Probably not. If diminished attention occurs on an intermittent basis in an otherwise loving and responsive environment, there is no need for concern. Indeed, some developmental scientists suggest that variations in adult responsiveness present growth-promoting challenges that may help young children recognize the distinction between “self” and “other,” which is a necessary next step for moving toward greater independence and increasing capacity for self-care and problem-solving.
The most important influence on early brain development is the real-life serve and return interaction with caring adults. There are no credible scientific data to support the claim that specialized videos or particular music recordings have a measurable impact on developing brain architecture in the first 2 to 3 years of life. Although a varied array of experiences clearly stimulates learning in the preschool years and beyond, promotional statements about the superior brain-building impacts of expensive “educational” toys and videos for infants and toddlers have no scientific support. For more information, see The Timing and Quality of Early Experiences Combine to Shape Brain Architecture. For more research on media use with children of all ages, visit the Center on Media and Child Health’s website.
There is large amount of evidence from developmental psychology about the importance of contingent, reciprocal interaction (“serve and return”) for many aspects of early childhood development (see Working Paper 1). But how do we know it actually “builds brains”? An increasing number of more recent studies, utilizing brain imaging and other new technologies, now document the impact of nurturing, supportive interaction and “sensitive caregiving” on both brain function and structure. A sampling of these studies are cited below.
- “Neuroimaging revealed a neural mechanism by which language experience may influence brain development; namely, children who experienced more conversational turns exhibited greater activation in left inferior frontal regions (Broca’s area) during language processing, which explained nearly half the relationship between children’s language exposure and verbal abilities.”
Romeo, R.R., Leonard, J.A., Robinson, S.T. et al. (2018). Beyond the 30-million-word gap: Children’s conversational exposure is associated with language-related brain function. Psychological Science, 29(5), 700-710.
- “Sensitive parental care, characterized by prompt and adequate response to the child’s signals and needs, predicts a more secure attachment relationship, higher levels of cognitive competence, and fewer psychological problems.”
“Parental sensitivity in early childhood was positively associated with markers of more optimal brain development at age 8 years, including a larger total brain volume, larger gray matter volume, and thicker cortices in the precentral, postcentral, caudal middle frontal, and rostral middle frontal gyrus.”
Kok, R., Thijssen, S., Bakermans-Kranenburg, M. et al. (2015). Normal variation in early parental sensitivity predicts child structural brain development. Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, 54(10), 824–831.
- “Variations in typical mother–infant interactions are associated with differences in infant brain volumes. Specifically, we found that lower maternal sensitivity was correlated with smaller subcortical grey matter volumes”
Sethna, V., Pote, I., Wang, S. et al. (2017). Mother–infant interactions and regional brain volumes in infancy: An MRI study, Brain Structure and Function, 222, 2379–2388.
- “After considering age at imaging, household income and postnatal maternal anxiety, regression analyses demonstrated significant indirect associations between maternal sensitivity and bilateral hippocampal volume at six months. … Moreover, functional analyses revealed direct associations between maternal sensitivity and connectivity between the hippocampus and areas important for emotional regulation and socio-emotional functioning.”
Rifkin-Graboi, A., Kong, L., Sim, L.W. et al. (2015). Maternal sensitivity, infant limbic structure volume and functional connectivity: A preliminary study. Translational Psychiatry, 5, e668.
- “Parent–child synchrony provides the first experience of nonverbal resonance where the mother adapts her gaze, affective expression, vocal quality, and movements to the infant’s earliest signals to create a shared dialog. Synchrony supports the development of abilities that sustain social engagement, including symbol formation, moral understanding, emotion regulation, and frustration tolerance and provides a template for biological synchrony; during synchronous moments parent and child coordinate their heart rhythms48, neural response28, and oxytocin release49, hence, synchrony is a mechanism by which the parent’s mature physiological systems externally-regulate the child environment-dependent systems and tune them to social life. Here, we show that synchrony longitudinally shapes the neural basis of empathy in preadolescence and specifically targets brain areas that underpin the interface of cognitive and affective empathy.”
