My mother works in child care. When I would drop by for a visit, I never paid close attention to what I was saying around the infants. “The babies won’t remember me,” I thought, “and they certainly won’t remember anything I do or say. Why should I be overly cautious around these little humans when it is too early in their lives to matter?” It was not until I watched “Neurorelational Development: Early Brain Development and the Power of Relationships Webinar” given by Dr. Gerard Costa that I realized how wrong I was.
Of course I didn’t go around screaming at these little kids that I just popped in to for a little bit to see, but this can be a very different story for someone who is constantly around the child or in the privacy of their own home. The wrong tone, a raised voice, or a more aggressive handling can all affect babies negatively in several ways regarding brain development.
This is because humans are pretty helpless and pathetic creatures at birth. Don’t get me wrong, humans are a mighty species, but as a baby… we definitely require help. This is something Dr. Costa is referred to as the “second womb.” When coming into the world, horses only require a few minutes to learn how to walk and gallop. A human baby can usually breathe pretty well, and cry. They are so good at crying. But they don’t inherently know much else, like the galloping pony does in contrast. From the moment they are born human babies have one task and one task only: learn how to be a human.
What better way to learn than to watch all the humans that surround them on a day to day basis? The relationships the babies have with the people around them are critical to their brain development. Every moment a baby can hear, see, touch, or even smell you they are taking in information that is wiring circuits in their brains. These circuits are the foundation of the child’s brain, and everything they learn later in life builds off of them. Although they may not remember the moment you are having with them, the baby does feed off the experience in lasting ways.
One of the ways early relationships affect the mind is in stress regulation. Babies don’t know how to regulate their stressors in life the same way they do not know how to file taxes. No one gets mad at babies for not knowing how to file taxes, so we should be patient with the babies as they learn how to deal with their emotions. The only way for them to learn how to do this is if the adults in the child’s life show it how to regulate stress in a happy, healthy, human way. Helping the child cope with stress is a process called co-regulating.
This was shown in the “Jack-in-the-Box” moment described by Dr. Costa in the webinar. If you have a child that is watching a Jack-in-the-box, it is hearing the music and seeing the crank turn. Maybe it is anticipating something else. So where does it look? At the adult that is beside them. They turn as if to say, “Woah, hey what’s this going on? Are you cool with it? Well if you’re cool with it then I am cool with it.” The child is feeding off the adult’s calm energy, participating in co-regulation.
Then it happens.
The Jack comes out of the box.
The worst has happened, and the baby is in panic mode.
Once again, the baby turns to the adult for comfort.
This is too much for the child to bear and it needs help to get through this horrifying experience. Sure, we look at it as just a toy, but in the future that child will grow to deal with much more stressful and frightening situations, and this experience will set the foundation for how to deal with it. Hopefully in a calm, collected, and healthy manner that was shown to them by the adult.
This is just one of many skills they learn in their early life. They also gain valuable experience in engagement (attunement and contingency), reciprocity, emerging shared representational thinking, and textured communications. In short, these are each a specific skill that allows us to function as humans. The quality of relationships that a baby might have changes how these skills develop in its brain and alters how it will perform these skills in the future.
We don’t just see these changes in behavior alone, but can be seen within the brain itself. When there is neglect, violence, or negative experience in general in a child’s early developmental stages there is an effect on the child’s amygdala and hippocampus. The amygdala is the brain’s social processor while the hippocampus is the brain’s memory processor. Both of these can be damaged early in life resulting in activity much lower than a healthy brain.
The wrong tone, raised voice, and aggressive handling we talked about earlier can hurt the child’s social processing and memory later in life. This leads to more downfalls, with it being difficult to go through school with a less than average memory, or even make it through life not being able to process social cues as well as the people around them. Nonviolent Communication is a tool that can be given to children early in life. Visit our free resources page to get started!
When dealing with children, even babies, it is a good practice to put your “best foot forward” and be the best example you can be, because the odds are that they are looking to you to learn how to be a good human. If you thought the information presented here was interesting, the link to the full webinar by Zero to Three can be found HERE.
