioral issues and serious chronic conditions. The implications for her Flint kids were horrific.

Even after hearing the facts, she didn’t want to believe them. The MDEQ couldn’t possibly be testing inaccurately or intentionally juking the results of tests that could have such devastating implications for the community? Surely not. But, she writes, her experience as an Iraqi immigrant, knowing that Saddam Hussein had gassed the Kurdish town of Halabja and murdered thousands of his own people, including children, had shown her at an early age what governments could be capable of.

After that conversation, she writes, a “fog of unreality” descended when she realized the enormity of what she—and Flint —were facing. From that point, science and Hanna-Attisha’s self-professed doggedness drove the story.

Balancing her impulse to launch into a full five-alarm Paul Revere moment with the need for a carefully constructed, fact-based scientific report, the devastated doctor began gathering statistics, knowing that every day meant harm to the children. Lead in the water threatened every tomorrow of every one of Flint’s children.

Addressing a public health crisis is like solving a mystery, employing just the right mix of instinct, insight, footwork, solid data, strategy and pure luck, Hanna-Attisha writes. When officialdom or fondly held beliefs get in the way, it’s time to speak science to power. And she did.

She soon found that just six months after the switch, General Motors had stopped using Flint water at its plant because it was so corrosive it was destroying metal engine parts. Despite that, no alarm bells had sounded about what such corrosive water could be doing to the city’s old lead water pipes.

Over the next month, Hanna-Attisha drew together a team of expert collaborators and together they worked to form an airtight argument: lead was in the water and action was demanded now. On September 24, 2015, roughly 28 days after she first heard about lead in Flint’s water, Hanna-Attisha and her team stood at a press conference and revealed her findings. She was ridiculed by the State of Michigan, with MDEQ spokesman Brad Wurfel accusing her of being irresponsible, “splicing and dicing numbers” and causing “near hysteria;” the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services dismissed her findings without actually looking at her study.

Though her conclusions were soon confirmed in professional journals and published in a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report, when Hanna-Attisha initially revealed her findings, she did so at great professional risk. Her research had not been peer-reviewed—the gold standard for scientific research—and if she got it wrong, her reputation and that of her hospital would have suffered significant damage. With the lives of children at stake, every day mattered. So, she broke the news, urged residents to stop drinking the water and set in motion the wheels that eventually led to a $641 million settlement for Flint families and indictments against nine public officials, including now-former Gov. Snyder, on 41 individual counts.

The brilliance of Hanna-Attisha’s book isn’t simply a description of events that led up to one of the nation’s most dramatic whistleblower events. What the eyes don’t see, she writes, is not just lead in the water, but the racism, inequity, heartless austerity policies and bureaucratic indifference that led to the crisis in the first place. The book’s title and central metaphor are taken from a D.H. Lawrence quote: “The eyes don’t see what the mind doesn’t know.” She took it upon herself to inform minds so eyes could see. She used her platform as a scientist, doctor and educator to craft a fierce indictment of a society and political system rigged from the jump against its members who are poor, brown and marginalized. Telling the story from her personal life and experience, she invites the reader to know her, to know her family and her values. When she talks about Flint’s families, she makes it clear that she believes health and happiness is their birthright as well. The contrast makes the criminality of official indifference even more obscene.

What the eyes also don’t see explicitly in Dr. Mona’s book is also richly there between the lines. In reading her book, we get to know her. It is apparent that “Dr. Mona” was able to accomplish what she did because of who she is. Her friends and colleagues knew her to be trustworthy and a person of ultimate integrity. With that knowledge as their basis, they stood together to right a terrible wrong. In her matter-of-fact telling, she presents the facts unadorned and unembellished.

The story of the Flint water crisis broke over the U.S. like a thunderclap — and was heard around the world. In the years since, further research has confirmed that Flint is by far not the only U.S. city with lead and other toxic chemicals in its drinking water.

In January 2021 a judge granted preliminary approval to a $641 million settlement to benefit Flint residents harmed by the contaminated water. Ex-governor Snyder and former Flint Public Works director Howard Croft were each charged with two counts of willful neglect of duty; other officials were charged with crimes ranging from felony counts of perjury, extortion and misconduct in office to misdemeanor counts of willful neglect of duty. Two officials have been indicted on nine counts of involuntary manslaughter in connection with a deadly outbreak of Legionnaires disease associated with water-quality issues.

Both Snyder and Wurfel have apologized to Hanna-Attisha.

Through a combination of corporate and private donations and government funding, Flint has created a number of programs to help Flint’s children, including universal pre-K, literacy and mental health programs, healthcare access and access to good nutrition — assets Hanna-Attisha says she wishes for all children.

More than 200 years ago, after realizing what a fight they’d have to put up to win this country’s independence, America’s founders pledged their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor to the cause. In this fight for the lives of America’s children, Hanna-Attisha did so as well, joining their ranks to become a true American hero.

The good news: most caregivers in that moment take a deep breath and dive in to do what’s needed to meet the baby’s needs, decipher the meaning of each type of cry and provide the infant with what’s needed to flourish and grow.