Levy, J., Goldstein, A. & Feldman, R. (2019). The neural development of empathy is sensitive to caregiving and early trauma. Nature Communications, 10, 1905.
- “7-mo-old infants activate auditory and motor brain areas similarly for native and nonnative sounds; by 11–12 mo, greater activation in auditory brain areas occurs for native sounds, whereas greater activation in motor brain areas occurs for nonnative sounds, matching the adult pattern. We posit that hearing speech invokes an Analysis by Synthesis process: auditory analysis of speech is coupled with synthesis that predicts the motor plans necessary to produce it. Both brain systems contribute to the developmental transition in infant speech perception.”
Kuhl, P.K., Ramírez, R.R., Bosseler, A., Lin, J.L. & Imada, T. (2014). Infants’ brain responses to speech suggest analysis by synthesis. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 111(31) 11238-11245.
- “The quality of the interactions between parents and their children, measured with gesture and speech, is associated with advanced language development … Infants’ language learning is enhanced in one-on-one social contexts, perhaps because these contexts allow more contingent social interaction between adult and child. … Evidence is accumulating to indicate a greater role for social interaction and social contingency in language learning. A large number of studies now suggest an important role for social behavior in language learning, among them: (1) the necessity of a social context for phonetic learning from exposure to a new language (Conboy & Kuhl, 2011; Kuhl et al., 2003); (2) the role of contingent response to infants’ babbling… (Goldstein et al., 2003; Goldstein & Schwade, 2008), (3) the role of social behavior (eye gaze) as a tactic that provides vital information for language learning in infants (Brooks & Meltzoff, 2008). … These findings contribute to our understanding of the social foundations of language, as observed in both typically developing and developmentally challenged young children, suggesting that language acquisition fundamentally requires social interaction to instigate learning (Kuhl, 2007; Kuhl, 2011; Kuhl, Coffey-Corina, Padden, Munson, Estes, & Dawson, 2013).”
Ramírez-Esparza, N., García-Sierra, A. & Kuhl, P.K. (2014). Look who’s talking: Speech style and social context in language input to infants is linked to concurrent and future speech development. In press: Developmental Science, 17(6), 880-91.
- “Our findings, derived from the moment-to-moment tracking of eye gaze of one-year-olds and their parents as they actively played with toys, provide evidence for an alternative pathway, through the coordination of hands and eyes in goal-directed action. In goal-directed actions, the hands and eyes of the actor are tightly coordinated both temporally and spatially, and thus, in contexts including manual engagement with objects, hand movements and eye movements provide redundant information about where the eyes are looking. Our findings show that one-year-olds rarely look to the parent’s face and eyes in these contexts but rather infants and parents coordinate looking behavior without gaze following by attending to objects held by the self or the social partner. This pathway, through eye-hand coupling, leads to coordinated joint switches in visual attention and to an overall high rate of looking at the same object at the same time, and may be the dominant pathway through which physically active toddlers align their looking behavior with a social partner.”
Yu, C. & Smith, L.B. (2013). Joint attention without gaze following: Human infants and their parents coordinate visual attention to objects through eye-hand coordination. PLoS One, 8(11), e79659.
Page 2
-
Is the child looking or pointing at something? Making a sound or facial expression? Moving those little arms and legs? That’s a serve. The key is to pay attention to what the child is focused on. You can’t spend all your time doing this, so look for small opportunities throughout the day—like while you’re getting them dressed or waiting in line at the store.
WHY? By noticing serves, you’ll learn a lot about children’s abilities, interests, and needs. You’ll encourage them to explore and you’ll strengthen the bond between you.
-
You can offer children comfort with a hug and gentle words, help them, play with them, or acknowledge them. You can make a sound or facial expression—like saying, “I see!” or smiling and nodding to let a child know you’re noticing the same thing. Or you can pick up an object a child is pointing to and bring it closer.
