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Impact on the Brain

“When you have a baby you have five years of hard labor ahead of you. If you don’t get it over at the beginning, you’ve got it coming to you later.”

- John Bowlby

As parents, we have great influence over what happens or doesn’t happen with our child’s development, and we have the ability to change the trajectory if we are aware and have the tools to make changes. We need to understand that our children are not born as blank states, but that children absorb what happens to them in utero, during birth, and long before they can consciously remember. Our parenting decisions help to form the basic structure of a child’s brain in the early years, while later decisions only add to or lessen the impact of the basic structure.

For example, if a child feels loved and valued as an infant, when other people express love and the child’s value when he is older, this will resonate within the child because it is part of his basic beliefs to love and accept love. If a child did not have this early experience, casual comments about a child’s value or lovability will be discounted because the child does not hold this core belief about himself. This makes it more important to try to meet children’s needs when they are young. It is possible to change things later, but you are looking at changing the structure of the brain and the neural pathways. It is possible to do, but it requires LOTS of work on a daily basis to make changes.