Imagine this: 700 connections made per second! No, I’m not speaking of some sort of multi-gig, trillion-teraflop supercomputer. It’s an infant’s brain, whizzing away at breakneck speed, connecting millions of brain cells in the first years of life.

This circuit development of the brain — though invisible to any parent’s eye — is fundamental to understand how babies learn and grow. At a recent symposium held at Harvard that I attended, along with other business and government leaders from our state, we learned from the neuroscientists, research pediatricians and policy makers how brains are built over time — from prenatal through adulthood. The largest part of brain architecture happens during the early childhood years.

Yet, how many of us really give thought to what’s going on inside a baby’s head? After all, babies are cute — and sweet — and cuddly — and (hopefully) good-natured and not too colicky. Isn’t that all we need to understand about these precious little bundles of joy?

Well, the new science of brain development is forging a path that is both illuminating and frightening. It’s pushing the frontiers of early childhood practice (that’s where parents and child care providers come in) and policy (that’s where legislators and business leaders come in). In ways never before understood, we now know that an infant’s early circuits of the brain cannot be rewired later in life; optimal flexibility and plasticity of the brain occurs very early, during the first three years of life.

As effortless as this sounds, this precious interaction is essential because children develop in an environment where relationships are primary. While genetics play a large role, brain development is heavily influenced by the child’s environment and experiences during infancy and early childhood. According to the National Scientific Council on the Developing Child, this can “either weaken or strengthen the initial blueprint; … the circumstances in which {the brain is} built are every bit as important as the … framework handed down by genetics.”

So, one of the take-aways from the recent symposium is that creating the right conditions in early childhood has vast implications. Secure and nurturing relationships that offer responsive (Serve and Return) experiences optimize neural growth. (This is one of the primary reasons why “educational” television for young children is pointless; there is no “Return” or response to the child’s “Serve.”)

Simply stated, parents and caregivers who understand that strong, bonding, responsive relationships are the building blocks of the environment’s influence on an infant’s healthy human development can do much to promote the well-being — and competence — of young children.

At another level, legislators and policy makers in Michigan should heed this important “new science” and find the will and the resources to develop strong early childhood policies to ensure that every child in our state has the opportunity to enjoy positive early learning experiences. Early childhood is a smart investment that yields long-term gains. How? These earliest relationships and experiences shape the brain development of young children, which in turn affects their ability to succeed in school and later in life. Having a capable, well-adjusted and educated population is in Michigan’s best interest.

State policies can help infants and toddlers get the positive start they need by promoting early childcare and education and ensuring services and resources dedicated to young children.

I’m proud to live in Michigan. But, I’d be even prouder to know that our state is in the forefront of promoting national early childhood policy instead of lagging in the middle of the pack. Our children deserve no less. And, our future depends on it.

Source: DetNews.com, MI
http://www.detnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080715/OPINION03/807150398/1031

Sleep appears to strengthen connections between communicating nerve cells in the brain - a process thought to form the basis of learning and memory.

Scientists in Switzerland studied a group of volunteers who were taught a new skill or shown images they would later have to remember.

The skill tasks included trying to follow a moving dot on a computer screen using a joy stick. One group of participants was then allowed to sleep normally for eight hours, while others were deprived of sleep or only permitted a nap.

The next day they were asked to repeat the tasks or recall the images while their brains were scanned using a technique known as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).

Those who had slept properly performed better, and this was reflected in their brain activity.

Dr Sophie Schwartz, from the University of Geneva, who led the study, said: “Our results revealed that a period of sleep following a new experience can consolidate and improve subsequent effects of learning from the experience. “This improvement comes from changes in brain activity in specific regions that code for relevant features of the learned material.”

Sleep helped the brain consolidate learned experiences and transform weak memories that might fade in time into more permanent fixtures, she said.

But how long it was necessary to sleep for the brain to benefit from this process was still unknown.

“Everybody sleeps, but some people sleep less than the average population, others have an abnormal sleep structure, and some drugs may change the duration of specific sleep stages,” said Dr Schwartz. “We also need to better study the impact of sleep on brain development in children.”

Brain scans should make it possible to assess the neuronal impact of sleep disturbances on patients with insomnia, sleep apnoea, depression or narcolepsy, she added.

“We now want to know which brain circuits are involved in these learning effects during the night and if we can experimentally enhance such effects,” said Dr Schwartz. “We want to assess how sleep disorders affect emotional and cognitive functioning, and what are the biological factors responsible for these effects.”

