Clinton – love builds brains

So I’m an infant, child and adolescent psychiatrist and I’ve spent a lot of my time trying to understand how I can support parents and caregivers, early childhood educators and teachers, how I can support them in their role in helping children to be the best they can be.  And we’ve got, we’ve had an explosion of knowledge about how the brain grows and people, you know, talking about oh, you need enriched environments and stimulating and I think that that’s made people a bit fearful about oh, I might kind of wreck it, not do it quite right. So I really wanted to come with a normalizing message of love is what children need.  What they need is the back and forth, the serve and return of everyday activities. It’s to build children’s language; it’s not about flash cards.  It’s about lovingly interacting with them, talk to them, take turns with them, read to them.   

So that loving approach to brain building I felt was really very important to bring to parents because fear interferes with learning and we really want parents to be able to enjoy these years, not be afraid, “oh, I’m not doing enough of the right thing”. 

Well, when I talk about how the brain moves from weighing about a pound at birth to weighing three pounds in the first couple of years and the experiences, all of the things I talk about;  talking and soothing ; that it’s those experiences through the senses that literally builds the brain.   

At first parents are a bit fearful, you know, if their children are over three or six they go oh, I didn’t do that, I didn’t do that. But then with more dialogue, recognizing that the experiences that the majority of children have are ones that are really good enough, that the loving nature of interactions, that it’s more important to put down your cell phone and interact with your baby.  That it’s more important to have the buggy, the baby facing you because the baby is a little scientist. Their brains are formed by the loving interactions so they’re watching your face. They’re watching what you do.  They’re watching to see is mommy or daddy are they making a strange face?  If they are I’ll hold back.  So introducing the baby as a scientist, as a little marvel, parents love it, they absolutely, absolutely love it.