Fascinating new research now tells us that the baby isn’t the only one growing and changing in this scenario. The very act of this intense caregiving causes observable changes in the brain of the caregiver — developing “parenting brain.” Those changes aren’t limited to the biologic mother or even the birth father but occur in the brains of everyone intimately involved in caring for the baby.

Changes in the brain of those transitioning to a parenting role are less shaped by biological relationships and more shaped by the degree of caregiver involvement, researchers say. Rather than some people being hardwired “by nature” to be a parent, people become parents by how — and the degree to which — they respond to the child: The act of caregiving, not simply the act of giving birth, calibrates the brain.

Drs. Pilyoung Kim and Sarah Watamura of the University of Denver call this transition to parenting a co-occurring sensitive period, “two open windows,” a time in which both infant and parent are especially receptive to being shaped by their environments and mutual interactions. Kim and Watamura (who is a fellow with ), are co-authors of “,” a report that highlights research into this exceptionally sensitive period and its critical implications for effecting changes that can improve outcomes for children and parents alike. Co-authors Tiffany Phu and Andrew Erhart, graduate researchers at the University of Denver, led this report.

“Humans have these massive learning machines,” Watamura says. “We adapt to our circumstances; we can live anywhere in the world, learn any language — there are so many ways that we adapt, yet we seem repeatedly surprised when our brains support us in what we’re trying to do.

“In this situation where a person is learning to parent, engaging and using all their resources to do that, it’s not surprising that their brain would show changes as they face that challenge.”

Many parts of the brain that adapt to stressful situations are also those that help direct parenting behavior. The parent hears a loud cry and in the context of the fight-or-flight response, they have to learn to redirect and listen for whether that sound is a hungry cry or an urgent request for a diaper change. When a parent is tired and feeling overwhelmed, they have to manage their own emotions so that they don’t feel so constantly “on” that they exhaust themselves, while staying engaged enough to respond appropriately to their child. All of these actions tune their brain, their brilliant on-board computer that instantly processes these lessons for the next encounter.

Multiple studies have found that this strengthening of parenting-relevant brain circuitry takes place in both male and female caregivers and shows no difference between biological and non-biological parents. What the research does show, however, is stronger response to infant cues among primary versus secondary parents (as identified by the parents) regardless of their sex or biological relatedness—information that’s highly relevant for developing policy in adoption and foster-care systems.

Stress Complicates the Learning Curve

Parents who are dealing with high levels of stress in their own lives may not show changes to the parenting-relevant brain circuits thought to support sensitive interactions with their baby’s needs. If they lack access to shelter, food and healthcare and/or have a history of childhood adversity, the caregiver’s own stress responses can make it difficult for them to attend to their child’s needs. Their brains can be so involved in responding to survival threats that they process their infant’s cries as just one more stressful element—even the hormones that generally support parenting behavior can work differently for parents who have a history of adversity.

Despite the complex of challenges and stressors that can accompany poverty, it isn’t the determining factor here: Even parents who experience chronic poverty can and often do demonstrate sensitive caregiving and interact warmly with their infants.

“Brains adapt to environments,” says Phu. “We respond to the responsibilities that are put in front of us — which can be a beautiful thing. But if the environments themselves are unhealthy, riddled with inequalities and other stressors, brains will adapt to that as well [by] responding to threats in the environment. Babies’ cries are meant to be distressing so they can elicit response. It can be hard for a person to respond appropriately if the crying just adds to the distress.”

Substance abuse can also disrupt the brain-reward systems relevant to parenting, the researchers say. Studies have shown that using substances in pregnancy is associated with reduced brain activation to infant faces and cries. Substance abuse in the transition to parenthood not only risks passing along the substance in utero or in breast milk, but may disrupt important brain changes in both generations, research shows.

Watamura stresses that poverty, substance abuse, postpartum depression and other stressors don’t have to determine the future of either parent or child. What the researchers have discovered is that parents in various adverse circumstances are more sensitive to external inputs as they’re transitioning to parenting. They want help and they want to change. The logical approach from both a policy and practical perspective would be to create and deliver interventions that serve the whole family during this critical window when caregivers are interfacing with health and support systems and are motivated to change, and that’s precisely what Ascend’s approach provides. By working intentionally and simultaneously with children and the adults in their lives or reducing environmental stressors, it combines the best of both worlds to improve outcomes for both.

The research detailed in “Two Open Windows: Part II” shows that this big-picture approach isn’t just a good idea, its interventions have an observable, biologic effect on both caregiver and child.

“People know in their gut that (this approach) is the right thing to do,” Watamura says, “but being able to see the neurologic underpinnings and importance of supporting and intervening not only with the child but with the adults in their lives helps us understand the need to invest appropriately. It adds further depth to the understanding that it’s about the caregiving, not whether you’re male or female, heterosexual or homosexual. None of those is the driver. The caregiving is.”