The research was presented today (mon) at the Forum of European Neuroscience meeting in Geneva, Switzerland.

Source: Telegraph.co.uk, United Kingdom
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?xml=/earth/2008/07/14/easleep114.xml

At last, from the frontiers of science comes an explanation for that long-recognized phenomenon of “monkey see-monkey do.”

Researchers in Parma, Italy, were studying the brain activity of monkeys. They recorded neuron activity when the monkeys reached for a peanut. The scientists were attempting to learn which areas of the brain would be stimulated by this simple activity.

Quite by accident, they discovered something else. A scientist reached for a peanut himself as one of the monkeys looked on. The technician watching the PET scan was astonished to record the same brain activity. Watching the researcher reach for the peanut elicited exactly the same movements in the same areas of the brain as when the monkey reached for the peanut himself.

This discovery launched a more significant study of these areas on both sides of our brain, which not only are stimulated when we do something but also stimulated in exactly the same way when we observe someone else do that thing. And what they have found is that the same phenomenon happens to far greater extent in humans than it does in our furry distant relatives.

“Mirror neurons” record the images we see. They provide the brain architecture that supports, on a cellular level, the actual recording in our brains of those things we observe others doing, as if we are doing them ourselves.

So if I watch you tie your shoes, I store that experience in my brain in the same way as if I had done it. If I look into your sad face, I record that same feeling of sadness as if it were my tragedy instead of yours. If I watch you striving to carry a heavy load, I experience that same struggle myself and may set my mouth just right to “help” you with the exertion.

Mirror neurons explain the mechanism for empathy, compassion, social learning and more. And for those of us interested in the experiences of children, they remind us once again of the importance of the environment on brain development.

As a child watches an adult perform an act of compassion, he experiences compassion, even if he had no responsibility for the act itself. He feels what it’s like to help a neighbor or speak a kind word.

Unfortunately, it also means that when a child observes an act of violence, he stores that action inside himself, also as if he had committed the act. Biologically, he has built a history in his brain of what it is to behave violently.

Researchers studying the mirror system say it is further evidence that we are intensely social creatures, looking for ways to connect. We are designed to learn from each other. It’s the way we find out how to comb our hair or hold a spoon or pat a dog.

More importantly, mirror neurons are what teach us how to respect others and demonstrate that respect through our behavior.

What we tell our kids is certainly important. Talking to them about our values and expectations helps them to build their own moral code.

But one day, we’ll see what they really learned from us. We will observe the behavior that was being recorded all the time by their mirror neurons, when we didn’t know we were teaching them anything at all.

Source Herald & Review, IL
http://www.herald-review.com/articles/2008/06/28/columnists/quigg/1033710.txt

Findings of a three-year study by researchers at the University of California, Riverside and the University of Florida, Gainesville run counter to the popular belief that women have better language skills than men.

In a study of 200 university students, the researchers found that women and men performed similarly on tests of language and reading skills. Differences in brain organization between men and women may be driven by sex differences in brain size, they said.

“People have said women have relatively larger language areas of the brain,” said Christine Chiarello, UCR professor of psychology. “In none of our language tasks were women better than men. When you account for differences in brain size between men and women there are few differences in the relative size of areas. While there are differences between men and women, those differences are minimal compared to the wide range of individual differences in both sexes.”

The study, “Size Matters: Cerebral Volume Influences Sex Differences in Neuroanatomy,” was published recently in the journal Cerebral Cortex.

The researchers gathered demographic data, tested language and reading skills, and performed magnetic resonance imaging to map brain structures of 100 female students and 100 male students. The men and women were similar in age, parental education and proportion of students who were right- or left-handed.

There were great individual differences in brain organization, brain size and where language and speech are processed, Chiarello said. For most people, speech and language are processed in the left half of the brain.

Men and women “confront similar cognitive challenges using differently sized neural machinery,” the researchers wrote. Their findings imply that “any sex-specific adaptations to overall brain size are not associated with large relative differences in the size of various cerebral regions. In this respect, our results suggest that brain size matters more than sex.”
Source: PhysOrg.com, VA
http://www.physorg.com/news133191625.html

The National Institutes of Health has awarded the University a $7.7 million, five-year grant to study the development of language among children, in order to better understand how early, preschool development relates to learning how to read.

