THE DEVELOPMENT OF EMOTION REGULATION

 Although emotion regulation starts in infancy, the preschool years are critically important in developing emotion regulation and control. Further Exploration contains additional readings and resources about these developmental changes. During these years, most children spend increasing amounts of time in group settings. These settings require children to balance their own wishes against those of others, to wait for things, to conform to routines, and to deal with others’ strong emotional responses. Denise and other early childhood professionals play a central role in this process.

No matter how skilled she is, however, Denise is not the sole regulator of her children’s expression of emotions. Children’s success or difficulty in emotion regulation has already been shaped by many factors even before the 2-year-olds enter Denise’s class. Maturation of the brain and nervous system helps children to inhibit emotional expressions and delay gratification of impulses. Denise’s children are better at waiting for turns on the tire swing than they were last year, in part because they are maturationally able to do so. For better or worse, children’s early family experiences have already affected their regulatory competence (Gottman, Katz, & Hooven, 1996). The center where Denise works enrol many children whose families experience great adversity. Poverty, violence, and instability of care have made it especially difficult for some of Denise’s children to express their anger and sadness in flexible, adaptive ways. Some children have disabilities that have already influenced them to adopt certain strategies for cop- ing with their own and others’ emotional states.

What Practitioners Believe and Can Do

So much has happened before children enter early childhood programs. What exactly is the role of the early childhood professional in fostering emotional regulation in young children? Little consensus exists. In surveying American and Korean teachers and program directors, Hyson and Lee (1996) found great variations in practitioners’ endorsement of statements about certain emotion-related beliefs and strategies, such as, “When a child is upset, I try to put it in words”; “Teachers should ‘let their feelings out’ in class”; and “Children should be encouraged to display feelings openly.” These variations existed within cultures as well as between cultures.

Rather than identifying one best role for teachers to adopt in support- ing children’s emotion regulation, it may be better to examine an array of possible roles. As recent discussions of appropriate practices and professional preparation have emphasized (Bredekamp & Copple, 1997; NAEYC, 2001), early childhood professionals need a broad repertoire of strategies to help young children learn. With skill in all of these strategies, practitioners can select those that are best suited to children’s individual needs, cultural expectations, and educational purposes. When Alexander’s car crashing became wild and uncontrolled, Denise had many options from which to choose. Her gentle distraction and guidance to a new activity worked effectively, but other choices were possible. Another child (or even Alexander on a different day) might have been able to regain control with a look from Denise. Simply moving closer to Alexander and the other boys might have been sufficient. On the other hand, at times Denise may need to take over the regulatory function completely, physically removing Alexander from the area and holding him firmly until his excitement and anger subside.

AN ENVIRONMENT FOR EMOTION REGULATION

Using the roles of smorgasbord host, scaffold, and cultural guide, early childhood professionals can construct an environment within which children can strengthen their abilities to regulate their own emotions and to respond appropriately to others’ feelings.

Establishing the Interpersonal Climate

The strategies presented in earlier chapters help children build regulatory skills: creating a secure emotional environment; helping children understand their own feelings and those of others; and serving as a model of genuine, appropriate emotion expressions. A positive interpersonal cli- mate will also support the development of emotion regulation.

Children who are in “good moods” are more likely to tune in to others’ feelings, to be generous to others, and to help those in trouble (Moore, 1985). Denise’s class and other high quality programs are happy places for children and adults. Despite conflicts among children and occasional reprimands for mis-behaviour, the dominant mood is positive and loving. Rose, the director of Denise’s program, says that the first thing many visitors comment on is how happy everyone seems to be. Staff turnover is low. Foster grandparents, parent helpers, and other community volunteers enjoy being around the center; children who have graduated to public school come back to visit. Children bask in the warmth of the center’s nurturing extended family.

Although she instructs children in culturally valued patterns of regulation, Denise matter-of-factly and openly accepts children’s expression of a wide variety of emotions.

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Best Ways to Conduct your Research

 

Start any research project by working with the broadest out- lines or topics (and the broadest resources) and slowly narrow your focus, getting more and more specific in topic and sources as you go along.

Encyclopedic entries are usually the most comprehensive and concise you will find. They cover so much territory and are so (relatively) up to date that they are an ideal “big picture” resource.

If you are writing a paper about a historical or contemporary figure, also consider skimming a biographical dictionary or, even better, one of the specific volumes in the Who’s Who series, which ranges from Who’s Who in Art and Who’s Who in American Jewry to Who’s Who in Vietnam and Who’s Who in Theatre.

Needless to say, new CD-ROMs and reference websites appear almost hourly. These many current resources should make it increasingly easy to choose a good topic, establish a reasonable thesis, and gather enough information to construct an initial outline, with- out having to do any further research.

Evaluating Resources

You may find so many potential resources that you won’t have time to read them all. Concentrate on those that have been published most recently or written by the most respected sources. However, don’t limit yourself too much—gather information from a wide range of sources. Otherwise, you may learn only one side of the story.

There are two types of resources: primary and secondary.