Attachment-based interventions to help parents and children build their relationships can take a variety of forms, from one-on-one counseling to small-group sessions or providing practice and modeling of core parenting skills. Equally important, improving material conditions of families living in poverty has been proven to have lasting beneficial effects.

Helping caregivers develop parenting brain is less often a knowledge gap for those experiencing poverty and more a “material resources and mental energy” gap, the researchers say.

“One of the pieces of this research that is really important is the fact that parental brain systems are also stress systems,” says Erhart. “Just addressing some of the stress that parents are experiencing, either through stress-reduction programs or by reducing the stressful environment itself, also function as an intervention.”

These types of interventions have been around for a while: the new body of research tracking caregiver brain changes provides unmistakable evidence of the impact of such interventions and points to the need to “think bigger,” the researchers say, about crafting policy that supports all caregivers regardless of sex or biologic connection to the baby.

The good news is that evidence exists, and the tool is readily available. The even better news for parents and caretakers? It’s free and simple: talk, listen and respond to children when they’re babies and toddlers. It’s all about the conversation.

has shown that the amount of interactive talk with adults that children experience in their first three years of life is directly related to their verbal abilities and IQ in adolescence. Researchers with LENA (Language Environment Analysis), a national nonprofit that helps communities accelerate language development in children birth to 3, began studying families in 2006 to observe the amount of adult words and back-and-forth conversations children were exposed to in their daily lives.

“For years, we’ve stressed the importance of what we call ‘conversational turns’ as one of the most predictive measures of child outcomes,” says Dr. Jill Gilkerson, LENA’s chief research and evaluation officer. “We were in a really unique position of having that early data and then being able to locate those kids in adolescence and have them participate in language and cognitive tests. Longitudinal studies are rare in this field and we now have long-term, empirical evidence of the benefits of early language exposure.”

For the original study, Gilkerson and her team enlisted more than 300 families with children 2 to 48 months old to participate in daylong LENA sessions for six months using a device that captured talk between the child and their caregivers. Often referred to as a “talk pedometer,” the LENA device doesn’t recognize individual words, but uses speech recognition algorithms that estimate word counts based on syllables, consonant distributions, duration and other characteristics.

The device weighs about two ounces and is small enough to slip into the pocket of a little vest the child wears. Parents were asked to turn the device on at the beginning of the day, leave it on and let it run out by itself. The information was then transferred to a cloud-processing system where the LENA software analyzed the captured audio and presented clear reports that are shared with parents and caregivers. The audio was deleted right after this processing so there’s never a record of what has been said.

Here’s how it works. The LENA algorithms are trained to identify and differentiate adult and child speech from TV, electronic media and background sounds. It automatically estimates the number of conversational turns between child and adult. The data show that those are the interactions that figure so dramatically in later outcomes: Children who experience more conversational turns as toddlers do measurably better academically and socially as adolescents.

“Conversational turns” refers to the back and forth talk between adult and child — even before the child has actual words. Gilkerson compares it to a verbal “serve and return” like ping pong. Gilkerson’s research and other important studies demonstrate that it isn’t the sheer number of words a child is exposed to but these conversational turns that make the difference in a child’s brain development and language learning. Torrents of words and human sounds wash over a baby from birth: it’s the social interaction that make those words stick — and make the language centers of the baby’s brain light up like a Christmas tree.

“The number of those conversational turns, especially at 18 to 24 months, has been shown to be the most predictive of child language development, as well as long-term cognitive outcomes and language outcomes,” she says. “They’re a measure of what the child is actually engaged in, not just passively listening to adult words, but their actual experience with language.”

The LENA technology offers a particularly hopeful solution to the documented “word gap” between children in lower socio-economic circumstances and middle- to higher-income families. The gap—which say amounts to a 30-million-word advantage by the time better-resourced children reach age 4 — does exist, but the LENA research proves that remedies can be available to every family.

Using the LENA analysis, researchers have been able to provide parents, caregivers and early childhood educators with rapid feedback about their verbal interactions.

“We’re able to show parents information about their LENA day compared to a normative sample,” Gilkerson says. “If it’s low, we can share techniques for improving those interactions, and when they make changes, they can see increases in the objective data, which can be very motivating. On the other side of it, it’s been great to be able to show some families what a wonderful job they’re already doing. Some of them are already really interacting with their children a lot — and it can be validating for them to be able to see that.

“It’s not necessarily the case that all high-income parents are talking a lot with their kids,” she says. “There’s a gigantic range within all socioeconomic groups. There’s a distribution (with more interaction at higher-income levels), but it’s important to know that we can change those trajectories through intervention. We can provide feedback and get those parents engaged.”

Particularly with lower-income parents who may be working multiple jobs and experience a great deal of pressure on their time and resources, Gilkerson and her team stress that incorporating conversational turns doesn’t have to be something “extra” to add to an already overburdened daily reality.

