Mustard – optimizing brain stimulation

The question that comes up is why should people who are going to work with early childhood, why should they understand brain development? I guess the primary reason is that how you set up the experience for the infant and toddler and young child has a huge effect on brain development. So if you understand the story and the scientific basis behind this, then you’ll appreciate that the problem-based learning i.e., play, that an infant or toddler is in engaged in should be optimizing maximum stimulation to the brain through a variety of sensing pathways. So if you watch all young animals, by the way, contact for them is important. They certainly look at you in the eye, watching a kitten in my household watches my eyes in spades.  All these are sensing systems that go in and so the last thing I like to see is when I watch kids who are in a day care centre being pushed in a cart with the kids all looking forward, not looking back to the pusher, and the pusher is not talking to them.  So if you think about optimizing of signals to the brain for its development, then the arrangement you set for the child will be different than if you don’t understand brain development.