This study will build on a longitudinal study of 60 children from a diverse set of families who already have participated in an NIH study to examine how they develop language in the home. The researchers also are studying 40 children with brain injuries, who will be followed as they enter school.

“The ability to communicate using language and gestures is a uniquely human capacity,” said Susan Goldin-Meadow, the principal investigator for the study. “All children acquire language, but they do so at different rates. The goal of our project is to explore how environmental and biological factors interact to create these individuals differences. Our aim is to delineate the extent, as well as the limits, of language learning in children,” said Goldin-Meadow, the Beardsley Ruml Distinguished Service Professor in Psychology and the College.

The research is divided into four planned projects, each under the leadership of a principal investigator.

The first project will examine the effects of environmental variation on language and reading development. Janellen Huttenlocher, the William S. Gray Professor in Psychology, will be the principal investigator for this project. Rebecca Treiman, an expert on reading and the Burke and Elizabeth High Baker professor at Washington University, will work with Huttenlocher.

Huttenlocher and Treiman will look at the development of language in children in different home and school environments to learn more about the role of environment in later language development and entry into reading. Using these data, language growth curves will be constructed for each child to track language development, from the earliest stages through the child’s first years of schooling.

The second project, which Goldin-Meadow will lead, will look at gesture in these children to establish its role in revealing children’s abilities and influencing language growth.

For that project, Goldin-Meadow will explore whether children use their hands to express ideas that they cannot yet express in speech, effectively using gesture to expand their communicative range. The project will also examine individual differences in how children use gesture, focusing on whether those differences predict later language use. Finally, the project will explore whether gesturing plays a role in helping children learn language.

Susan Levine, Professor in Psychology and the College, will lead the third project, which will focus on language and reading development in children with brain injuries to examine the combined effects of biological and environmental variations on learning.

The researchers will examine the plasticity of language and reading skills, studying children ages 5 to 10 who experienced a brain injury before or around the time of birth. By assessing language and reading development in the school year, they will be able to determine whether plasticity for early language extends to reading and more complex language processes. The researchers also will try to determine if environmental variation plays the same role in predicting language growth in brain-injured children as it does in children without a brain injury.

Steven Small, Professor in Neurology, Psychology and the College, is principal investigator for the fourth project, which will look at the brain organization underlying language processing and the effect of environmental and biological variation.

That project will look at the organization of language functions in both typically developing children and children who suffered early brain injuries. Children will have functional brain imaging to evaluate brain development for language and gesture. These fMRI scans will be used to understand how parts of the brain that are used for language interact and adapt as children (with and without brain injuries) refine their language skills and learn to read.

Another important feature of the study is the development of robust statistics to support the work. Stephen Raudenbush, the Lewis-Sebring Distinguished Service Professor in Sociology and Chair of the Committee on Education, and Larry Hedges, the Board of Trustees professor of statistics and social policy at Northwestern University, will lead this effort.

Raudenbush pointed out the importance of these projects and the potential for obtaining new information about how children learn.

“This will be the first study to show how language development beginning during the second year of life is linked to the emergence of reading comprehension and oral language that are key to later school success,” he said. “The study will generate new ideas about how to improve preschool and primary school instruction.”

Source: University of Chicago Chronicle
http://chronicle.uchicago.edu/080612/nih.shtml

Children are almost twice as likely to die before adulthood if they have a father over 45, research has shown.

A mass study found that deaths of children fathered by over-45s occurred at almost twice the rate of those fathered by men aged between 25 and 30.

Scientists believe that children of older fathers are more likely to suffer particular congenital defects as well as autism, schizophrenia and epilepsy. The study was the first of its kind of such magnitude in the West, and researchers believe the findings are linked to the declining quality of sperm as men age.

A total of 100,000 children born between 1980 and 1996 were examined, of whom 830 have so far died before they reached 18, the majority when they were less than a year old.

The deaths of many of the children of the older fathers were related to congenital defects such as problems of the heart and spine, which increase the risk of infant mortality. But there were also higher rates of accidental death, which the researchers believe might be explained by the increased likelihood of suffering from autism, epilepsy or schizophrenia.

Most research into older parents has, until now, focused on the risks passed on by older mothers. But the new study, published in the European Journal of Epidemiology, was adjusted to take account of maternal age and socio-economic differences.