“For a parent who’s working long hours and experiencing a lot of challenges, it might not be top of mind for them to provide a language-rich environment for their child,” she says. “But if we can just educate them on the importance of talking with their child — even when they aren’t yet able to talk to you, it does make such a difference. Even just having a few minutes at the end of the day to sit and read a little. They don’t have to read a book from cover to cover — it’s all about having a conversation about the book. Let them interrupt, ask questions and talk, talk, talk with them. If a parent can do that daily, then they can really improve things for their child.”

LENA has developed comprehensive coaching curriculums that couple with the data from their technology to support parents, teachers and home visitors. The programs are implemented by trusted community partners like libraries, school districts and state agencies. is an evidence-based community program in which parents use LENA’s technology and meet for 10 weekly sessions (virtually or in person) to increase conversation with their young children. A facilitator introduces for talking with their children and the group discusses the tips, then goes home to try them and returns to discuss how the experience went. The program started in 2015 with two sites; it’s now up to 31 active sites, reaching more than 4,800 children.

In addition to being a great way for parents to learn the skills of incorporating quality talk into daily routines with their small children, it’s also a great way to build social capital in the community, she says.

launched in its current form in 2016 and has reached more than 4,700 children so far. The program supports home visitors who work one-on-one with families to increase their focus on talk and positive adult-child interactions. Other LENA tools are also available for speech pathologists, researchers and others who need scientifically reliable speech-language measurements for babies and young children.

, started in 2017, is a research-based professional development program for infant, toddler and pre-K teachers that couples LENA’s “talk pedometer” technology with strengths-based coaching that doesn’t pile more onto their schedules. It is currently operating in 162 centers and has reached more than 9,700 children since its inception.

“I’m most excited about LENA Grow,” Gilkerson says. “If we really want to move the needle and have a large, population-level effect, we want to train the people who will be interacting with a lot of children.

“I’ve been so encouraged by the fact that teachers really love this data. A lot of people in this field are not given ongoing opportunities for growth and professional development. Having someone acknowledge the importance of their work and being provided with a tool that can give them feedback can be very elevating for them. Most of them are attracted to the field because they love being able to help the children in their care.

“There are so many children who spend more than half of their waking hours in childcare or preschool at a time when their little brains are growing so quickly. Think of how many children a childcare professional can impact over their lifetime.”

Organizations globally are now using LENA programs to enrich their communities’ language environments for children and to build early literacy skills, strengthen families and increase school readiness. This offers details.

Think how many children in the world these programs can affect and how many verbally adept, intelligent, socially engaged adolescents — soon to be adults — that translates into. Just think.

“One of the things that happens in human development,” Davidson says, “is that the prefrontal cortex matures as we get older. It’s an important part of the brain that enables us to do what psychologists call mental time travel, where we can anticipate the future and reflect on the past. But in preschoolers, where the prefrontal cortex is not so developed, they’re not worrying about tomorrow. Their future is maybe three minutes from now.”

Teaching children mindfulness is easy, he says, but must be done in an age-appropriate way that looks very different from how meditation practices are typically taught to adults. One strategy he recommends for preschoolers is to practice belly breathing where the children lie on their backs and a little stone or stuffed animal is placed on their tummies. They’re asked to simply observe the stuffed animal or stone moving up and down as they breathe for a minute or two.

“They are really easily able to do that,” Davidson says, “and they get it immediately.”

Another technique is to have the children sit and listen keenly while the instructor rings a bell or chime, and to raise their hands when they can no longer hear the sound.

“You can be in a classroom with 20 kids, and the quietness and stillness are palpable during that time. As soon as they stop hearing the sound, they start jumping up and waving their hands. But for at least that 10 or 15 seconds, they can really taste what stillness is like, and they love it. They frequently will ask for it because at a non-conceptual, visceral level, they know that it’s beneficial.”

Once a child has “tasted the stillness,” Davidson says, they can return to it again and again and it becomes a useful strategy in learning their own self-regulation. Mindfulness isn’t just a way to get fidgety little ones to be quiet for a while; it serves as a means for them to be in charge of themselves — to learn to calm themselves and modulate their thoughts, behavior and emotional responses to their environment — skills that studies have shown to be robust predictors of success in multiple major life outcomes, from physical wellness and financial success to the likelihood of avoiding substance abuse or engaging in antisocial behavior.

“A large body of longitudinal data show that kids who have a better capacity for self-regulation at age 4 or 5 do better in life. If we can teach those skills early in life — and we can — they will have multiplicative effects as the children develop.”

Davidson, professor of psychology and psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is the founder and director of the . He came to the topic of mindfulness and the study of healthy minds by way of a question he couldn’t answer: Why are some people vulnerable and some resilient? He was already a neuroscientist in 1992 when he first met His Holiness the Dalai Lama, with whom he is now a close associate and friend, who issued a challenge that altered the direction of Davidson’s career and led to his groundbreaking investigation of emotion and the brain, for which he is now recognized as a global authority.

