Think of the children (development)

When someone (mostly: a parent or an educator) think of the development of children and young adults, the reaction falls in the range between those 2 extremes:

Many researchers on different fields, but focused on the same topic

Just thinking that there are hundreds of researchers (scientists, but also humanists) who spend most of their lives trying to find out who we are, how our environment works and how we can live better is something that makes me want to express gratitude. Here the intent is even more noble if we think that it is a question of understanding and trying to improve the development of future adults, which has a potentially enormous impact for the next and future generations. It’s not just rhetoric, I’m not sarcastic; it’s a sincere thought that is amplified by contrast when I think of all the herds of brainless people who go to the squares to bleat “we want a better future” and “someone do something”. Useless beings who demand solutions without trying to be useful, but there are people much worse than them: I am thinking of those who work in the social media marketing sectors, young developers and other professionals paid absurd salaries to keep people glued to their screens (unfortunately a lot of kids too, since we’re talking about the effects of the environment on children’s brains). One last thing: like in every kind of (serious) research, researchers are aware of limitation of our knowledge, limitation of measures and methods and value of knowledge and opportunities in other disciplines.
So what do these professionals study about child development? After (hundreds of) years of hypothesis and researches, now we can say that we (as individuals and groups) are the result of “nature + nurture”. So studies are trying to better identify and understand effects and interactions of what attributes, in what individuals, at what conditions, at what points in time. The essential interacting factors are:

• biology;
• individual and social functioning;
• physical environment;
• culture;
• time.

Children and the world

Trying to summarise in a few models to better explain (but please, as always, remember that the map is not the territory):

The relationships are both ways, that’s why for example that’s a strict interdependence between our environment and our habits – you can see more in my other post: How (yet another book on) Atomic Habits made me think. That’s also the reason why NAPCAN raised attention with this amazing sensibilization campaign:

I’ll skip all the neuroscience part, there are better way to learn about processes like gastrulation and how, just after 2 weeks, an embrion start separating areas with epiblast and hypoblast and all the mechanisms that (after circa 42 days) lead to differentiation between progenitor cells and neurons migrating to neocortex. What I want to emphasize is that, once a baby is born, a deprivated environment (less stimuli) can lead to an under-developed brain.
Evidence (Kolb and Gibb, 2011) suggests that brain development and function is influenced by:

• sensory stimuli;
• psychoactive drugs;
• gonadal hormones;
• parental-child relationships;
• peer relationships;
• early stress;
• intestinal flora;
• diet.

And it’s not only about infants: brain plasticity is somehow easily “adjustable” up to 20-25 years old: until this age (of course also later, but slower, less often and with less adjustment), people organize their knowledge in cognitive schema (example: “Horse: animal, can ride, 4 legs”) and they can update a previous schema or create a new one. Obviously it’s during the first phases of our life that we have the biggest impact. OK, but what “phases”? The famous Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget proposed a Cognitive Development Theory on 4 stages:

• Sensorimotor (0-2 years): object permanence, develop first schemas of objects;
• Preoperational (2-7 years): symbolic thought, ability to internally represent the world through language and mental imagery, dominated by how the world looks (not how the world is), not yet capable of logical (problem solving) type of thought, animism (thinking that toys can have feelings like humans) //this actually makes me think about some religions/beliefs but also about the Kawaii obsession in Japan… after all, people are always looking for faces (pareidolia);
• Concrete operational (7-11 years): logical thought;
• Formal operational (11+ years): scientific reasoning.

In another part of the world, Lev Vygotsky (a Soviet psychologist that shared interesting ideas before his death at 37) stressed much more on the influence of the sociocultural context and on the impact of adult’s help/guide (by parents, teachers, educators and others).
Comparing the 2 different models (following table from SimplyPsichology):

More than words

With this title I don’t want to talk about Extreme’s most famous song, but to go deeper in the development of language. There are basically 4 aspects involved:

• Phonology
  • Phonemes (depending on languages, e.g.: “L” and “R” are the same for a Chinese, while there are 2 different kind of “Kh” for Arabs and barely distinguishible for western people)
  • Cluster of phonemes (difficult to separate them when hearing a sentence, that sounds like a continuous stream)
• Semantics
  • Children learn 10K words between 1 and 6 y.o. (about 5 words per day)
  • Understanding objects and part of them (sometimes they make under- or over- extension when naming a part instead of a whole object or viceversa)
• Grammar
  • Syntax (at 3 y.o., they start with small phrases with 3 words, when they already know at least 200 or 250 words)
  • Morphology: dealing with numbers, gender, possession, …
• Pragmatics
  • Discuss about a topic

Meanwhile, children develop a Theory of mind, the capacity to understand other people by ascribing mental states to them, what is happening in their mind (let’s say a “meta-thinking” ability), including the knowledge that others’ mental states may be different from one’s own states. It’s not so obvious, since probably newborns can’t even “distinguish” between themselves and others (e.g.: they can be surprised that you may stay calm when they are feeling the urge to eat something, like asking: “Why aren’t you crying? Don’t you feel we are hungry!?”). Deficits in theory of mind can occur in people with autism spectrum disorder or other conditions (not to be confused with the lack of empathy of an antisocial assh*le).

