Your Child's Brain
When a newborn baby enters the world, the farthest thing from the mind of a parent is the neurological development of the newborn baby's brain. It is not likely that one would think of a baby's brain as a jumble of neurons like a ball of yarn waiting to be sculpted into a work of art. However, one should be concerned and interested in the development of their child's brain as certain critical periods pass for developing skills in math and logic, music, emotions, language and movement.It should be stated that there are certain critical periods that comprise the growth and development of neurons as they wire the brain. "If these neurons are used they become integrated into the circuitry of the brain by connecting to other neurons; if they are not used, they may die" (Begley, 1996, p.65). One can safely assume that these 'windows of opportunity' are a very critical time in the stimulation of the growth of brain activity. By age sixteen, the wiring of the neurons throughout the brain is almost complete, making it harder for adults to pick up new tasks easily. However, the adult brain is crisscrossed with approximately 100 billion neurons, allowing the brain to have over 100 trillion connections (Begley 1996). Genes often dete
------------------------------------------------------------------------ Emotions are often hard to understand, however, it is fairly simple to understand the development of emotions in newborn babies. After a baby is born, the parent seems to take over the role of playing back a child's feelings, and this process is known as attunement (Begley 1996). Circuits seem to gain reinforcement by using the same pathways to generate an emotion as responding to one, thus, "if an emotion is reciprocated, the electrical and chemical signals that produced it are reinforced" (Begley, 1996, p.67). The calm down circuit, which gives children the ability to control their emotion and remain calm, seems to grow into a control switch by infusing reason into emotion. Impulses from the eye and ear reach the amygdala before they get into the rational neocortex, thus when an experience has been painful they amygdala floods the circuits with neurochemicals which may reestablish the painful emotion (Begley 1996). Movement, as seen in the textbook in chapter 5, begins at seven weeks and can create a peak between the 15th and 17th weeks. This is the time in which the regions of the brain that control movement and posture begin to form functional
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