WHY? Supporting and encouraging rewards a child’s interests and curiosity. Never getting a return can actually be stressful for a child. When you return a serve, children know that their thoughts and feelings are heard and understood.
-
When you return a serve by naming what a child is seeing, doing, or feeling, you make important language connections in their brain, even before the child can talk or understand your words. You can name anything—a person, a thing, an action, a feeling, or a combination. If a child points to their feet, you can also point to them and say, “Yes, those are your feet!”
WHY? When you name what children are focused on, you help them understand the world around them and know what to expect. Naming also gives children words to use and lets them know you care.
-
Every time you return a serve, give the child a chance to respond. Taking turns can be quick (from the child to you and back again) or go on for many turns.
Waiting is crucial. Children need time to form their responses, especially when they’re learning so many things at once. Waiting helps keep the turns going.
WHY? Taking turns helps children learn self-control and how to get along with others. By waiting, you give children time to develop their own ideas and build their confidence and independence. Waiting also helps you understand their needs.
-
Children signal when they’re done or ready to move on to a new activity. They might let go of a toy, pick up a new one, or turn to look at something else. Or they may walk away, start to fuss, or say, “All done!” When you share a child’s focus, you’ll notice when they’re ready to end the activity and begin something new.
WHY? When you can find moments for children to take the lead, you support them in exploring their world—and make more serve and return interactions possible.
Serve and return interactions make everyday moments fun and become second nature with practice. By taking small moments during the day to do serve and return, you build up the foundation for children’s lifelong learning, behavior, and health—and their skills for facing life’s challenges.
-
There is large amount of evidence from developmental psychology about the importance of contingent, reciprocal interaction (“serve and return”) for many aspects of early childhood development (see Working Paper 1). But how do we know it actually “builds brains”? An increasing number of more recent studies, utilizing brain imaging and other new technologies, now document the impact of nurturing, supportive interaction and “sensitive caregiving” on both brain function and structure. A sampling of these studies are cited below.- “Neuroimaging revealed a neural mechanism by which language experience may influence brain development; namely, children who experienced more conversational turns exhibited greater activation in left inferior frontal regions (Broca’s area) during language processing, which explained nearly half the relationship between children’s language exposure and verbal abilities.”
Romeo, R.R., Leonard, J.A., Robinson, S.T. et al. (2018). Beyond the 30-million-word gap: Children’s conversational exposure is associated with language-related brain function. Psychological Science, 29(5), 700-710.
- “Sensitive parental care, characterized by prompt and adequate response to the child’s signals and needs, predicts a more secure attachment relationship, higher levels of cognitive competence, and fewer psychological problems.”
“Parental sensitivity in early childhood was positively associated with markers of more optimal brain development at age 8 years, including a larger total brain volume, larger gray matter volume, and thicker cortices in the precentral, postcentral, caudal middle frontal, and rostral middle frontal gyrus.”
Kok, R., Thijssen, S., Bakermans-Kranenburg, M. et al. (2015). Normal variation in early parental sensitivity predicts child structural brain development. Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, 54(10), 824–831.
- “Variations in typical mother–infant interactions are associated with differences in infant brain volumes. Specifically, we found that lower maternal sensitivity was correlated with smaller subcortical grey matter volumes”
Sethna, V., Pote, I., Wang, S. et al. (2017). Mother–infant interactions and regional brain volumes in infancy: An MRI study, Brain Structure and Function, 222, 2379–2388.
- “After considering age at imaging, household income and postnatal maternal anxiety, regression analyses demonstrated significant indirect associations between maternal sensitivity and bilateral hippocampal volume at six months. … Moreover, functional analyses revealed direct associations between maternal sensitivity and connectivity between the hippocampus and areas important for emotional regulation and socio-emotional functioning.”
Rifkin-Graboi, A., Kong, L., Sim, L.W. et al. (2015). Maternal sensitivity, infant limbic structure volume and functional connectivity: A preliminary study. Translational Psychiatry, 5, e668.
