The key to understanding self-regulation is that it is a capacity that develops post-natally, it\u2019s a capacity that develops essentially in the first five or six years of life, and it\u2019s for that reason, this is the critical reason why we are so concerned about the early years and about early child development. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
So how does a child develop this capacity to self-regulate? The short answer is that a child develops the capacity to self-regulate by being regulated. A child is engaged in almost non-stop interactions with their primary caregivers in the early years of life, and the caregiver serves as a sort of external brain who is regulating the child, whose brain is still quite immature, quite undeveloped, and exploding in the early years, and the caregiver has to perform this regulatory function for the child because those systems of the brain are only slowly developing in the early years, and it\u2019s through these constant back and forth interactions with their primary caregivers that the child begins to develop the capacity to do if for herself. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The child begins by being regulated to self-regulate, the way it happens is that the necessary information is being delivered into the parts of the brain that are coming online in the early years of life, so for example, the dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex which Adele Diamond studies so carefully, we know that this goes through a massive growth spurt between ages of three and five, but it\u2019s essential that during those ages the child is engaging in regulating experiences in order to deliver the necessary information to this maturating brain system so that the child can begin to take this over for themselves. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The key to understanding self-regulation is that it is a capacity that develops post-natally, it\u2019s a capacity that develops essentially in the first five or six years of life, and it\u2019s for that reason, this is the critical reason why we are so concerned about the early years and about early child development. So how […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":39,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"template-text-only.php","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-1551","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1551","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/39"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1551"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1551\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1552,"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1551\/revisions\/1552"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1551"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}