Babies are born to learn, and learn they do. In the first years of life, their brains create over a million new neural connections every second. Those connections become the foundation for more complex pathways and behaviors later on.
That’s the boom period. In the first year of life alone, brain volume doubles. The connections forged in the first two years carry over to childhood and adolescence; the most-used ones strengthen while others are pruned.
Early life experiences set the stage for forming those connections. Here’s what it means for early childhood education and why it’s vital for developing complex skills later in life.
How Does the Brain Develop in Early Childhood? Your Crash Course
Of course, brain development starts well before a child takes their first breath. Forebrain, midbrain, and hindbrain, three primary brain structures, form in the sixth week of pregnancy. By the last trimester, neurons have already forged their first connections. Come birth, the brain already has major long-range signaling pathways in place to support vital functions.
During the first years, the brain rapidly develops more neural connections. Sensory pathways (vision, hearing) are the first to form. Early language-related ones follow them. Higher cognitive function pathways boom by the end of the first year.
By the age of 3, a child’s brain has around 1,000 trillion connections. That’s the most they’ll ever have. The less-used connections are then pruned. (That doesn’t mean new connections can’t be formed later in life, though!)
Brain development in early childhood is akin to building a sturdy foundation for a skyscraper. The simpler circuits formed in early childhood are the supporting structure for more complex pathways.
So, Why Is Early Childhood Education Important for Brain Development?
The foundation established in the first years of a child’s life will influence the cognitive, emotional, and social abilities they develop later in life. High-quality education and care can help build that foundation, and its benefits are many:
- Better academic and cognitive outcomes
- Higher educational qualifications and higher job earnings
- Reduced likelihood of risky health behaviors
- Better health outcomes
- Lower rates of depression
Early childhood is when the brain is highly “plastic,” and this plasticity allows the brain to accommodate a wide range of environments and interactions. Early childhood education can take advantage of high neuroplasticity to help children build the foundation for more complex skills and behaviors.
That said, the importance of early childhood education hinges on its quality. High-quality education doesn’t revolve around grades and assignments. It fosters curiosity, a spirit of exploration, and basic cognitive, social, emotional, and physical skills by:
- Teaching children to recognize and use new words
- Encouraging asking questions
- Employing storytelling techniques
- Teaching counting, comparing, and classifying objects
- Fostering memory and retrieval
- Offering opportunities for interacting with other children
- Teaching how to solve simple problems
- Encouraging self-control and attention
How Responsive Teaching in Early Childhood Promotes Neural Connectivity
Responsive teaching may sound complicated on the surface, but that’s a false first impression. In practice, it’s a simple idea: responding to the child’s cries, babbles, or gestures. It doesn’t have to be a verbal response; it can also be a hug or eye contact.
This back-and-forth, which Harvard researchers dubbed “serve and return interactions,” is vital because brains are wired to expect it. That’s the basis for any social interactions between humans. Strengthening neural connections through this back-and-forth ultimately lays the foundation for communication and interpersonal skills.
But that’s not all. Responding with words and naming things the child is focused on promotes their language skills. Helping them identify their feelings, in turn, fosters emotional intelligence skills.
Timely and sensitive caregiving interactions are associated with larger brain volume in infants, according to this study by Sethna et al.
Here’s how to practice serve and return interactions:
- Notice what the child is focused on
- Respond by showing you’re noticing the same thing or bringing the object closer
- Name what the child is seeing, feeling, or doing
- Keep the interaction going back and forth; be patient while waiting for a response
- Practice clear beginnings and endings
A Word on the Importance of Play in Child Development
As one pediatrician succinctly put it in an interview with Healthline, “Play is how children learn.” We couldn’t have said it better.
Play helps children acquire and develop a plethora of vital life skills, such as:
- Cognitive skills: Memory, critical thinking, problem-solving, creativity, imagination
- Physical skills: Fine and gross motor skills, spatial relations, motor planning skills, balance, dexterity
- Social skills: Understanding social expectations and rules, listening, reaching a compromise, exchanging ideas
- Emotional skills: Understanding and processing emotions, self-confidence, sense of identity, self-esteem
These benefits are well-documented. This AAP clinical report lists improvements in executive functioning, early math skills, language, social development, physical health and development, and sense of agency.
Overall, there are two types of play:
- Structured play takes place under the guidance of an adult, at a fixed time and place.
