Stanley – nurturing

Well this is where I think it’s very exciting because we now know more about brain development and child development than we ever have. Of course we used to have it intuitively. When I talk to some of our Aboriginal researchers and colleagues, the equivalent of your First Nations people, they say, “Why are you researching this? We’ve know about this for 40,000 years.” And my answer to them is: We seem to have forgotten it. We seem to have forgotten how important those early years are to develop the knowledge and capacity to interact with peers, to have a capacity to understand your environment and to be able to be competent within it. And to actually have these wonderful social interactions that enable you to be an intellectually and socially competent person. We have forgotten how important those early times are. When you think about it, it’s logical. It’s so logical.  

But what’s been very important and exciting is the neuroscience research, the brain research, which has shown how incredibly important the brain development is, both in utero, in the womb, and in those first three, four, five years of life. While there’s obviously quite an important genetic component for the big picture of what a brain looks like, we all have cerebellums, we all have a cortex, we all have an amygdala, we all have a temporal cortex and so on. But how those parts of the brain work together and actually become competent in utero, in those first few years, are due to those social environments around a child. It’s that sensory input; it’s about how these peers, these parents, these environments around that child; auditory, visual but also the ones that turn on the frontal cortex, particularly the nurturing environments, the appropriate response to crying, the breast feeding, the reading to the child, the talking, the really stupid things you say to a child, which is in fact developing that child’s understanding about how social interactions occur. And in fact we know now that that turns on specific neuro-endocrine pathways in the brain. It’s wonderful stuff.  
 
So that gives us a very strong message about the importance of these interactions and teaching parents about these interactions. They’re not just inconsequential; they are vitally and centrally important to how that child will be at age 10, at age 20, and even at age 50 and 60. And so this now is where the solutions come in. That we have to provide for parents, for communities, for families, for governments, local, state, that’s your province, and federal governments, this knowledge. Because the whole future capacity of that child, that family, that community, that nation, is dependent upon how effective it is that we turn on these pathways and make these brains connect properly. Exciting. Simple. Gorgeous.