Patricia Snyder, who studies young children at the University of Florida, still thinks about a certain scene. A young mother pushing a stroller through an airport while she was waiting for her flight caught her eye. The baby, who was about four months old, was clearly hungry and crying in a way that any parent would recognize as trouble getting worse. The mom had a bottle. She had a buggy for babies. The only thing she didn’t have was attention. She had her phone out.
He said it was painful to watch what happened over the next ten minutes. The baby couldn’t hold on to the bottle. The child would whine. While still talking, the mother would move it and then go back to her call. Don’t look at them. Not comforting. No trade. Just a bottle propped up and a hand away from it.
Snyder is careful not to be too harsh on that mother. In general, she doesn’t think the woman was careless. Soon after, a woman sitting nearby with a small dog made the young mother feel better right away. She started talking to the dog, cooing, and responding. There was enough room. Being aware wasn’t.
In the field of developmental science, the gap between what parents can do and what they know is at the heart of one of the most well-studied but poorly funded areas. It has been shown over and over again that about 90% of brain development happens in the first five years of life. During those early interactions, like mealtimes, grocery store trips, and bedtime routines, neural pathways are being formed. These pathways build the structure that helps with everything from learning a language to controlling your emotions to long-term learning. These aren’t allegories. It is possible to measure how these biological structures are changing in real time.
However. In this country, a lot of the money that is spent on education comes after most of the building has already been done. Clayton Christensen, a professor at Harvard, says that about 98 percent of education dollars come in after a child has built up most of their basic intellectual skills. Pre-kindergarten programs, which usually cost around $4,000 a year for each child, are more often seen as nice policy breaks than as long-term investments. On the other hand, it costs more than $148,000 a year to jail a juvenile offender. There’s nothing hard about the math. It looks like the political will is.
Sandra Dodgens has seen what early intervention looks like in real life. A pair of three-year-old twins came to live with her with severe developmental delays, what might have been autism, what might have been dyslexia, and they could only talk in twin-speak. The last caregiver worked for 30 hours. Snyder worked in early intervention at the time, so Dodgens called him and got to work. She gave each thing in their environment a name. She set up habits. She wrote down her progress every week. She took them in as her own when they were nine years old. They are both now in college.
It’s simple to turn that story into a happy ending and move on. However, Dodgens is very clear about what made the difference. “A lot of people don’t know that you actually have to engage and talk regularly to young children,” she explains. That seems pretty clear. It’s not. Snyder says that a lot of parents really believe that babies can’t interact with others in a meaningful way before they can talk, that real learning doesn’t start until preschool, kindergarten, or whenever a teacher is involved. The study says otherwise. Snyder puts it simply: “By pre-kindergarten, it’s three years too late if the child hasn’t had responsive early interactions as an infant or toddler.”
When you watch how policies are made, it seems like early childhood science is talked about in a different room than the budget rooms where decisions are made. Advocates have the facts. Researchers put it out there. The cycle then starts all over again when a school district cuts its early intervention program or when the state legislature stops giving money to home visits. About one-third of kids who start kindergarten are not ready to do the work. By fourth grade, more than half of them can’t read at grade level. This number has stayed the same for years. They’re not a secret.
It’s still not clear if there are the political structures in place to take the first five years as seriously as biology calls for. The way “early childhood programs” are talked about might have always been a part of the problem, since they sound like a nice-to-have instead of a basic investment in brain health. The brain doesn’t wait for money to get back on track, though. There are serve-and-return interactions going on right now between a caretaker and an infant in homes, daycares, and airport terminals across the country. These include the look, the response, the sound, and the smile. The window is wide open. That won’t last.
