What's Going On In There? How the Brain and the Mind Develop in the First Five Years
Lise Eliot
Allen Lane/ Penguin, £18.99, 544pp
Buy it at BOL
How Babies Think: The Science of Childhood
Alison Gopnik, Andrew Meltzoff and Patricia Kuhl Weidenfeld, £20, 294pp
Buy it at BOL
Everyone knows what it takes to be a perfect parent. Be strict, yet have a generous heart. Support your children without crowding them. Keep them busy, but let them relax. It's easy to get trapped in bland dichotomies that contain a grain of truth yet don't really lead you anywhere. Perhaps a scientist could offer a more solid prescription?
Attempting to cash in on the current parenting angst are two dense American tomes, one by a neuroscientist and the other by three noted child psychologists. Each assembles a groaning weight of data and tries to draw conclusions. Both also hope to sugar the pill by talking about their own experiences as loving parents.
Lise Eliot's What's Going On In There? does the neuroscience. The big news in brain research is the "use it or lose it" hypothesis. The infant brain sprouts cells and synaptic connections at a phenomenal rate in the womb and the first year of life: a toddler has twice the number of neurons as an adult. This bulking up is then followed by two key processes. First there is a pruning to sculpt the brain's processing pathways; poorly placed or unneeded cells and connections die as the brain tunes itself into the sensory and motor world in which it finds itself. Then comes myelination, the wrapping of fatty insulation around the remaining nerve fibres to allow the brain to work at adult levels of speed and efficiency.
It is a brilliant design concept: grow a big glob of protoplasm, make the cells compete to do the job, then fix the winning circuits as they emerge. What makes people gulp is the sheer wastage: throughout our early childhood we are losing 20 billion synaptic connections each day. The other factoid that has stuck in the collective consciousness is an ancient research finding about rats whereby those brought up in an "enriched" environment ended up with more lavishly connected grey matter, suggesting that a brain that is not stretched at an early age will shrink back much further than might otherwise be the case.
Such discoveries have led to the fad for hothousing. Strap a tape recorder playing Mozart to the pregnant belly. Start teaching a foreign language by three; the brain will never learn to pronounce words like a native after that. Every second of infancy has to be turned into a learning experience because, by the time a child actually reaches school, its brain will already have solidified.
Eliot strongly believes in the "use it or lose it" theory: everything from vision to memory, athleticism to empathy, has its critical period during which parents ought to be maximising their child's potential. But the facts she presents don't support her case, and in the end even she begins to vacillate. Take the "enriched rat" finding: as Eliot points out, the real story was that rats with a few toys and playmates in their cage were compared to rats growing up in barren isolation - neither environment being particularly mentally challenging compared to fending for yourself in a sewer. The studies only showed the relative impact of what would be considered impoverished, even abusive, upbringings in humans.
After admitting that there is no good evidence that giving a child accelerated practice at sitting, walking, block-building or tricycle riding has any lasting effect on motor skills, Eliot wistfully concludes that great violinists and tennis players simply must have been helped by starting young. Similarly, after reviewing evidence that inhibited or anxious children tend to retain their basic temperament, Eliot finishes by urging parents to take on the job of "limbic system tutor", making sure all those little emotion circuits become wired as optimally as possible.
There is some truth in what Eliot says. Children's brains can be damaged by bad parenting. Drinking, smoking and stress during pregnancy do take a toll, as does neglect or abuse during early years, and Eliot presents a comprehensive survey of recent research. While it is harder to prove some specific benefit of brain-targeted parenting, it is clear that infants do profit from early stimulation, especially in the area of speech - studies claim astonishing emotional and intellectual improvements in children whose parents have real conversations with them.
However, the attempt to deliver any simple message always falls foul of the dichotomies concerning the brain and mental ability. For one thing, the adult human brain is remarkable for both its hard-wiring and its plasticity. Recent discoveries (which Eliot does not properly consider) have shown that the real key to the brain's power is its ability to accumulate intellectual habits while remaining simultaneously flexible in its response. So while it is true that low-level skills, such as vision and locomotion, do mature reasonably early, higher-level skills to do with thinking, remembering and anticipating stay plastic throughout life. The brain wins both ways; there is no suddenly closing window of opportunity for the mental abilities that really matter.
Another dichotomy that cuts across Eliot's simple diagnosis is the culture/genes divide. Humans are the most plastic-brained of all species, as evidenced by our extreme helplessness as infants. And the reason for this plasticity seems to be to allow human culture to have its maximum effect on the shaping of our brains. It is not just language we learn, but the mental habits language enables. Human brains are forged from a mix of genetic and cultural evolution. In this equation, parenting matters, but mostly because parents act as the unwitting delivery vehicles for the standard package of thought rhythms and social norms - the memes - that have evolved within their culture.
Unfortunately, Eliot does not touch on the wider story of brain development. She struggles to make her case for brain-targeted interventions and at the last moment loses her nerve, admitting that time, love and conversation are the true ingredients of parenting. So, push but don't push: the usual bland advice. However, one final throwaway remark does seem to hit the nail on the head: "It is the model we set, rather than the specific teaching we attempt, that is going to have the biggest impact on a child's cognitive abilities and success in life." Change yourself if you want to change your child - now there's a message most parents really don't want to hear.
How Babies Think, by Gopnik, Meltzoff and Kuhl, ought to be better. These three are leading researchers in the field of child cognitive development; standing between neurology and sociology, their view should be more balanced. Yet, oddly, the psychologists argue from even deeper prejudice. Their big idea is that babies are mini-adults, expert makers of their own intellectual worlds. Children are evolutionarily programmed to learn, as parents are programmed to teach; any form of hothousing is likely only to interfere with normal, natural parenting.
A comforting message, but Gopnik et al are too quick to dismiss the complexities. As Eliot makes clear, babies are born with proto-brains, not mini-brains. Much of the higher brain - the cortex - is not even connected up in a way that could do work in the fashion the psychologists suggest. And they give little consideration to the brain-moulding effects of language and human culture, preferring a romantic vision of babies as emerging essentially entire from the womb. In moments of gushing prose, the fast-learning infant brain is even presented as distinctly superior to the fossilised circuits of its adult carers.
These two books offer plenty of fascinating science, yet do little to cut through the modern dilemmas of parenting. Decent reading for the intellectually curious who want a glimpse of what is unfolding within their newborn's cranium; but perhaps the worried parent ought to steer well clear.
