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Parenting
with Gary & Anne Marie: Toddlers
Toddlers - The Neurological Boundaries of Learning
Some junior high students
huddled around the inside perimeter of a schoolyard fence. A passing psychologist
from the local university noted this and subsequently suggested that the fences
represented unwelcome limitations and that children would do better with an
unrestricted schoolyard. Thus the fences all came down. The result? The children
began to huddle in the middle of the playground because they did not know where
the boundaries were.
Boundaries play a role in
a toddler's life as much as they do in our adult life. The psychologist above
assumed that the boundaries were bad. Yet in this case, boundaries clearly represented
the perimeter of security and the outer limits of freedom. When the boundaries
came down, the students' freedoms were lost.
Boundaries are important
for a toddler's development, and in the period between fourteen and forty months,
boundaries take on two forms. Physical boundaries, of course, are obvious necessities.
How far can little feet travel, and how much can little hands touch? Physical
boundaries play a role in matters of health and safety. What you allow your
child to touch and where you allow him freedoms to play are often based on safety
concerns first and learning second. But there is a second boundary to consider:
the neurological boundaries associated with learning. Your toddler's developing
brain sets its own boundaries and has its own way of organizing. Therefore,
how the mind is stimulated and how learning is organized is as important as
learning itself.
Some parents think they
can stuff knowledge into the child's developing brain much like, as Jane M.
Healy PhD puts it, a butcher stuffs sausage. They think teaching their eight-month-old
child math and Swahili destines him to become a genius. Not so. As well intentioned
as these parents may be, their emphasis is in the wrong place-on knowledge disbursement,
rather than on developing a healthy infrastructure for learning. Helping to
stimulate an efficient knowledge processing system during the critical fourteen-to-forty-month
period is a "must attain" goal for toddler parenting.
There is no debate among
educational clinicians about whether a child's ability to learn is tied to how
the brain organizes information and what stimulates thought, ideas, and answers.
This is one reason why a toddler's curiosity should not be hindered but rather
directed. Any activity that engages a toddler's interest, attention, or imagination
is a type of toddler "brain fertilizer." If it provokes a response
or investigation, the brain is actively working, growing, and organizing.
Actively is used here in
contrast to the less-desirable passive form of learning, i.e., sitting too long
and absorbing too many video or TV cartoon messages. These activities do not
help with optimal brain organization because learning is passive and not interactive.
Mothers often write and
ask us if there really is an advantage to reading stories to toddlers and preschoolers.
Our answer is "Yes, of course!" There are many advantages, but not
necessarily the advantages most parents think of. Certainly, reading to your
toddler creates a physical environment of touch and closeness. Often the child
is in a parent's lap, finding security in his parent's arms.
The parent is also teaching
self-control, encouraging focusing and attention skills, and reinforcing the
very productive skill and habit of sitting. The child's imagination is also
being stimulated, and new interests are developed as Mom walks him through story-land.
Often, children's stories possess a moral component, allowing you to teach toddler-age
virtues. These are some of the wonderful corollary effects of reading to your
toddler.
However, holding your child
in your lap and reading, "See the bunny!" from his book cannot be
compared with a trip to the pet store or zoo, where Mom also says, "See
the bunny!" In your toddler's developing brain, the real thing is better
than a thousand pictures when it comes to organization. The bunny moves, sniffs
with little bobbing whiskers, chews a small green leaf, and hops around his
cage. The child's brain is interacting far more with the real thing than with
a storybook. It is not simply that there is more brain stimulation, but that
the type of stimulation facilitates better organization. More senses are stimulated,
including sight, sound, smell, and touch, as well as a warm, loving feeling
associated with the bunny's furry cuteness.
What are the major differences
above? The walking, talking, touching toddler connects better than the sitting,
immobile toddler. Common observation confirms that a mobile, exploring toddler
learns faster and more efficiently than the child whose feet never leave the
couch and whose eyes never leave the TV screen. The network of brain activity
connecting mobility and discovery is indeed greater than the type of passive
learning that includes only input data but no output of energy or stimulation
of all the senses.
What public education via
PBS could not-and will never be able-to achieve is to have a two-way conversation
with its viewers. A toddler's language formation, for example, does not develop
solely by listening, but with the necessary interaction back and forth between
people. Your toddler must have opportunities to talk, interact, and respond.
When a child sits and learns
passively from television programming, or even the best of Veggie Tales,
he is missing half of the equation. The more hours of passive learning and the
less opportunity he has to compensate for this type of linear input, the more
disorganized the brain becomes, because the responsive side of the brain is
increasingly left unattended.
Please take heart. We are
not asking you to throw out your television, destroy your children's DVD collection,
or buy a pet store. But we are encouraging you to carefully monitor the amount
of single-direction programming that influences your toddler through the medium
of television. Passive learning is not a sufficient stimulus.
Article
by Gary Ezzo / Anne Marie Ezzo
