Healthy Beginnings: Whole Child
©2004 by Christine Roberts
The brain at birth has 100 billion neurons that are like seeds waiting for the environment to turn them into healthy trees. As those seeds get the proper nutrients from their learning environment, they grow roots and branches. The brain’s primary nutrients are responsive interaction with adults, opportunities to move, and food and sleep. For movement exploration, the baby engages in three essential motor patterns that water the neurons and create forests within the brain. The patterns are the pre-mobile upper and lower, the mobile belly crawl, and creeping; commonly referred to as crawling. All the push and pull work a baby engages in during tummy-time builds structure and function in the body and brain.
The baby’s delicate neural networks need a work out too. Budding tree limbs need the fertilizer of movement to stimulate the chemical release of proteins that builds their brains. Movement that involves push and pull strengthens, stabilizes and organizes our patterns of movement. In an economy of design, the very events taking place in the body are taking place in the brain. Just as the shoulders, hips, hands and feet are becoming strengthened, stabilized and organized, so are the neural networks.
The brain is the most malleable of organs within our bodies. It dances with nature and nurture in a seamless flow of ever-changing states. Infants spend the first year of their lives "hard wiring" their sensory systems, eyes, ears, taste, touch and bodily awareness. Their brain, like a seed, comes with the potential for growth but the stem grows strong and the branches develop, as the environment stimulates the baby’s senses. Smell is the most developed sense at birth. The visual system, on the other hand, is the least developed at birth and undergoes a critical phase from birth to 6 months.
Movement experiences carried out on the tummy fulfill the developmental patterns that contribute to a sound body and brain. Along with the enormous physical benefits of movement for visual development, eye hand coordination, developing the arches in the feet and hands, and one’s overall sense of self; physical activity and interactive play are the primary ingredients for sound neurological integration and attachment.
Nurturing Pathways'® Rhymes and Chants are a group of rhyming exercises that rehearse the developmental movement patterns to integrate the developing trees of the mind. At no other time will the brain grow at such a rapid rate, doubling its weight in the first year and achieving 95% of its adult weight by the age of four. These exercises strengthen the baby’s body and support their independent mobility, in addition to firing the brain in organized pathways. As neuroscientists like to say, "what gets fired gets hard wired." The rich interaction of song and rhyme while you interact with the baby packs a powerful punch for brain growth.
If parents and caregivers consciously limit the time babies spend in containers, especially during the early months prior to crawling, the baby will experience less stress on their tummy to play. I like to refer to it as "Growing From the Ground Up." One of the adverse affects of the "Back To Sleep" campaign is that very early on an infant can develop a disliking for the prone position. The best solution is to start placing your baby, when awake, on their tummy from the time they are born. You can join them on your tummy so that both of you are comforted by each others presence.
Tummy time matters for the brain. It deserves a place of importance in the overall development of a child’s life. Babies need lots of opportunities to discover their mobility. Just as a turtle flipped on its shell cannot get up and go, neither can an infant on its back or a baby that is sitting but not yet mobile. Our practices create outcomes, and the time to put best practices into place are at the beginning of every child’s life, when the greatest gain, long term, can be realized. A seed is a very powerful thing, but without water, soil and sunlight, it will remain a seed, never discovering its full potential.
