Hertzman – healthy development 

The first question I’d like to address is this: Why is early child development important and particularly important for people like you to think about? And the answer is very simple. It’s because it is a determining influence on subsequent life chances and health. In other words, the conditions of early childhood and early child development go on to influence health, wellbeing, learning and behavior throughout the balance of a child’s life course.  

This animated graphic shows very clearly why that would be true, and what it shows basically is that in those early years and as you can see along the bottom axis it shows from zero through to seven showing the preschool and the early schooling ages,  that there are a whole series of different basic competencies that the developing brain is developing, and when they are at their maximum sensitivity, that is to say when each of these curves reaches the top, they are sensitive to the environments where children are growing up. That’s what sensitivity means, so brain cell to brain cell connections are being made and irrelevant connections are being sculpted away and they are occurring according to the qualities of the environments that children are growing up in. You can see that there is a whole series of different major competencies here.  

But what I’d like to do is focus your attention just on three to four and five. During that period of time, the child really needs a lot of opportunity to have a consistent set of faces up close at about 13 inches or 20 centimeters or 25 cm I should say at the focal length so that they can start to recognize facial expressions and encode facial expressions in terms of emotional information. This is what allows attachment to occur, and children who don’t get strong visual connections in those early years then have very much trouble understanding the information that human faces provide them around and are at risk for a number of negative social outcomes because of that. 

Another example is the pair of emotional control and habitual ways of responding. Here what we understand is that in a critical window between age 2 and 5 is the greatest chance we have to help children become helpful and empathic and to get away from being physically aggressive in their social interactions with other children. So it turns that out in the second year of life, as children are mobile enough to interact with each other physically that a large proportion of them simply declare themselves to be physically aggressive. And it is during this period of time then that if the kids are in strong, nurturant environments that we can transform those physically aggressive responses into language which allows them to develop negotiation skills. 

A third example is language development itself and as you can see the peak  of sensitivity here is reached at about age 2, but the brain is highly sensitive to language development throughout the early years. What we know during this period of time is, is that your ability to understand language, and your ability to express language in the ways that you need to do in the modern world goes up as a straight- dose response with the amount, and the richness and the variety of language that you hear in your day-to-day living. So children who don’t hear much language spoken to them or only ever hear it spoken to them to give them orders will have a much more restricted ability to understand language and express themselves in language than children who are asked questions, who are read bedtime stories, who are talked with about their thoughts and their feelings, who adults get down at eye level with them so that children can decode the social and emotional information that goes along with their language. And these are the principle concerns of early child development.