By Dr. Kalman Heller, Child and Family Psychologist
The media is definitely herd-like. Recently, most of the major magazines and newspapers ran articles stressing new knowledge about the importance of early experience in the development of cognitive, intellectual, and social skills. This is really an old tune with some updated lyrics. Fifty, even 75 years ago, parents were being taught that a child’s personality was primarily formed by age five. Along the way we learned that infants are far more developed at birth than we’d once thought, and capable of considerable, if rudimentary, learning in the first days and weeks of life. The age old question is: does talking to your baby more make them smarter?
Real Science, Familiar Anxiety
Now scientists can identify the actual areas of the brain where these events take place, and that’s revived the idea of “critical periods,” the notion that stimulation is needed at particular times to generate more maximal brain development and the intelligence a child will come to exhibit. I can already see another round of books on how to raise your infant’s IQ, and games designed to stimulate intelligence. Parental anxiety will climb even higher as parents who already have so little time to devote to parenting feel even more guilty and spend that time training their children instead of enjoying them.
The Trouble With “More Talking Equals Smarter Kids”
Many articles have stressed that if parents don’t talk to and touch their children enough, those children will enter school with limited skills and never catch up. But there are some serious misunderstandings here, ones that threaten to distort the joy of parenting and cause more harm than good. For example, some research found that at age three, children who’d heard more words directed at them in parent-child interactions scored higher on standardized tests, and that children of professional parents heard nearly twice as many words as children of working-class parents, who in turn heard three times as many words as children from families receiving public assistance. The conclusion people jumped to was that parents must talk to their children as much as possible. But there are at least three real problems with that conclusion. We don’t have an accepted measure of intelligence that actually predicts life success, so do these score differences matter much at all? How much of the difference simply reflects the higher genetic loading of “intelligence” already present in the genes of more successful parents? And would these differences even persist if the other kids got strong educational programming over the following years?
What Actually Matters
The value of talking to, holding, reading to, and playing silly games with your infants, toddlers, and preschoolers isn’t in question. It stimulates brain development, sure, but it also builds the parent-child bond that helps very young kids feel secure and teaches them how to relate to other people in positive ways. Here’s the thing though, most parents already do this to a sufficient degree. There’s no evidence that reading more, playing extra hours of classical music, or starting sports or art classes earlier produces smarter kids, better athletes, or better artists. The main job is simply to offer your child a range of experiences at moderate intensity and let their natural inclinations take it from there. One of the other genuinely important tasks of parenting is staying tuned in to your child’s innate temperament and matching the stimulation to what that particular kid can handle. Shy children need gentle social prodding. Kids sensitive to touch may need less cuddling than you’d expect. Sound-sensitive kids may need the volume turned down rather than up.
Genes, Resilience, and Letting Go of “Potential”
Parents who don’t provide the basics for their kids are often dealing with serious struggles just to survive, and they need more than parent education to fix that. It matters that we reach those families and help them build stable environments. But kids are remarkably resilient, and there’s no reason to scare the average parent into thinking they blew it by not doing the “right thing” during some specific developmental window. Research on twins raised in different environments backs this up in a striking way. Studies going back decades that look at the impact of genes versus environment on cognitive ability have found that while the rearing environment matters more early on, as kids get older their biological parents’ abilities carry more and more weight, and by around age sixteen there’s little correlation left with the adoptive environment at all. Brain architecture research and studies on the heritability of intelligence over time both point to something similar. This doesn’t mean family experience stops mattering for everything else a child develops. It just suggests that for many kids, intelligence ends up determined largely by simply being in a supportive environment that lets their inborn capacities surface, that genetics may place some natural limits on what a child is capable of, and that parents will raise a healthier kid by enjoying them instead of constantly pushing toward some imagined vision of “potential.”
By Dr. Kalman Heller, Child and Family Psychologist