Surely more than once you have read that babies are born with a very poorly developed brain. Well, it's true.
The lungs and the heart, for example, need to function at full capacity as soon as they are born and that is why they are widely developed, however other organs, including the brain, will just grow and mature outside.
This means that brain development takes place, for the most part, once the baby has already been born and, therefore, We parents can help it develop in the most correct way possible.
Babies are born with an immature brain
There are authors who explain that babies should be born, at least, with 12 months of gestation, a theory that would explain how difficult it is for children to adapt to the environment (to life, to light, to noise, to the environment, ... ) in the first three months, when many afternoons cry inconsolably because their brains say “this is how far I have come” (a phenomenon that was known for a while as infant colic).
Other authors, on the other hand, are more daring and speak of nine months of gestation in the uterus and nine months of extrogestation (arms, skin-to-skin contact and breastfeeding to maintain maximum mother-child contact), to result in A minimally mature baby.
In any case, the important thing is to understand that with the evolution of humans the brain grew by increasing intelligence, the standing made the woman's pelvis narrow and this caused the baby had to be born with a brain that is only 25% of the size it will be in adulthood.
If we add to this that babies are born with a brain in which there are very few neuronal connections in the rational brain, we have as a result a human baby with very few rational abilities (speaking in Christian, unable to “tease” or “talk Latin").
In short, when a baby arrives in the world, the brain is still in the early stages of maturation and most of its development takes place outside.
We can influence brain development
Imagine babies were born with 95% of their brain developed. Only 5% of his brain would develop outside and our work as parents and educators would be less influential.
They would grow with us and surely we could change many of their neural connections (our brain is plastic and changes day by day), however many others would be immovable and our “message” would not arrive as much as it can when we raise babies with brains So immature
By this I mean that the fact that most of the brain has to make the neural connections abroad It is an opportunity for parents to help babies grow in a healthy way, balanced, adapted to the environment, responsible, etc.
It is not that we have the capacity or the possibility of shaping our children as we please, because in spite of everything they are not a blank book that is waiting to be written by us. They are a book with some pages already written by themselves, which has to be written by themselves, with our help and support.
However, this opportunity that nature offers us is a double-edged sword. If we do not understand how the brain of babies works, if we do not understand their primary needs or satisfy them, if we allow them to cry and suffer, we will be allowing them to create neural connections based on unpleasant and uncomfortable experiences, adopting attitudes of defense or vigilance and we will be allowing them to grow up without learning how to calm and control their emotions and their impulses (or doing it erratically).
The curious thing is that until now, due to ignorance or routine, parents have been educating their children in a way that the brain would require, leaving them to cry “because the world also comes to suffer”, not taking them “because they get used to the arms ”and producing or allowing various dissatisfactions at ages too early that they don't know how to manage.
To be continue…
Since it is a topic that requires a few more paragraphs, we will continue in a few days with the following entry about this topic.
