Your Child's Growing Mind: A Parent's Guide to Learning from Birth to Adolescence

The completely updated and expanded version of the 1987 classic hailed by parents and educators everywhere.


From the Trade Paperback edition.

Chapter 1



Opening the "Black Box"



One evening some years ago, I received a call from a young teacher whom I hadn't seen since she had left school on maternity leave. We had often talked about her hopes and plans for the baby, but tonight she sounded worried.

"Jane, I'm sorry to call you at home, but I just have to ask for some advice about Tony. He seems very advanced, and I'm doing all the things we talked about--playing with him, talking to him, reading to him--but this neighbor of mine has just signed up for a course that advertises ways to raise her child's IQ by increasing his brain development. Should I be doing more? Can parents really help build their kids' brains?"

Amy's call didn't surprise me, since over the years I have gotten the same question in many forms. The pressure on parents becomes more intense all the time. They come to my office wanting to do a "perfect" job despite the constraints of busy schedules, but they are confused by conflicting theories about child development and by omnipresent advertising for products that claim to make children smarter sooner. Confusion and guilt are inevitable: Am I doing enough? How much and what kind of enrichment does a preschooler need? What is the best way to teach reading and math--and what if my child is having difficulty? Should parents help with schoolwork? Can creativity be developed? How can we act as a child's advocate if school personnel aren't attuned to individual needs? What, really, is "attention deficit disorder"? How can we make kids more motivated? What about the child who doesn't "fit the mold"?

These questions have never been easy ones, but now the science of developmental neuropsychology, integrating brain research with children's behavior and learning, offers some answers. We know more about learning, individual differences in abilities, and emotional development than we did even five years ago. Although no two human brains are alike and no one set of answers is right for every child, new information can help teachers do a better job and assist parents in making wise decisions--while confirming the innate wisdom of their own best instincts. An incident much earlier in my career makes me realize just how far we have come.

I met nine-year-old Aaron when he tripped over me as he was entering his science class. As a visiting consultant, I was trying to be invisible, and apparently I had succeeded as far as Aaron was concerned. I began to suspect that this waifish-looking little fellow had a problem when he next bumped into the doorway, scattering a mass of smudged work sheets whose mangled manuscript letters would be an embarrassment to most six-year-olds and which bore the indelible marks of teacher rejection: "Messy!" "F." Ignoring my mission to evaluate the science curriculum, I watched him struggle to organize himself around a desk, dropping his pencil and fumbling through a tattered folder for misplaced homework. A discussion of space exploration immediately attracted his attention, and his skinny arm gyrated in the air, once more knocking his pencil, unnoticed, from the desk. Recognized at last by the teacher, he delivered a stunning exposition of rocket trajectories, fuel needs, and relative astral distances.

I couldn't resist asking the principal about Aaron. "Has he ever had a neurodevelopmental evaluation? It sure looks as if something is misfiring when he tries to translate his good ideas into action."

"Oh, no," he said. "Poor kid has an emotional problem. He's being treated by a psychiatrist. Believe it or not, he still wets his bed! His mother rejected him emotionally when he was born, and he's always had difficulty with schoolwork even though we can tell he's smart."

"Well, you might consider looking further," I ventured. I was quite sure Aaron had some problems that predated the emotional ones, but I was there to evaluate curriculum, not to do diagnosis.

Six months later I received a note in the mail from a woman who identified herself as Aaron's mother. "Thanks to your intervention," she said ("intervention," indeed!), "we took Aaron to a clinic and found that he has had a problem since birth in one of the important lower brain centers." Since the area she described is part of a system responsible for voluntary control of motor movements such as writing, avoiding bumping into people and doorways, and yes, even bladder control, it is not surprising that Aaron was having problems despite an IQ in the superior range. "Now we understand that he isn't lazy or stupid, and he will get special help with this problem," she went on to say. "If you only knew the guilt and the anguish we have been through, you would understand why I am so grateful."

I keep that note, not only because it is the only effortless success story of my career, but also because it is a perfect example of the "black box" view of the brain that prevailed for so long: "If we can't see inside, we'll ignore it." "Emotional problems" became the handiest scapegoat whenever things weren't going well. The unfortunate result became a "blame game" in which the parents, school, and even the child were accused of responsibility for problems in learning. We have come a long way, but the "blame game" is still around--for parents, for children with learning differences, for some whose environments shortchanged them early in life, and too often for educators who can't force unprepared or unready neural systems to mature on a set timetable.



Looking Inside



Various forms of brain research have been conducted for centuries, but the field has experienced an avalanche of new information since the development of electronic methods of observing and measuring brain activity. Harmless ways of looking directly at the brain in action help teach us about why learning happens--or fails to. The major methods of looking inside utilize either caps of electrodes or computerized scanners. Mapping the brain's electrical activity shows how actively and how quickly brain areas respond to a stimulus; different kinds of scanners display the structure of the brain or the way it functions during normal activities, such as reading or working mental problems. Because these technologies are still difficult to use in real-life situations (in a scanner, for example, the child must lie still for an extended period of time), their findings are combined with behavioral observation and good educational and developmental research to get a bigger picture.

From another angle, work with "artificial intelligence" has also sparked research on how the human brain functions, giving scientists new respect for the capabilities and complexity of even a toddler's brain as they try--and fail--to duplicate human learning abilities, such as building a block tower. Computer brains are terribly good at some things, but terribly bad at others--such as creativity, understanding the nuances of language, or practical problem-solving. Nor can they compete with human caregivers in providing "scaffolds" for a child's social, emotional, and cognitive growth.

The purpose of this book is to bring you up to date by explaining what science has discovered and how we can apply it in real-life situations at home or school. I will be drawing on research in a wide variety of fields and on a background of professional and personal experience. I hope you will also feel empowered to use your own common sense! In this chapter we will introduce two major questions central to the book: Where does brainpower come from, and what can we do about it? The following chapters will apply this basic information to different age...