Read Online Welcome to Your Child's Brain: How the Mind Grows From Conception to College by Sam Wang, Sandra Aamodt - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Sam Wang, Sandra Aamodt
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to criminal parents and raised in a bad environment would commit a crime, simply by adding the two percentages to get 18.8 percent. But the study found something very different. Children with both risk factors, the biological children of criminals raised in a bad environment, had a much higher rate of criminality, 40 percent—more than twice the risk that would have been expected.
At the same time, neither factor determined the children’s fates. Even under the worst conditions, more than half the children with multiple risk factors turned out to be law-abiding citizens. None of these factors absolutely determines a child’s outcome—but they do change the odds.
So the next time you read that intelligence is 60 percent genetic or that researchers have discovered the gene for homosexuality or that children are aggressive only because they’ve learned the behavior from role models, keep in mind that biology doesn’t work that way. Genes and environment are irrevocably entangled throughout your child’s life.
PART TWO
GROWING THROUGH A STAGE
ONCE IN A LIFETIME: SENSITIVE
PERIODS
BORN LINGUISTS
BEAUTIFUL DREAMER
IT’S A GIRL! GENDER DIFFERENCES
ADOLESCENCE:
IT’S NOT JUST ABOUT SEX
Chapter 5
ONCE IN A LIFETIME: SENSITIVE PERIODS
AGES: BIRTH TO FIFTEEN YEARS
Your child’s brain is a bit like IKEA furniture: built through a series of steps that normally occur in order. Failing to complete certain steps on schedule—as we certainly have done when assembling a table—can interfere with later steps in the process, usually delaying them but sometimes preventing them from happening at all.
In this chapter, we discuss a special type of development that is central to matching your child’s brain to the environment. Sensitive periods are times in development when experience has a particularly strong or long-lasting effect on the construction of brain circuitry. Receiving the correct sort of experience during a sensitive period is essential for the maturation of the particular behaviors that rely on that circuitry.
Not all aspects of early development are so demanding. Much of brain maturation occurs without special help. For example, neural circuits in the retina and spinal cord mature according to a set program that is not responsive to experience at all. Other regions—such as the hippocampus and certain parts of the cerebral cortex—are modifiable by experience not during a short period of time but instead throughout life. These brain regions are always able to acquire new information, which helps us continue to adapt to our environment during adulthood.
Sensitive periods for particular functions are special because during these times, the quality of a child’s experience can have permanent effects. For example, the brain areas that are specialized for understanding language end up with different connections between neurons depending on whether your baby hears English or Mandarin during the first few years of life (see chapter 6 ). The brain changes that occur in response to this experience make your child an expert at understanding and producing the sounds of his native language.
Later, you may still be able to learn a new language, but you have to work much harder. As an adult, your brain’s language areas are no longer under construction and their connections are more difficult to modify. Your sensitive period for language has passed.
Fortunately, as we have said before, experience isn’t something that happens passively, even to babies. Your child’s brain has definite preferences about what it should learn at various stages of development. The types of experience that can modify a developing neural circuit are determined by predispositions that are built into the brain as a result of our evolutionary history. In short, children actively seek out the experiences they need.
What do we mean by experience? Your child’s brain is potentially influencedby any event that can be detected by sensory
At the same time, neither factor determined the children’s fates. Even under the worst conditions, more than half the children with multiple risk factors turned out to be law-abiding citizens. None of these factors absolutely determines a child’s outcome—but they do change the odds.
So the next time you read that intelligence is 60 percent genetic or that researchers have discovered the gene for homosexuality or that children are aggressive only because they’ve learned the behavior from role models, keep in mind that biology doesn’t work that way. Genes and environment are irrevocably entangled throughout your child’s life.
PART TWO
GROWING THROUGH A STAGE
ONCE IN A LIFETIME: SENSITIVE
PERIODS
BORN LINGUISTS
BEAUTIFUL DREAMER
IT’S A GIRL! GENDER DIFFERENCES
ADOLESCENCE:
IT’S NOT JUST ABOUT SEX
Chapter 5
ONCE IN A LIFETIME: SENSITIVE PERIODS
AGES: BIRTH TO FIFTEEN YEARS
Your child’s brain is a bit like IKEA furniture: built through a series of steps that normally occur in order. Failing to complete certain steps on schedule—as we certainly have done when assembling a table—can interfere with later steps in the process, usually delaying them but sometimes preventing them from happening at all.
In this chapter, we discuss a special type of development that is central to matching your child’s brain to the environment. Sensitive periods are times in development when experience has a particularly strong or long-lasting effect on the construction of brain circuitry. Receiving the correct sort of experience during a sensitive period is essential for the maturation of the particular behaviors that rely on that circuitry.
Not all aspects of early development are so demanding. Much of brain maturation occurs without special help. For example, neural circuits in the retina and spinal cord mature according to a set program that is not responsive to experience at all. Other regions—such as the hippocampus and certain parts of the cerebral cortex—are modifiable by experience not during a short period of time but instead throughout life. These brain regions are always able to acquire new information, which helps us continue to adapt to our environment during adulthood.
Sensitive periods for particular functions are special because during these times, the quality of a child’s experience can have permanent effects. For example, the brain areas that are specialized for understanding language end up with different connections between neurons depending on whether your baby hears English or Mandarin during the first few years of life (see chapter 6 ). The brain changes that occur in response to this experience make your child an expert at understanding and producing the sounds of his native language.
Later, you may still be able to learn a new language, but you have to work much harder. As an adult, your brain’s language areas are no longer under construction and their connections are more difficult to modify. Your sensitive period for language has passed.
Fortunately, as we have said before, experience isn’t something that happens passively, even to babies. Your child’s brain has definite preferences about what it should learn at various stages of development. The types of experience that can modify a developing neural circuit are determined by predispositions that are built into the brain as a result of our evolutionary history. In short, children actively seek out the experiences they need.
What do we mean by experience? Your child’s brain is potentially influencedby any event that can be detected by sensory
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