“You’ve been using the tools of modern neuroscience to investigate anxiety, fear and depression,” the Dalai Lama said. “Why can’t you use those tools to study kindness and compassion, to study the positive qualities of life?” Davidson says that simple challenge was a wakeup call that led him to focus on well-being and healthy qualities of mind and ultimately to the establishment of the Center for Healthy Minds. More recently, the Center has launched a “Kindness Curriculum” aimed at promoting social, emotional and academic skills among preschoolers.

It all starts with mindfulness, which is foundational in answering Davidson’s question about resilience. He defines resilience as the rapidity with which one recovers from adversity. To paraphrase the bumper sticker, he says, “stuff happens.” No one can lead a life completely buffered from adversity. Resilience is about how we bounce back from the stuff.

“And it turns out that the simple skills of mindful awareness can help us return back to that baseline more quickly. We can measure this objectively — it’s not based on self-reporting but actually measured in behavior and physiology, and in the brain. We have shown that through the increased practice of simple mindful awareness techniques you can actually learn to become more resilient and to recover more quickly from adversity.”

“This is not only at the core of our psychological well-being, but our physical health as well. Some of those systems that need to recover are the stress biology systems; for example, the stress hormone cortisol. Researchers have measured cortisol levels following an acute stressor and know that people differ dramatically in how quickly they come back to baseline. This has tremendous applications for physical health because when cortisol remains elevated beyond the point where it is serving a function, it can have really deleterious effects on the brain and the body.”

Developing an acquaintance with mindful awareness, Davidson says, is one of the “Four Pillars of Well-being” that the Center has identified. The next, which builds on mindfulness, is connection, the qualities that promote healthy social relationships such as kindness, compassion, appreciation and gratitude. The third and fourth pillar are insight and a sense of purpose, but Davidson says those really begin to take on significance in the early teen years. Kindness and connection start very early.

“We have done randomized, controlled trials on simple practices designed to cultivate kindness and compassion in both kids and adults and the practices translate into real behavior,” he says. “In one trial we did with preschool children with our Kindness Curriculum, we found that compared to a randomized control group, the kids who received our curriculum behaved more altruistically on a hard-nosed measure of altruistic sharing compared to their classmates who received a standard curriculum. These and other findings indicate that with practice kindness can be learned, which has led us to a simple but very radical conclusion, which is that characteristics like kindness — and well-being more generally — should be regarded as skills.”

The good news in this finding is that skills, unlike qualities which are innate, can be taught, practiced and learned.

“We all have various kinds of early predispositions, genetic and environmental, and have a starting place. But these characteristics can be further nurtured and developed. The way we now think about kindness and compassion is very much like the way scientists think about language. We all come into the world with a biological propensity for language, but we know that if we’re not raised in a normal, linguistic community, language won’t develop normally.

“Similarly, kindness and compassion are part of what it means to be human, and there are good data showing that the vast majority of young infants, when given a choice, behave in a prosocial, altruistic way.”

The default response for humans is to help others, not to be selfish, he says. But in order for those seeds to grow, they have to be intentionally cultivated. And they must be, he says. As the news of the day continues to underscore, humans have to learn to get along more cooperatively and compassionately: The flourishing of humanity and the planet are at stake.

It all begins with mindful awareness, and if you want to get started learning on your own, it’s easy. Just put a stuffed animal on your belly and breathe.

If Dr. Catherine Monk and her research team have their way, these visits soon will routinely include high-quality psychological interventions as well, based on researchers’ growing awareness of the effect mental and emotional stress during pregnancy can have on the mother’s health and the baby’s brain development.

Monk, professor of medical psychology in the Departments of OB/Gyn and Psychiatry at Columbia University Irving Medical Center, directs the department’s research laboratory, where a team of researchers focuses on the earliest influences on children’s development by connecting perinatal psychiatry, developmental psychobiology and neuroscience to study child development in utero.

Their research increasingly underscores the direct links between a mother’s psychological and emotional wellbeing, and changes taking place in her developing child’s brain.

As one strategy to help women and prevent mental health risks for their future children, Monk leads a new integrated care program, Women’s Mental Health @Ob/Gyn, that embeds mental health care practitioners within obstetrics and gynecology, and employs all the tools at their disposal to help reduce stress levels in their pregnant patients.

Adult psychiatric illness and mental health issues such as depression are known to be profoundly affected by the genes a person inherits and by the quality of care they receive as a child. Researchers now know a pregnant woman’s stress, anxiety and depression can create a “third pathway” for mental health concerns, Monk says.

The precise mechanism of the damage to the child’s neural development isn’t fully known, but numerous animal models and epidemiological samples indicate that distress-based changes in pregnant women’s biology are associated with negative cardiovascular, metabolic and psychological effects in their children. The release of cortisol, adrenaline and other stress hormones creates a chemical stew that can alter the brain chemistry of the fetus: Reduce the mother’s stress and lessen the harm to the developing child.

Though the womb is a baby’s first home and as influential as any they will ever have, researchers are just getting started probing its mysteries. “About 20% of pregnancies end in miscarriage, which is usually in the first trimester. Is that because of such a big stress effect that the baby doesn’t make it?” Monk says.