The research also found higher death rates among children of the youngest fathers, especially those below the age of 19. However, the study said these differences were explained by the risks of teenage motherhood and poorer diet and lifestyle.

Previous research using the same data found that older men were four times as likely to father a child with Down’s syndrome, while other studies have found that the genetic quality of sperm deteriorates as men age.

More than 75,000 babies in Britain are born to fathers aged 40 and over each year, or more than one in 10 of all births. This includes more than 6,000 born to fathers aged 50 or over. The average age of fathering a child in this country is 32.

Dr Allan Pacey, senior lecturer in andrology – the medical specialty dealing with male reproduction – at the University of Sheffield, said: “A lot of people know that there are risks for the child that come from having an older mother, but children of older fathers also carry an increased risk. These sorts of results provide another good reason to have children early, when possible.”

Dr Pacey, who is secretary of the British Fertility Society, said scientists were unsure exactly what impact the ageing process had on the quality of sperm, making it impossible to detect defects before conception.

Dr Jin Liang Zhu, from the Danish Epidemiology Science Centre, which carried out the research, said: “The risks of older fatherhood can be very profound, and it is not something that people are always aware of.”

The mother’s age still has the bigger impact on child health, however. About one in 900 babies born to women under 30 have Down’s syndrome – a figure which reaches one in 100 by the age of 40. The number of over-40s giving birth in Britain each year has doubled in the past decade to 16,000. The risk of miscarriage rises sharply with age.

Source: Telegraph.co.uk, United Kingdom
http://tinyurl.com/4jl4jy

No one can read our thoughts, for now, but some scientists believe they can at least figure out in what language we do our thinking.

Before we utter a single word, experts can gauge our mother tongue and the level of proficiency in other languages by analyzing our brain activity while we read, scientists working with Italy’s National Research Council say.

For more than a year, a team of scientists experimented on 15 interpreters, revealing what they say were surprising differences in brain activity when the subjects were shown words in their native language and in other languages they spoke.

The findings show how differently the brain absorbs and recalls languages learned in early childhood and later in life, said Alice Mado Proverbio, a professor of cognitive electrophysiology at the Milano-Bicocca University in Milan.

Proverbio, who led the study, said such research could help doctors communicate with patients suffering from amnesia or diseases that impair speech. It could also be of use one day in questioning refugee applicants or terror suspects to determine their origin, she said.

The interpreters who took part in the study were all Italians working for the European Union and translating in English and Italian.

“They were extremely fluent in English,” Proverbio said in a telephone interview earlier this month. “We didn’t expect a big difference in brain activity” when they switched from one language to another.

The subjects were asked to look at a screen that flashed words in Italian, English, German as well as nonsensical letter combinations. They were not aware of the purpose of the study and were simply tasked with pressing a button when they spotted a specific symbol, Proverbio said.

Meanwhile, researchers monitored them using an electroencephalograph, or EEG, which measures the brain’s electrical activity through electrodes placed on the scalp. The EEG readout was fed into a computer program that pinpointed the time, intensity and location of the responses evoked in the subjects’ brains by each word.

About 170 milliseconds after a word was shown, the researchers recorded a peak in electrical activity in the left side of the brain, in an area that recognizes letters as part of words before their meaning is interpreted.

These brain waves had a much higher amplitude when the word was in Italian, the language the interpreters had learned before age five.

“The research suggests the differences between the two languages are at a very fundamental level,” said Joseph Dien, a psychology professor at the University of Kansas who was not involved in the study.

Proverbio attributed the differences to the fact the brain absorbs the mother tongue at a time when it is also storing early visual, acoustic, emotional and other nonlinguistic knowledge. This means that the native language triggers a series of associations within the brain that show up as increased electrical activity.

“Our mother tongue is the language we use to think, dream and feel emotion,” Proverbio said.

Offering an example, she said that an English-speaking child would associate the word “knife” with a sharp, cold object that is dangerous and should only be used by adults, while these links would be much weaker and indirect once that person learned the same word in another language later in life.

The only exception would be for those bilingual individuals who learn an extra language before age five.

The findings by Proverbio’s team were published earlier this year in the Biological Psychology journal and have surprised some scientists, particularly because the differences in brain activity show up at a point in the thought process when the brain hasn’t yet interpreted the meaning of the words.

“I didn’t expect such differences at the very beginning of the process,” Dien said in a telephone interview.