What some studies found is that language development improves when associated with social clues; if you’re curious about it, there’s also a study (Kuhl, 2007) that tried to understand, with acoustic analysis, the effectiveness of the “motherese” language spoken by caregivers: talking slowly and with exagerated pitch modulation to the babies can make them better understand and develop. As expected, autism can be an obstacle to those clues.
There are also a lot of studies on bilingual children and, despite your hopes in a “growth mindset”, it’s nearly impossible to learn a new language after 20 y.o. the same way we learn it as a native language.

In the near future, use of machine learning trained with big data of several MRIs will help to identify possible cases of development anomalies (now they can try to predict for example dislexya with 70% of confidence) and a lot of studies are still trying to quantify how much the capabilities to understand are inborn or embodied from external cultural aspects. From studies across several populations, researchers Found out the language is cognition. They still don’t known precisely if it’s also because visual and motor areas are involved when learning a new word, but it’s clearly evident that cultural differences do affect how we see ourselves and the world, including ability to perceive and communicate space positions, objects, colors and many other aspects – by the way, I suggest reading the studies present in the book “Loneliness” by Cacioppo, like the differences between individuals in dealing with society in Asia and in western countries and… well, there are masterpieces of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Noam Chomsky and many others, I won’t cite their works here. So yes, words are important, think before talking specially with children.

With and without words: emotional development

Before, during and after the development of language, children deal with emotions, involving:

• neural responses;
• physiological responses;
• subjective feelings;
• emotional expressions;
• action tendency.

With a functionalist approach, emotions organize and regulate how we act and react: development in emotion-deprived environment can lead to severe consequences. The development makes babies correctly transform the “basic feelings” (attraction to pleasure and rejection of pain) to the universal basics for adults (happiness, fear, disgust, anger, sadness, surprise). Development of happiness starts around 1 year, while anger and sadness tend to emerge around 3-6 years. Development of self-conscious emotions (see also the “Theory of mind” written before) is observed from 18-24 months, including guilt and pride (they’re sensitive to guilt, as catholic priests know…).

It’s surprising that even a baby of just 3 months is quite able to understand facial expressions and can try to link them to cognition: in fact, they can gain insight in cause and effects, understand that thinking and feeling are connected even combine multiple cues (in a rudimental way, of course). And, even before the interaction with the environment, stable individual differences in how emotions are experienced and expressed can be noticed (different “temperament”). I will not point out enough the importance of education and that we are now aware of the power of epigenetics: OK, “we’re born this way”, but we can try to play better with the cards (genes) they dealt us (and we can help children to make them understand the card that they have and how it’s possible to use them).

Was that everything we should know?

Obviously, there is much more than that, there are also huge topics that can be discussed, like social cognition and, one of my favourite, the studies on intelligence development, starting with the first question: is it possible to improve intelligence in children or is it more like a “fixed parameter” written in the genes? Well, if you just read the infographics above, probably you guessed the answer, but I really recommend to read the book “In the Know: Debunking 35 Myths about Human Intelligence” by Russell Warne. Incidentally, the course also covered a bunch of other topics, including animal research (for example, animals are used in A/B tests in controlled environment to observe severe conditions like total social deprivation, impossible to replicate in a modern society – maybe you heard about some experiments on human twins done in some camps during a particular historical period); so it was the occasion to start ethics discussion about it (to earn a “course certificate”, I had also to write my thoughts about research with animals and review a few opinions by my peers). This is really a complex topic on ethics that has little to do with this post, anyway some of the results came from those researches observing animals. Please don’t think that the majority of experiments include cruelty, some of them are like this one on fairness (another feeling developed during childhood):

Just for your interest, talking about law (often not so correlated with biology and science in general…), childhood, according to the UN “Convention on the Rights of the Child”, means the period of life up to the age of 18; yes, since 1990, a “child” is almost universally a human being before 18 years old, unless the age of majority comes earlier for individuals in some countries (so it is not surprising that for some nations people are considered “young” up to 45 years of age).
Why I suggest everyone to know those basics on development? For the sake of curiosity, to generate other ideas (as also written in “Range” by David Epstein), as a retrospective on yourself and other adults you know (you can try to understand why we and others behave sometimes) and… well, of course this knowledge is useful in helping current and future children to better develop!

Everyone has studied, during primary school, that “a human being is born, grows, reproduces and dies”. Now, we (in western countries with high income) make less children every decades (just to make an example, Italian births dropped to lowest level since country’s unification, so the lower number of newborns since 1861); reproduction is a taboo specially in countries where there is a strong Catholic presence (no surprise children start learning sex watching porn on the Internet, on average at 12 years old, with impact on their brain, as you now understand); death is thing only a few want to think about. So, at least let’s talk about growing, please include also this topic in schools: I’m not expecting teachers showing how to change a diaper, but at the very least cover the basics of development.