- Unstructured play happens spontaneously, without prior planning.
Here are some examples of age-appropriate play:
- Infants: Peekaboo, experimenting with sounds (e.g., giving a crinkly paper)
- Toddlers: Playing with cars and blocks, puzzles, pretend play, drawing
- Preschoolers: Solo activities like puzzles, LEGOs, magnetic tiles; social activities like tag, Simon Says, and red light/green light
How to Promote Language Development in Early Childhood
During the first 3 years of life, the brain goes all in on acquiring speech and language skills. But, of course, it can’t do so in isolation: it needs consistent exposure to speech and language.
Babies start communicating with cries. By 6 months, they learn to discern basic sounds of their caregivers’ native language. By the age of 1, they can usually speak a couple of simple words. By the age of 3, they should be able to have a word for almost everything and use two- or three-word phrases.
Serve and return interactions are crucial for language development. During them, the child:
- Hears new words
- Associates them with objects, actions, emotions, or concepts
- Tries using them
- Receives feedback from the adult
Language skills lay the foundation for literacy, which in turn impacts academic outcomes. That said, language development also goes hand in hand with building cognitive and social-emotional skills.
Both families and educators can foster language development by:
- Reading aloud to children
- Playing with letter blocks
- Talking to the child: asking open-ended questions, encouraging them to retell stories
- Playing word-based games to introduce new vocabulary
- Encouraging social interactions with peers
- Discussing pictures and events
Social Emotional Development in Early Childhood: A Crucial Piece of the Puzzle
There’s more to healthy brain development than cognitive skills like memory, language, and problem-solving. For a child to grow into a healthy adult, they need social and emotional skills to interact with others and build meaningful, long-lasting relationships.
A strong foundation for these skills can lead to benefits like:
- Increased prosocial behavior
- Higher prevalence of internalizing behaviors over externalizing ones
- Stronger social competences
- Higher academic performance ratings
That last point is something you might not expect, but it is true: stronger social and emotional skills go hand in hand with better academic outcomes. That’s because they enable children to learn more effectively. For example:
- Managing one’s emotions helps maintain attention and overcome frustration.
- Social skills enable learning from and with others.
- Understanding of social rules helps children listen and wait for their turn.
Early childhood environments should be conducive to developing these skills. That can mean, for example, including group activities as part of play or helping children recognize and name their emotions.
What Makes for Quality Early Childhood Education?
Based on everything we’ve laid out this far, you can see that there’s more to high-quality early childhood education than basic daycare activities. Education that promotes healthy brain development has to involve:
- Serve and return interactions. This means that educators pay attention to what the child focuses on and respond to them in a back-and-forth.
- Language-rich activities. Those can include reading, asking open-ended questions, storytelling, and two-way conversations.
- Play-based learning. Play is learning; so, children should have enough opportunities to explore and experiment on their own and with their peers.
- Social interaction. Early childhood education needs to combine responsive interaction with adults and play with peers.
- Safe, predictable environment. Physical and emotional safety is a prerequisite for exploration, learning, and interaction with others.
- Neither too tough nor too simple activities. They have to be just the right degree of challenging (and age-appropriate) to enable learning without unnecessary stress.
Healthy Brain Development Hinges on More Than Education
Don’t get this wrong: early childhood education is important. That said, it’s far from the only factor at play here.
The genetic makeup and how or whether genes are expressed set the framework for brain development. Other environmental and experiential factors, including before birth, also influence brain development.
For example, a healthy diet and enough folic acid promote healthy nervous system development during pregnancy. Infections, exposure to toxins, and even the mother’s stress during pregnancy, in turn, can negatively affect brain development.
After the birth, healthy brain growth requires:
- Responsive caregiving
- Nurturing, stable, and caring environment
- Proper nutrition
- Protection from toxin exposure, adverse events, and toxic stress
- Sufficient sleep
- Early learning opportunities
- Physical and emotional safety
The WHO, in fact, establishes five crucial components of nurturing care for successful early childhood development:
- Good health
- Learning opportunities
- Security and safety
- Responsive caregiving
- Adequate nutrition
In Closing
It’s impossible to understate just how crucial the first years of a child’s life are for brain development and for their life in general. That’s why early childhood education isn’t something to be discounted or overlooked. In fact, it’s as vital as proper nourishment, responsive caregivers, and a secure, toxin-free environment.
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