“They emerge at a very early level of comprehension,” he said. “It will take a lot more work to work out the implications of that.”

Dien said further research in the area could help understand and treat learning disabilities like dyslexia.

The Italian study also showed links between brain activity and proficiency in other languages. The differences showed up when the translators were shown words in English and in German, a language they knew at a more basic level, Proverbio said.

In this case, the differences in intensity and duration of the brain’s activity were seen some 250 milliseconds after a word was shown, and were traced to areas of the brain used to understand the meaning of words.

This phenomenon had been already discovered by previous studies which, however, had not spotted any difference between the mother tongue and other languages spoken with high proficiency. This had suggested that with some effort “we could all become perfectly bilingual,” Proverbio said. “Unfortunately, that’s not true.”

Source: International Herald Tribune, France
http://tinyurl.com/45dzks

A tide of recent research on early childhood development is inspiring prominent scientists and politicians to argue for an unprecedented investment in schooling that begins virtually at birth.

But as decades of academic studies on brain development start to land in the real world, experts are divided on whether to focus new funding on infants and toddlers, or conventional preschool. Many now think some policies popular with politicians and the public, such as universal prekindergarten, may fail to reach at-risk kids at a young enough age.

The scientific controversy also is spilling into the presidential contest, where the Democratic candidates have taken divergent positions on universal preschool and other early childhood issues.

Studies have suggested that intervening before children start preschool improves academic outcomes for low-income kids and may reduce the risk that they will end up in prison. Such interventions stem from the theory that experiences in the first five years of life set a lifelong course for brain development.

Chicago has become a national proving ground for schooling during the first three years and is home to prominent advocates such as Nobel Prize-winning economist James Heckman of the University of Chicago, who said reaching kids before preschool could offer the best long-term economic return.

“Even at age 4 or 5, you may be starting too late,” Heckman said. “I wouldn’t say it’s hopeless to help kids after those early years, but it’s extremely expensive.”

Backers of universal preschool say the evidence for even earlier intervention is not yet solid and offering conventional prekindergarten to everyone would help build popular support for early education.

In theory, starting to intervene soon after birth should help kids more because that’s when experience starts to shape their brains, many experts said.

Children’s brains change more between conception and kindergarten than at any other time. University of Chicago neuroscientist Peter Huttenlocher showed in studies over the last 30 years that connections between cells in most brain areas peak by age 3, then decline gradually as experiences mold the brain’s circuitry.

The zero-to-3 period is not necessarily a magical and irreplaceable window for teaching children. But studies show that babies raised in poverty get fewer of the early experiences that spur vocabulary growth and good social judgment, making it harder for them to catch up later.

For example, toddlers whose parents speak more words to them develop bigger vocabularies than children who hear less speech, studies have found. One University of Kansas study concluded that kids from upper-income backgrounds hear 30 million more words by age 3 than those from poor families.

Early intervention with enrichment programs can narrow that gap, researchers and advocates say.

“The basic science of brain development says you need to start as early as possible for kids in the greatest danger to get the best outcomes,” said Jack Shonkoff, director of the Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University.

Bruce Fuller, a professor of education and public policy at the University of California-Berkeley, said he feared focusing on universal prekindergarten — making preschool a middle-class entitlement — could divert help from low-income families that need it most.

“Why would we use scarce public dollars to subsidize all families if we know the biggest impact is with poor kids?” he said.

Source: Detroit Free Press, United States
http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080502/NEWS07/805020328

For generations, scholars have debated whether language constrains the ways we think. Now, neuroscientists studying reading disorders have begun to wonder whether the actual character of the text itself may shape the brain.

Studies of schoolchildren who read in varying alphabets and characters suggest that those who are dyslexic in one language, say Chinese or English, may not be in another, such as Italian.

Among children raised to read and write Chinese, the demands of reading draw on parts of the brain untouched by the English alphabet, new neuroimaging studies reveal. It’s the same with dyslexia, psychologist Li Hai Tan at Hong Kong Research University and his colleagues reported last month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The problems occur in areas not involved in reading other alphabets.

Using two brain-imaging techniques, they identified striking differences in neural anatomy and brain activity between children able to read and write Chinese easily and classmates struggling to keep pace. Both were at odds with patterns of brain activity among readers of the English alphabet.