“The second trimester is a time of phenomenal brain development, but the synaptogenesis (the development of neural circuits) really peaks in the third trimester. In the third trimester, we start seeing early births, and stress possibly plays a role in those. We are in our infancy in terms of parsing out which trimester is particularly relevant to what exposure.”

One dramatic effect that is known about stress — and that illustrates its profound influence in utero — is that fewer male babies are born to women who are physically and psychologically stressed. On average, about 105 males are born for every 100 female births, but one study Monk and her colleagues conducted measured 27 different indicators of psychosocial, physical and lifestyle stress, and found that about a third of the women were experiencing “clinically meaningful” high levels of mental stress and sub-clinical levels of physical stress. Among these women, the male-to-female birth ratios were dramatically altered, 40/60 and 30/70, respectively.

After social upheavals such as the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the relative number of male births decreased, Monk says. Studies have shown that males fetuses are more vulnerable to adverse environmental conditions. This suggests that highly stressed women are less likely to have male babies because they lose the pregnancy, often without even knowing that they were pregnant.

“Many researchers want to study women who are pregnant during our current, very stressful period,” she says. From the COVID pandemic itself to job losses, loss of health insurance, concerns about family members, changes in hospital labor and delivery policies, a woman’s inability to have her caregivers with her for the birth or with her at home afterward, the Year 2020 wins the stress sweepstakes for just about all of us, and especially so for pregnant women. What this will mean for babies born during this time will bear close watching — and interventions whenever and wherever they can be made.

Despite the fact that 10 to 15% of women in the U.S. experience depression in pregnancy or postpartum — and up to 30% when substance abuse and anxiety are factored in — most pregnant women encounter barriers to accessing mental health services. Most insurance companies don’t cover behavioral health care or do so adequately, so women have to go outside their network for it — if they are able to get it at all. The consequences are not only devastating for the depressed woman and her developing child, they are costly for society.

Important Interventions

Monk emphasizes that, though prenatal stress has these effects on the developing child, it isn’t in itself a life sentence for the baby. Important interventions such as regular obstetric visits that keep a close eye on the mother’s blood pressure, weight and other health indicators can make a big difference, as can making sure the woman receives adequate nutrition and supplemental vitamins, particularly iron and zinc.

The care and warm interaction both a mother and baby receive during the postpartum period can also go a long way toward mitigating prenatal harms. As it turns out, social interaction is good medicine for both mother and child.  ĚýĚý

The good news is that none of the prenatal and postpartum interventions Monk and her team recommend are massive, intrusive or burdensome. Their Women’s Mental Health service deploys two psychologists, two social workers and two psychiatric nurse practitioners — one of whom is a doula — to meet their pregnant patients’ emotional and mental health needs.

Another intervention is called (Practical Resources for Effective Postpartum Parenting), which Monk describes as “very light-touch” — six sessions in which a coach prepares women for the postpartum period with mindfulness tools so they can find groundedness and calm when they need it. We provide education about what to expect with their baby coming, and provide a lot of tools for them to feel confident in being able to take care of the baby.

“The mother’s calm can then help the baby be its calmest self, too.”

Monk says the pandemic has required that these PREPP sessions now be conducted via telemedicine, but that has created a silver lining in showing that even prenatal visits can be successfully conducted through smartphones. This is especially important for women who are economically, socially or geographically disadvantaged — which all too often means women of color.

As with other effects of intergenerational stress and poverty, Black women and other women of color are disproportionately affected by both physical and psychological stress, which makes interrupting the pattern particularly important. Even families that don’t have computers at home usually have a smartphone, so the ability to reach these women through telemedicine opens up a whole new arena of accessibility for populations without access to the internet.

Though social distancing is one of the primary keys to controlling the spread of coronavirus, following distancing orders during these times can be especially difficult for pregnant women. Family and friends should never underestimate their ability to stay connected and make a dramatic difference simply by calling, Zooming, FaceTiming and using technology in whatever ways they can to provide the social support that is so essential for a woman during her pregnancy and in the postpartum period.

Monk says her intention is that the Women’s Mental Health @Ob/Gyn project will serve as a model for embedding mental health care into America’s obstetric practice nationwide and eventually pave the way for including behavioral health services in primary care settings more generally. When families are able to access counseling and psychotherapy as easily as they can get a strep test or cholesterol screening, that will be one giant step for a healthy — and mentally well — human future.

Although it sounds like a sweet job almost anyone could enjoy, being a toy waver in this context is actually a tricky task involving significant training, according to Dr. Sarah Lytle, I-LABS’ Director of the Outreach and Education division.

The toy waver keeps infants’ and toddlers’ attention while they sit for as long as possible in one of the most technologically advanced brain-imaging devices in the world, specifically modified to scan the brains of the youngest humans. As the baby focuses on the stuffed animal, soap bubbles or cloth Slinky the toy waver deploys, the lab’s magnetoencephalography, dubbed , silently measures minute changes in the electric field of the child’s brain — giving researchers a clear idea of how and when the child responds to various stimuli. The torrent of data these scans provide has given scientists’ unprecedented information particularly in relation to how human babies learn language and our practically endless capacity for statistics and computation.