- “Parent–child synchrony provides the first experience of nonverbal resonance where the mother adapts her gaze, affective expression, vocal quality, and movements to the infant’s earliest signals to create a shared dialog. Synchrony supports the development of abilities that sustain social engagement, including symbol formation, moral understanding, emotion regulation, and frustration tolerance and provides a template for biological synchrony; during synchronous moments parent and child coordinate their heart rhythms48, neural response28, and oxytocin release49, hence, synchrony is a mechanism by which the parent’s mature physiological systems externally-regulate the child environment-dependent systems and tune them to social life. Here, we show that synchrony longitudinally shapes the neural basis of empathy in preadolescence and specifically targets brain areas that underpin the interface of cognitive and affective empathy.”
Levy, J., Goldstein, A. & Feldman, R. (2019). The neural development of empathy is sensitive to caregiving and early trauma. Nature Communications, 10, 1905.
- “7-mo-old infants activate auditory and motor brain areas similarly for native and nonnative sounds; by 11–12 mo, greater activation in auditory brain areas occurs for native sounds, whereas greater activation in motor brain areas occurs for nonnative sounds, matching the adult pattern. We posit that hearing speech invokes an Analysis by Synthesis process: auditory analysis of speech is coupled with synthesis that predicts the motor plans necessary to produce it. Both brain systems contribute to the developmental transition in infant speech perception.”
Kuhl, P.K., Ramírez, R.R., Bosseler, A., Lin, J.L. & Imada, T. (2014). Infants’ brain responses to speech suggest analysis by synthesis. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 111(31) 11238-11245.
- “The quality of the interactions between parents and their children, measured with gesture and speech, is associated with advanced language development … Infants’ language learning is enhanced in one-on-one social contexts, perhaps because these contexts allow more contingent social interaction between adult and child. … Evidence is accumulating to indicate a greater role for social interaction and social contingency in language learning. A large number of studies now suggest an important role for social behavior in language learning, among them: (1) the necessity of a social context for phonetic learning from exposure to a new language (Conboy & Kuhl, 2011; Kuhl et al., 2003); (2) the role of contingent response to infants’ babbling… (Goldstein et al., 2003; Goldstein & Schwade, 2008), (3) the role of social behavior (eye gaze) as a tactic that provides vital information for language learning in infants (Brooks & Meltzoff, 2008). … These findings contribute to our understanding of the social foundations of language, as observed in both typically developing and developmentally challenged young children, suggesting that language acquisition fundamentally requires social interaction to instigate learning (Kuhl, 2007; Kuhl, 2011; Kuhl, Coffey-Corina, Padden, Munson, Estes, & Dawson, 2013).”
Ramírez-Esparza, N., García-Sierra, A. & Kuhl, P.K. (2014). Look who’s talking: Speech style and social context in language input to infants is linked to concurrent and future speech development. In press: Developmental Science, 17(6), 880-91.
- “Our findings, derived from the moment-to-moment tracking of eye gaze of one-year-olds and their parents as they actively played with toys, provide evidence for an alternative pathway, through the coordination of hands and eyes in goal-directed action. In goal-directed actions, the hands and eyes of the actor are tightly coordinated both temporally and spatially, and thus, in contexts including manual engagement with objects, hand movements and eye movements provide redundant information about where the eyes are looking. Our findings show that one-year-olds rarely look to the parent’s face and eyes in these contexts but rather infants and parents coordinate looking behavior without gaze following by attending to objects held by the self or the social partner. This pathway, through eye-hand coupling, leads to coordinated joint switches in visual attention and to an overall high rate of looking at the same object at the same time, and may be the dominant pathway through which physically active toddlers align their looking behavior with a social partner.”
Yu, C. & Smith, L.B. (2013). Joint attention without gaze following: Human infants and their parents coordinate visual attention to objects through eye-hand coordination. PLoS One, 8(11), e79659.