Santos – importance of caregiving

Although a baby is born with all the neurons in the brain that an adult has, about a hundred billion, sort of like the number of stars in the milky way is a way of thinking how complex the brain is most of those neurons are not well connected, hence they are dependent on the experience of the child in the first few years and pregnancy period.  When you look at pictures of the brain at that level you see those connections happening through those early years.  You find that, at around that age two and three probably you looked at from a developmental perspective, that¹s the time that there is the most connections in the brain because the child¹s brain is so active.  In fact, if you define being smart as the ability to learn new things, babies far and away out pace adults in terms of their ability to learn.  They are literally geniuses in terms of the way they approach the world. 

Another thing we¹ve learned about those early years is that it used to be assumed that babies were born as blank slates, they don¹t know very much, they didn¹t do very much, they just sat there, cried every now and then, and then you feed them.  The truth is with the new research is that babies are born with already an enormous amount of knowledge of how the world works and how it is organized and how to live in the world.  What they rely on caring adults for is to help shape that learning further in all domains of development, their social development, emotionally and in terms of their learning ability, so that sculpting that occurs really depends on that interaction in every way with caring adults, whether that¹s playing, talking or reading or any number of ways that adults typically interact when they encounter a child. 

We find is that there has been a lot of worry on the part of parents and adults that care for children as to what you do with these babies and how best to maximize their development. When, in fact, the kinds of things that I think the research shows that most  adults unconsciously do when they’re around children, which is to pick them up and cuddle them and play with them and talk to them in baby talk and all that. All of those things that we sort of unconsciously do are in fact some of the best things we can do with a child. You don’t need any special toys or books, with apologies to the people who sell those things. What you need is a caring adult with a consistent time, space and opportunity to be in the life of the child in that important period.