I-LABS is the first lab in the world to put an awake baby in a MEG; it’s one of the only MEG devices used primarily for research with infants and toddlers. One of the key features of this MEG is that it’s noiseless, which, as any adult who has endured an MRI can affirm, is a huge plus. Because the machine measures minuscule alterations in the magnetic field, the room has to be free of metal — requirements that combine to create a significant design challenge, Lytle says. Ultimately I-LABS purchased a MEG machine from Finland and re-engineered it somewhat to create a molded-plastic, hydraulic high-chair apparatus that operates silently and gives the babies room to move their heads so they don’t feel constrained or pinned down — a recipe for upset, as any parent can attest.

A little cap fitted with GPS sensors tells the machine where the baby’s head is located at all times so measurements can be adjusted instantly for head movements. The child’s parents watch from a waiting room where a video feed provides up-to-the minute feedback on the baby’s responses.

Then, the toy waver’s job really gets under way.

“We use noiseless toys that are interesting for a child,” Lytle says, “but not so interesting that they want to reach out and grab the toy. Ideally, we keep the children in this sort of glazed-over state where data collection happens best. We have a short window of time with younger kids because of their tolerance level.”

An especially important finding of this precise imaging technology has been that children apparently have no limit to their capacity for language learning, Lytle says. Researchers have suspected this for some time, she says, but seeing in real time how the baby’s brain responds to language learning provides the science-based evidence.

Further, she says, I-LABS researchers have discovered that learning multiple languages appears to help with cognitive flexibility, as the scans have revealed increased activity in the frontal lobes of children who are bilingual. The frontal lobe is the area of the brain responsible for higher-order thinking skills, which scientists refer to as “executive functions” — tasks like inhibition and activation of actions.

“A bilingual child gets natural practice with these skills as they toggle back and forth between each of the languages in their lives,” Lytle says. “For instance, if Mom is speaking to you in Spanish, you need to activate your Spanish response and inhibit your English response, and if your teacher is speaking to you in English, you need to activate English and inhibit Spanish.

“A child who has greater cognitive flexibility is going to be the one who waits with their hand raised to be called on instead of blurting out the answer, because they have that impulse control. They might be better at switching between the transition time in a classroom when they’re done with recess and have to go do math.”

One inestimable value of the I-LABS’ MEG research has been that the lab has studied thousands of infants at different ages and have created maps of babies and toddlers’ brains, which provides a collection of brain atlases of data-based information about the functional area of the brain signals are coming from. I-LABS has made these atlases open source so any researcher anywhere in the world can have unprecedented access to data that shows what’s going on in those brilliant baby brains.

As co-director of the at the University of Washington, Kuhl holds the Bezos Family Foundation Endowed Chair for Early Childhood Learning and is an internationally recognized authority on early language and brain development. She is also an enthusiastic believer in the brilliance of babies, with plenty of scientific data to back her up.

“No computer, no matter how sophisticated, can do what a baby can do in listening to language input and deriving the words, grammar and the sound contrasts that create language,” she says. “No artificial intelligence in the world has been able to do that so far.”

Thanks to the University of Washington I-LAB’s magnetoencephalography (MEG) brain-imaging machine, a one-of-a-kind mechanical tour de force, researchers have been able to scan babies’ brains in a way that is safe, noninvasive and silent to pick up with millimeter accuracy the magnetic fields that respond as a baby is listening and learning. It is the first machine in the world able to record babies’ brain imaging as they are learning, providing what Kuhl calls a “tsunami of data” about what’s going on in their brains.

Long before a baby can understand a single word, their brains are crunching statistics to sort out the frequency with which a particular sound occurs. Babies start out as “citizens of the world,” Kuhl says, able to distinguish all the sounds associated with human language from background noise no matter what country or what language they encounter. At six to eight months, the brain scans of babies throughout the world light up equally in response to all human language sounds. About two months later, an incredible shift occurs: babies begin to ignite only to the languages around them to the exclusion of other languages. If the language in the baby’s environment is Japanese, for example, their brain scans will show no response to English Rs and Ls. But if the language in their world is English, multiple areas of their brains will light up in response to the abundance of Rs and Ls they hear. By 10 months, she says, a trained ear can hear that Chinese babies are babbling differently from the French babies who are babbling differently from the American infants.

Babies’ brains are not automatons though, Kuhl says, and this rich learning only happens when the input comes from social interaction with other human beings.

“Our studies contrasted a foreign language tutor, who spoke either Mandarin or Spanish, with the exact same material presented over a DVD,” she says. “The babies crawl up to the television and watch it. But the tests afterwards that measure learning demonstrated that those watching TV (or listening to an audio recording) learned nothing. They were just like the control (subjects) who had only listened to English.”

The only group of babies who actually learned were listening and interacting with a person, which lit up their brain scans in ways that showed that they were “socially electrified, watching everything that was going on and learning like crazy,” Kuhl says.

