The home is the single most significant environmental factor in enabling children to develop the trust, attitude and skills that will help them to learn and engage positively with the world.
A good home-learning environment provides the love, security, stimulation, encouragement and opportunities for children to flourish - a process that starts at birth, if not long before.
BUILDING BLOCKS FOR LEARNING: EARLY BRAIN DEVELOPMENT
In the past 25 years technological advances have enabled important new discoveries about the growth of the human brain and the impact of a young child's experiences on their development. The human brain is unfinished at birth. A baby's brain develops at an astonishing pace - from 25 per cent of the fully formed brain at birth to 80 per cent by the age of three.
This development is 'experience dependent'. A baby is born with most, if not all, of their brain cells in place. After birth, however, connections (synapses) are developed that pass information between the nerve cells. Imagine a new house with all the wiring in place but not yet connected; the electricity will work only once the circuits have been connected.
The patterns of connection that form between the brain's nerve cells govern the development of language and emotion as well as cognitive, physical and sensory abilities.
The more an experience - positive or negative - is repeated, the stronger the connection.
After a period of rapid growth from birth to three, when the brain makes trillions of new connections, some of these are 'pruned' away.
Connections that have been used repeatedly grow stronger, start to form well-trodden pathways and are retained, while those that have not been used often are shed.
IMPORTANCE OF RELATIONSHIP FOR THE DEVELOPING BRAIN
The quality of the relationship between parent and child during the first three years is fundamental to longer-term development (O'Connor and Scott, 2007).
When parents provide warm, loving attention this builds the baby's future capacity for empathy and self-control, both of which have a major impact on later life. A child who finds it difficult to focus, control their behaviour and relate to their peers and teaching staff is more likely to become trapped in an escalating cycle of school disaffection.
Schore (1994) describes how the relationship between baby and adult carer affects the physical development of the part of the brain that governs empathy and self-control (the orbitofrontal cortex), which grows almost entirely after birth in response to social experiences.
EXPERIENCES CAN DAMAGE THE DEVELOPING BRAIN
The baby's brain does not only develop (or not) in response to positive interaction.
New research contains important messages about the damaging impact of stress and the stress hormone, cortisol, on the developing brain.
Babies are not able to manage their own stress and need to have stressful experiences managed for them. They have low levels of cortisol for the first few months as long as adult carers maintain their equilibrium by soothing them when necessary.
A baby whose stress is not kept at a manageable level may eventually be seriously affected. Lyons et al (2000) suggest that high levels of cortisol can be toxic, adversely affecting later emotional life.
WINDOWS OF OPPORTUNITY FOR THE DEVELOPING BRAIN
The rapid development of the human brain during the first three years of life provides what are often described as 'windows of opportunity' for the development of vision, hearing, language, emotions and motor skills.
While there is some disagreement in the literature about the extent to which the brain's plasticity allows individuals to make up physical and psychological losses after early deprivation, there is widespread agreement about the critical periods for optimum development:
- Vision: birth to two years
- Hearing: six months to one year
- Language: birth to six years
- Emotions: birth to three years
- Motor skills: throughout childhood
ATTACHMENT AND THE DEVELOPING CHILD
Attachment research highlights the fact that sensitive and loving caregiving, and the development of a secure relationship with one or more loving carers, are central to optimal child development.
The roots of attachment theory can be traced to the work of British psychiatrist John Bowlby, who believed that 'the propensity to make strong emotional bonds to particular individuals (is) a basic component of human nature' (1988).
Bowlby's colleague, Mary Ainsworth, empirically tested these ideas by observing mothers and infants interacting in their homes during the infant's first year.
From these studies, Ainsworth observed that the mothers who responded to their infants' need for attention sensitively and appropriately were more likely to have babies who cried little and were content to explore their environment in their mother's presence. She concluded that these infants were 'securely' attached, and that this security was supported by warm and sensitive parenting behaviours.
Findings consistently suggest that a secure attachment status is related to greater self-confidence, improved social skills and higher school achievement (Sroufe et al, 2005).
THE IMPORTANCE OF TALKING TO YOUNG CHILDREN
Hart and Risley's (1995) long-term study highlighted the direct connection between talking to children and children's linguistic and intellectual development.
The study involved 42 families who were classified into three main groups:
- professional families
- working-class families
- families who were on welfare support.
By recording and analysing the verbal interactions between parents and their children from the age of about ten months to three years, they established progressive differences in the language abilities of the children from the three types of home background.
Although children from all of the groups started to speak at about the same time and also developed good structure and use of language, their vocabulary, as measured by the number of different words used, varied significantly and correlated directly to the number of words they had heard spoken.
DOES IT MATTER HOW PARENTS TALK TO THEIR CHILDREN?
Hart and Risley (1995) also identified the kind of talking that benefited children's development and that could be applied to all of the families.
Five specific ways that parents talked to children consistently had the most positive impact:
- They talked, generally using a wide vocabulary as part of daily life.
- They tried to be nice, expressing praise and acceptance and few negative commands.
- They told children about things, using language with a high information content.
- They gave children choices, asking them their opinion rather than simply telling them what to do.
- They listened, responding to them rather than ignoring what they said or making demands.
These ways of talking to and interacting with children had a strong relationship with children's IQ scores at age three.
When a group of 29 of the children were followed up at ages nine to ten, the difference in verbal ability was still evident in 61 per cent of the children.
BRINGING IT ALL TOGETHER
Sylva et al (2004) identified particular activities that 'stretch a child's mind':
- reading with and to children
- singing songs and rhymes
- going on visits
- painting and drawing
- creating opportunities to play with friends
- going to the library
- playing with letters and numbers.
This is an edited extract from Early Home Learning Matters by Kim Roberts, published by the Family and Parenting Institute
EARLY HOME LEARNING MATTERS: A GOOD PRACTICE GUIDE
Early Home Learning Matters by Kim Roberts (The Family and Parenting Institute) came about following the success of two DCSF-funded demonstration projects around engaging parents with their very young children's early learning, particularly when there was a risk of learning delay.
The evidence is now overwhelming. Parental involvement in early learning as part of daily family life at home has a greater impact on children's wellbeing and achievement than any other factor, such as poverty, parental education or school environment. If we are to narrow the gap between the achievements of advantaged and disadvantaged children we must seriously address what happens between birth and three years.
The book sets out the importance of working with parents, describes a good home-learning environment, shows how to engage parents and illustrates models and approaches for working with families and meeting the needs of different parents. A copy is being sent to every children's centre in the country.
The book is just one of the resources to come out of the Early Home Learning Matters project. A new booklet for parents, Learning and Play, is full of ideas on play activities to do in the home. The Early Home Learning Matters: A good practice guide and Learning and Play can both be ordered from the website www.earlyhomelearning.org.uk which also has lots of information for practitioners, service providers and parents.
A short summary on early home learning will be sent to workers across health, childminding and non-statutory early years services.
READER OFFER
Early Home Learning Matters by Kim Roberts is usually priced at £14.50, but we have 300 free copies for Nursery World readers. To get your hands on a free copy visit www.earlyhomelearning.org.uk/news and quote the reference number NW300