Even when readers in both languages looked at the same written characters, the brain activity was different, other researchers found. Arabic numerals of standard arithmetic — used by readers of Chinese and English alike — activate different brain regions depending on which of the two languages people had first learned to read, researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and China’s Dalian University of Technology reported in 2006.

“In this sense, we may regard dyslexia in Chinese and English as two different brain disorders,” Dr. Tan said, “because completely different brain regions are disrupted. It’s very likely that a person who is dyslexic in Chinese would not be dyslexic in English.”

By any measure, reading is a complex and peculiar task. At the speed of thought, readers of English turn letters they see into sounds, sounds into words, and words into meaning. Fluency is measured in milliseconds. Spelling variations are speed bumps in the brain.

Until recently, researchers who study reading abilities focused mostly on Western alphabets. English and 218 other languages, from Alsatian to Zulu, share variations of the same Latin character set. But that set is only one of 60 writing systems used among the world’s remaining 6,912 spoken languages. Even so, those studies convinced many scientists and educators that the brain’s response to the written word, regardless of the language, is universal.

The new research suggests they’re wrong. The schooling required to read English or Chinese may fine-tune neural circuits in distinctive ways.

“We have to recognize that the writing system in China is different, the demands on the brain are different and the characteristics of dyslexia are different,” said Georgetown University pediatric learning specialist Guinevere Eden, who is incoming president of the International Dyslexia Association.

To document the effects on brain development, Dr. Eden and her colleagues are launching a five-year study in Beijing and Washington to compare the neural changes in 60 schoolchildren learning to read either Chinese or English. “Nobody has ever done this across two writing systems,” Dr. Eden said.

In ways that ancient scribes never imagined, text has transformed us. Every brain shaped by reading, whether it is schooled in Chinese or English text, measurably differs — in terms of patterns of energy use and brain structure — from one that has never mastered the written word, comparative brain-imaging studies show. “There are real differences that emerge because of literacy,” Dr. Wolf said.

Some social psychologists speculate that the brain changes caused by literacy could be involved in cultural differences in memory, attention and visual perception. In January’s Psychological Science, MIT researchers reported that European-Americans and students from several East Asian cultures, for example, showed different patterns of brain activation when making snap judgments about visual patterns.

No one knows which came first: habits of thought or the writing system that gave them tangible form. A writing system could be drawn from the archaeology of the mind, perpetuating aspects of mental life conceived at the dawn of civilization.

“Once you have different writing systems in place,” said University of Michigan social psychologist Richard Nisbett. “They may reinforce the perceptual and cognitive trends that preceded the invention of writing. They may go hand in glove.”

Source: Wall Street Journal
http://tinyurl.com/6c4gax

What does my baby know? When does my baby start to learn? How do you teach a baby?

Twenty-five years ago, the answers to these questions were unclear; there was much conjecture and many hypotheses on just what happens when infants interact with the people and objects in their environment. Observation and testing provided many tantalizing clues, but what was actually going on within those precious little heads still remained a mystery.

In recent years, new and nonintrusive brain-scanning technology has allowed scientists to watch in real time the brain-stimulation effects of a wide range of seemingly simple activities, beginning in the earliest weeks of life.

It turns out, infants quickly know an amazing amount of things: Just days after birth, they can recognize familiar faces, smells and sounds; soon after birth they can differentiate every vocal sound produced by human languages (and by six months they have already begun to sort out the common sounds of the languages they hear most frequently). At birth, they begin expressing rudimentary emotional expressions, and by two months they can express more complex emotions, such as sadness or frustration.

While these infants are literally growing smarter daily, their parents are often feeling the opposite effect; the addition of this little genius to the family has thrown their personal and family routines into disarray, priorities are now inverted and diapers and feeding cycles are an obsession they never believed they’d share. All parents need and deserve support in this time of transition.

What to do with this information is the challenge; for many parents in today’s two-wage-earner economy, just spending a few waking hours with their baby is a stretch — especially when it is the baby’s sleep schedule that determines when a waking hour occurs.

While we’d all like to give our littlest ones every advantage from day one, parents are overwhelmed with opinions, options and advice, much of it contradictory.

New parents can prepare to be their child’s first and best teacher by first acknowledging that none of us can do this alone. Connecting with their peers to share the challenges and opportunities, acknowledging their common needs and sharing resources, information and skills will build confidence and competence in those critical first few months of the adventure of parenting.

Source: Seattle Times, United States
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/opinion/2004371716_harryhoffman25.html