Brain Facts:
Children

Child’s Brain

A child’s brain comes preprogrammed to grow, but it takes a bit more than the first two decades of life to finish this task, making it the last organ of the body to become anatomically mature.

Bullies

Schoolyard bullies (who typically have a history of physical abuse) over interpret anger, reading antagonism into faces that are neutral. Their attacks on other children are often due to this misperceiving hostile intent where there is none.

Depression, Mother’s

A mother’s depression can become the transmission route by which all the personal and social ills bearing down on her affect her child. A mother’s funk, for example, has negative hormonal effects on a child that show up as early as infancy: babies of depressed mothers have higher levels of stress hormones and lower levels of dopamine and serotonin, a chemical profile linked to depression. A toddler may be unaware of the larger for forces impinging on her family, but those forces will become embedded in her nervous system nonetheless.

Emotionally Literate

I prefer to teach my child…to be emotionally literate. That is the skill the child will need in order to overcome stress, anxiety, frustration, disappointment, anger, hurt and despair. I would teach my child the difficult situations in life help to improve our self-esteem, courage and self-reliance, and enable us to handle life on our own terms.

Emotions

By age four or five, children are able to shift from simply trying to control their upsetting emotions, to have a greater understanding of what causes their distress and what to do to relieve it—a sign of high-road maturation. Parental coaching in the first four years of life, some psychologist suspect, may be particularly potent in shaping a child’s later ability to manage her emotions well and to handle rocky encounters smoothly.

Empathy

When parents act with empathy and are responsive to a child’s needs, they build a basic sense of security.

Exercise

Exercise improves children. Physically fit children identify visual stimuli much faster than sedentary ones. They appear to concentrate better. Brain-activation studies show that children and adolescents who are fit allocate more cognitive resources to a task and do so for longer periods of time.

Exercise Concentration and Problem-Solving

While the terrain has been paved and the daily threats are more subtle these days, studies show that our brains still thrive on movement and that exercise boosts concentration and problem-solving. So why are physical-education classes disappearing from schools, and why don't more employers encourage walking meetings?

Feelings

Most children learn to distinguish one feeling for another and to grasp what has led to this feeling or that. But children who are severely neglected by their parents do not. When vignettes were read to such preschoolers, the answers they gave were wrong half the time—a far poorer rate of recognition than for preschoolers who have been well nurtured.

Happiness

The amount of joy in a toddler’s relationships appears critical to setting the brain pathways for happiness.

Human Contact

Children deprived of vital human contact fail to make crucial distinctions among emotions; their senses of what others feel remains fuzzy.

Imitating Behavior Study

In one study, parents of preschoolers were observed during a marital disagreement. Some couples were antagonistic and disjointed in their attentions to resolve their conflicts. Neither party listened to the other, they were angry and contemptuous, and they often withdrew from each other as their hostility grew. The children of these couples imitated this pattern with their playmates, being demanding and angry, bullying and hostile.

In contrast, those couples who during their disagreements displayed more warmth, empathy, and mutual understanding also approached parenting together with greater harmony, even playfulness. And these parents had children who in turn got along better with playmates and could work disagreements out more productively. How couples work out their disagreement predicts their children’s conduct, even years later.

Neuronal Spurt

A neural growth spurt starts at around age five, allowing more of their circuitry to come online just in time to send the child off to school. That spurt continues apace to around age seven, greatly boosting the child’s self-control and making second-grade classrooms far less rambunctious than kindergarten. Each stage of intellectual, social, and emotional development in a growing child marks a similar step in the maturation of brain areas; this anatomical process continues into the mid-twenties.

Play

The psychostimulant medications given to children for ADHD all reduce the activity of the brain’s play modules when given to animals, just as they seem to snuff out playfulness in children. Panksepp makes a radical, though untested, proposal: let younger children vent their urge to play in an early-morning free play, rough-and-tumble recess, then bring them into a classroom after their urge to play as been sated, when they can more easily pay attention.

Play

At the brain level, time spent playing pays off in neuronal and synaptic growth; all that practice strengthens brain pathways. Beyond that, playfulness throws off a kind of charisma: adults, children, and even lab rats are drawn to spend more time with those who have an abundant practice playing.

School Active

Dr. Antronette Yancey: “Kids pay better attention to their subject when they’ve been active. Kids are less likely to be disruptive in terms of their classroom behavior when they’re active. Kids feel better about themselves, have higher self-esteem, less depression, less anxiety. All of those things can impair academic performance and attentiveness.”

School Learning

"If you're in high school, and you have five 50-minute periods of information in unbroken, declarative fire hose streams, where a teacher literally sprays the knowledge and splatters it all over your brain and you're expected to absorb it, well, we know that's not how the brain learns."

The brain, he says, needs time to absorb information, review it and store it. And that kind of time can't be tightly scheduled, especially for the developing brains of children. It's especially true for children that "the more unstructured you make them, the more 'thinking' they become," he says

That doesn't mean, though, parking them in front of TV screens or video games. Those are just different forms of "structured" time — the TV show runs a certain length, the video games are timed. They can just add to time pressure.

"The more ventilation you give the kids to be themselves, with a playtime that is unstructured and really imaginative, the more likely they are to mobilize their God-given IQs and perform in a way that I think parents actually want them to perform," Medina says.

Lessons for all of us: Sometimes faster is really slower, and doing less can help you accomplish more. And sometimes, the most productive way to schedule our time is to leave a big, blank space in our itinerary … and let our brain fill it in.

Secure Base

Research has found that a secure base does more than provide an emotional cocoon: it seems to nudge the brain to secrete neurotransmitters that add a small bolt of please to that feeling of being well loved—and it does the same for whoever provides that love. Decades after Bowlby and Ainsworth proposed their theories, neuroscientists identified two pleasure-inducing neurotransmitters, oxytocin and endorphins, that are activated by laughing.

Stress

Study after study has shown that children—some as young as 6 months—react to adult arguments physiologically, such as with a faster heart rate and higher blood pressure. Kids of all ages who watch parents constantly fight have more stress hormones in their urine. They have more difficulty regulating their emotions, smoothing themselves, focusing their attention on others. They are powerless to stop the conflict, and the loss of control is emotionally crippling. As you know, control is a powerful influence on the perception of stress. This loss can influence many things in their lives, including their schoolwork. They are experiencing allostatic load.

Stress

If youngsters are exposed to stresses they learn to handle, this mastery becomes imprinted in their neural circuitry, leaving them more resilient when facing stress as adults. Repeating that sequence of fear-turning-into-calm apparently shapes the neural circuitry for resilience, building an essential emotional capacity

Terrible Twos

The “terrible twos” when babies start to defy their parents by shouting “No!” when they are told to do something, signals a major milestone in brain development. The brain is beginning to be able to inhibit impulse—to say no to urges—a capacity that becomes refined throughout childhood and the teen years…the array of neurons in their OFC that can stop an impulse from being enacted is underdeveloped.

Ultrastoic

A poignant extreme can be seen in the thousands of infants placed in Romanian orphanages during the severe economic troubles in the 1980s. These infants spent up to twenty hours a day in their cribs, with no one to attend their needs. As eight-year-olds, a sample of those adopted by American families still showed troubling symptoms: they were Ultrastoic, neither crying nor expressing pain; they were uninterested in playing; and they hoarded food. Many of their problems improved as they fit into their new families. Even so, brain scans showed that key areas of their social brains were underactive, including the orbitofrontal cortex.