Home - Dialogue - Concepts - Building - Questions

By Joan Lessen-Firestone, Pj.D.

For countless generations, young children have cuddled in their parents' arms, grabbed and explored interesting objects, and bounced and crawled as soon as they were able. While such behaviors usually are tolerated and often encouraged, only recently have we begun to understand their critical importance in building children's brains. Almost 80 percent of our knowledge about the brain has been developed during the past five years through such modern technologies as positron emission tomography (PET) scans.

We now know that the "wiring" of a child's brain, unlike his/her skeletal system, is not determined before birth. The brain's wiring occurs in direct response to the environmental input the child receives after s/he is born. The brain of a child who has happily spent his/her first five years hearing and speaking English, playing the violin, and swimming in a lake will wire itself differently from that of a child who contentedly spends those years learning Japanese and Russian, exploring the computer, and playing on swings and teeter-totters. More significant is the fact that these two children's brains will both look and perform very differently from that of a child who spend his/her first years in a stress-filled environment without much language, much stimulation, or much nurturing.

By the time children enter kindergarten, a great deal of the emotional and intellectual wiring of their brains has been set. Whether children are on a path leading to academic success and positive social behavior or to school failure and violent is determined largely by the manner in which this wiring has occurred. For the first time, we now understand how and why this happens.

Go on to the Four Major Parts of the Brain.