The takeaway is that the brain’s statistical learning is only part of the language equation. Those statistical processes launch when babies are engaged with a social “other,” she says. The human mind is hard-wired to pick out patterns, and babies need social interaction to put those patterns in context, to receive the smiles and nods and reinforcement that say, “Yes, you’re really onto something with that ‘ba ba’ thing.”

Some parents think that because their babies aren’t saying words yet, the parents don’t need to talk to them, but precisely the opposite is true, Kuhl says. The brain is waiting for the back-and-forth that helps it sort language out of the sound soup that surrounds the baby. And that call-and-response not only activates the auditory centers in their brain but the areas that involve motor response, which indicates that even before the baby can talk, engaging with people speaking to them activates the motor centers that will be needed for response once the child’s vocal mechanism develops enough to form words.

A third, equally important, finding in Kuhl’s research is the particular way in which parents and caregivers speak with their babies.

Researchers call the speech pattern “parentese,” and it is distinctly different from baby talk — not “Um’s a widdle cutie patootie,” but “Is that a ball? Is it a red ball?” Parentese is a grammatically simple, here-and-now vocabulary that is slow and deliberate, with a singsong, upbeat tone that grabs the baby’s attention. As the child’s brain tries to map what sounds are happening most frequently, the “linguistic units” need to be clear. Parentese makes them clearer and cleaner.

As further evidence of babies’ sophisticated computational capacity, the researchers’ data show that babies in bilingual or even multilingual environments are learning those languages, too. As long as the input is happening and social interaction is present, Kuhl says, babies can hear Mom speaking one language, Dad speaking another and even Grandma speaking a third and their brains keep learning the sounds, words and grammar of the additional languages, with no confusion and no slow-down on the developmental timeline.

Plainly, Kuhl says, the U.S. needs to start teaching foreign languages much, much earlier — before the first birthday, if other languages are to be natural for the child.

With this incredible human gift of language comes great responsibility, Kuhl says. A baby’s mind-boggling on-board computer isn’t a turn-key operation: It needs deliberate language input, stimulation and interaction, early and often. Experience builds the brain.

“It’s not as though you just birth the baby, turn it on like a Christmas tree and it’s done,” she says. “No computer in the world can learn like a baby, but that comes with a responsibility for the adults in the culture to provide the social, cognitive and linguistic world that brain needs.”

Disclosure: The Bezos Family Foundation provides financial support for Early Learning Nation.

The University of Washington’s brings together experts in psychology, neuroscience, computer science, radiology and more. Breakthrough research is the institute’s raison d’ĂŞtre, but it also prioritizes putting its findings into the hands of people who can use it.

And that’s where the marine biologist comes in. Marley Jarvis, used to study plankton at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico in a submersible, but two years ago she made the switch to I-LABS. “Scientists follow their curiosity,” she says. (In case you’re wondering, plankton, the most prevalent animals on earth, don’t have brains, but .)

Jarvis has a special interest in neuroplasticity, a phenomenon she summarizes with the simple but thrilling statement: “We’re literally shaping our brains as we experience life.” Neuroplasticity, which is especially strong in young children, plays a starring role in the short video that she directed, narrated and illustrated (yes—a scientist who can draw. ?)

The video came together in seven days. It had to, in order to make the deadline for the American Psychological Association’s (PsycShorts, for short). Jarvis brought her colleagues together to shine a light on a study by I-LABS’ Tal-Chen Rabinowitch and Andrew N. Meltzoff that was published in The Journal of Experimental Child Psychology.

The study points to a correlation between “synchronized movement”—think of activities like marching and clapping together—and working cooperatively. The video shows children jumping on a trampoline while holding hands as well as swinging on swings in unison, which is the activity used in Rabinowitch and Meltzoff’s study. Similar effects chronicled by the study starts as early as 14 months of age.

“Given the visual nature of the research method,” Jarvis says, “It made sense to go beyond words.” At the same time, the limitations of a short video required being selective about what to show and what to leave out. “There are 10 different stories you can tell,” she says.

Inspired by the tight deadline, the I-LABS team stuck with simple but engaging drawings and a concise narration. “The contest was a good excuse to try something new,” she says. In June, PsycShorts named it .

When asked about the implications of the synchronous movement study, Jarvis says, “Humans are greatly influenced by the social experiences we have with others. We’re learning quite a bit about what goes into behavior.” These insights help us move beyond inaccurate and, ultimately, damaging preconceived notions about kids being “good” or “bad.”

What happens when a child is labeled “bad”? A found that 50,000 preschoolers were suspended at least once in 2016, and another 17,000 were expelled. ()

Jarvis recognizes that academics don’t have all the answers to the problem. “Parents and teachers have expertise that we don’t,” she says, “but we’ve found that research and day-to-day experience really complement each other.”

She views the study as more than a neat trick for preschool classroom management. It demonstrates, she says, that synchronous experience can make us feel like someone else. And that, she says, is the beginning of empathy.