How Kids Learn
Babies are quick studies-and parents are cramming them with Mozart and French lessons
Babies start to show social skills before they can form a complete sentence. Alison Gopnik, a University of California-Berkeley psychologist, gave 14-month-olds a bowl of Goldfish crackers, which they universally loved, and a bowl of broccoli, which they disliked. A researcher expressed a preference for broccoli and then asked the toddlers to "give me some." They gave her the Goldfish, refusing to believe that she would rather have broccoli. However, 18-month-olds handed over the broccoli. "They learn something very hard and important," says Gopnik, "and that's that people want different things." Alan Leslie, a psychologist at Rutgers University, has demonstrated that even children with Down's syndrome can correctly predict the expectations of others. As a result, he believes that ability must be instinctive but honed by experience. No one knows how much is nature, how much nurture.
Beyond the laboratory, these findings have sparked a proliferation of efforts to capitalize on them, from measures in more than two dozen states to expand access to preschool, to all manner of classes and educational toys. And much effort has gone into bringing music to the under-2 set. Georgia and Tennessee now send a classical-music CD home with every newborn, and Florida requires public schools to play classical music for toddlers. The Delos label markets Baby Needs Mozart, a recent Billboard chart-topper, as well as Baby Needs Beethoven and Baby Needs Baroque. No matter that a study released last month in the journal Nature found, as lead author Kenneth Steele of Appalachian State University says, that "there's very little-OK, there's no evidence-to suggest that these CDs do anything special."
But what about the rest of it-the lapware, the better-baby institutes? "None of it will help build your baby a better brain," says John Bruer, head of the James S. McDonnell Foundation, which funds research on neuroscience and cognition. He argues that most people misinterpret what scientists have discovered about infants' rapid cognitive development. As a result, Bruer says, two myths have permeated society. One is that enrichment activities allow the brain to grow more synapses than it would have otherwise. The second is that basic learning skills are hard-wired in the first three years, and that this process ends when the period of rapid synapse formation ends, forever closing these "critical periods" of development.
Neuroscientists and developmental psychologists applaud Bruer's stance. "Whether you're using a megaphone to talk to your child in utero, or labeling everything in their little world with flashcards, you're not going to unleash some special brain potential," says Ross Thompson, a developmental psychologist at the University of Nebraska. For one thing, the theory that the environment stimulates brainpower grew largely out of research conducted in the 1970s on rats. Animals in cages "enriched" by wheels and other toys had more synapses in certain parts of their brains and performed simple learning tasks better than did rats living in barren cages.
Fundamental differences. "Aside from the problem of what's true for rats may not be true for children," explains Jack Shonkoff, chair of the National Academy of Sciences Committee on Integrating the Science of Early Childhood Development, "the difference between enriched and severely deprived is very different than the difference, as most parents extrapolate, between a good and a great environment."
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