In this article, Yudhijit Bhattacharjee discusses the critical brain development that happens in the first year of a baby’s life, and the impact that growing up in poverty has on that cognitive development. Researchers in Philadelphia, USA studied the environments of children living in poverty and found that children who received more attention and nurturing in infancy tended to have higher IQ scores and that children who received more cognitive stimulation tended to perform better on language tasks. Furthermore, the researchers studied these children at the age of four, eight, and as teenagers and found a strong link between nurturing and the size of the hippocampus in the brain at the age of four, but not as strong a link between nurturing and the brain at the age of eight - indicating the importance of nurturing in those early years.
The author also cites other studies in Paris, France, Leipzig, Germany, Kansas, USA, and more that sought to explore language development in infants. These studies, too, point to the huge developmental strides made in the early years of a person’s life. The studies also indicate that, in terms of language and cognitive development, in the words of one of the researchers “the equipment alone is not enough. You also need input.” A child’s environment, and the kind of stimuli received, are crucial to her or his development. And, says one study, children in higher socioeconomic environments tend to have much more stimulation, and hear more words an hour, than those in lower socioeconomic environments. The article concludes with an example of a parental training program that engages parents of low-income children to help them to encourage development in their children and to teach the parents techniques of playing and interacting with their children.