When routines and stability are lacking, children’s cognitive development suffers a setback. Here’s what happens to their brains and why predictability is their best defense.
Children’s brains are always “listening” to new stimuli from which to learn, and if chaos and unpredictability prevail around the little ones, that chaotic world interferes with the cognitive abilities of the little ones.
Three new studies published on Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience document the extent to which instability in the growing environment can impact children’s abilities to pay attention, analyze acquired information, and regulate emotions.
A predictable and safe context: this is how you learn
The basis of all three studies is the assumption that children’s brains are a prediction machine: from the first months of life, children constantly monitor what is happening around them, and a predictable environment allows them to formulate expectations about what will happen in response to a situation – in other words, to learn.
On this “background” stability, children build the foundations of more complex cognitive abilities, such as attention and emotional control: however, socioeconomic or family conditions do not always allow this predictability to materialize.
Intermittent attention
In an initial experiment on 160 children aged 3 to 12 months, scientists at the University of California, Irvine noticed that children who were growing up with fewer guarantees of having a stable home, food and other basic resources tended to look away more frequently during a task that required visual attention.
From the toddlers’ point of view, what might seem like simple attention difficulties made perfect sense: the children were trying to distribute attention to the world around them, which they perceived as unstable, waiting to grasp new information.
Less present and less adaptable
A second test involved 104 3-year-old children engaged in five minutes of cuddles and eye contact with caring family figures.
Scientists tracked the predictability of caregivers’ behaviors. Children cared for by less predictable adults showed reduced activity in the frontal cortex, a sign of poorer attention and a lower ability to analyze information.
Furthermore, they had lower heart rate variability, a value that predicts the flexibility of the nervous system in responding to different emotional situations.
A predictable interaction – the scientists explain – has a rhythm and phases that children can anticipate: between this and a contact perceived as unstable there is the same difference that exists between a lullaby and a piece of jazz improvisation, perhaps fun, but which is difficult to learn.
Is breastfeeding a natural regulator?
In a third study, which followed 81 pairs of mothers and babies, scientists hypothesized that a substance naturally present in breast milk – allopregnanolone, a neurosteroid derived from the hormone progesterone and which has the effect of regulating stress and stabilizing mood – acts as a buffer between maternal depression and the effects that this type of instability can have on children’s emotional regulation skills.
A synthetic version of this substance is, not surprisingly, already used in the treatment of postpartum depression.
Support families to support children
Taken together, these three studies underline the importance of parenting support from the early stages, with an important distinction: stability does not necessarily depend on the availability of economic resources, even if a context poor in resources is more often unstable.
Some forms of support that are not directly financial, such as parental leave or better, easily accessible public childcare facilities, can make a difference in children’s cognitive development.