Primary resources are those written by people who actually witnessed or participated in an event. When you read a scientist’s report about an experiment he has conducted, you are consulting a primary resource.

Secondary resources are those written by people who were not actually present at an event, but have studied the subject. When you read a book about the 1950s written by someone who was born in 1960, you are learning from a secondary resource.

Primary resources are likely to be more reliable sources of information. But depending upon your subject, there may not be any primary resources available to you.

Where to Look for Materials

How do you find out whether anyone has written a magazine or newspaper article about your topic? How do you know if there are any government documents or pamphlets that might be of help? How do you locate those written-by-the-experts reference books?

You look in your library’s publication indexes, which list all of the articles, books, and other materials that have been published and/or are available in your library. Most are arranged alphabetically by subject:

1. The card catalog. This is a list of all the books in your library. (Although many libraries now store it on computer, it’s still often called a card catalog because it used to be kept on index cards.) Books are indexed in three different ways: by subject, by author, and by title.

2. Book catalogs. The best-known are Books in Print, Forthcoming Books, and the Cumulative Book Index.

3. Newspaper indexes. Several large-city newspapers provide an indexed list of all articles they have published. Your library may even have past issues of one or more available on microfiche.

4. Periodical indexes. To find out if any magazine articles have been published on your subject, go to a periodical index. The Readers’ Guide to Periodical Literature, which indexes articles published in the most popular American magazines, may be one with which you’re already familiar.

5. Vertical file. Here’s where you’ll find pamphlets and brochures.

6. Guide to U.S. Government Publications, American Statistical Index, and Congressional Information Service Index. These are all useful for locating government publications.

7. Computer databases. Widely used indexes are available, covering American and world history, art, biology, philosophy, religion, psychology, engineering, and much more.

8. The Internet. Most magazines, newspapers, encyclopedias, government organizations, and so forth have websites that can be a starting point for your search. They often have links to other sites where you can find full-length articles and stories, biographic information, and the like.

How Libraries Are Organized

To provide organization and facilitate access, most small and academic libraries utilize the Dewey decimal classification system, which uses numbers from 000 through 999 to classify all material by subject matter. It begins by organizing all books into 10 major groupings.

Given the millions of books available in major libraries, just dividing them into these 10 groups would still make it quite difficult to find a specific title. So each of the 10 major groupings is further divided into 10, and each of these now 100 groups is assigned to more specific subjects within each large group. For example, within the philosophy classification (100), 150 is psychology and 170 is ethics. Within the history classification (900), 910 is travel and 930 is ancient history.

An Approach to Online Research

■ Long before a paper is due, choose four search engines—one a metasearch engine (which searches other search engines), the other three regular. Robin’s recommendations: Copernic (meta), Google, Hotbot, AltaVista, Northern Light, Dogpile (meta).

■ When beginning your research, use the meta engine first.

■ Learn each engine’s advanced features—you’ll find things faster and easier.

■ Print out the FAQ pages for each search engine and create your own manual.

■ Choose three search engines with different strengths to maximize your search abilities.

■ Consider using a specialized search engine, such as Beaucoup, if you are unable to find what you want or have found too much information.

■ Learn Boolean searches. 

 

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Helping Children Understand Emotions

 

THE “BASICS” OF EMOTIONAL UNDERSTANDING

What do children need to understand about emotions? The concepts that toddler Brenda, as well as the rest of Terry’s children and other young children, are developing probably include the following “basics” (Saarni, 1990):

1. Every one has emotions.I feel happy this morning. So does Brandon, and so does Barry. Terry, my caregiver, has feelings too. She is excited and surprised sometimes, and sometimes she is serious or unhappy .

2. Emotions arise because of different situations. Lots of things make me happy: my toast on my high chair tray, a hug from Terry, the click of beads on the chain when I tug it. When someone takes my toy, or when I fall off my bike, or when I just get tired after lunch, I get angry or sad.

3. There are different ways of showing feelings.Warren fusses alot when he doesn’t have something he really wants, like his bottle. Doreen just comes right over and grabs things. Nina tries to talk me into giving her my toys or gives something in trade. And sometimes I whine and pout.

4. Other people may not feel the same way I do about everything. When I am tired, I want my “woober,” but Barry just sucks his thumb when he’s tired. I like to ride around the patio on my trike very, very slowly, but Nina wants to go fast and get ahead of me.

5. I can do things to change how I feel and how others feel. When I’m sad, I can go sit in Terry’s lap or in the big chair and after a while I feel better. Sometimes when baby Warren is fussing, I make funny faces at him, and he starts to laugh. 

OBSTACLES TO UNDERSTANDING ABOUT FEELINGS

Children do not arrive at this emotional understanding quickly or automatically. As Exploration 3 in Part II emphasises, developmental limitations, family and community environments, and cultural differences may create challenges along the way. Infants and very young children have only limited ability to infer the reasons for others’ happiness, sadness, or anger. And even somewhat older children have a hard time drawing conclusions about the causes of emotion when the situation is unfamiliar, or when the other person’s feelings are different from those the child would have. Young children may also have trouble understanding the cause-effect connections between an event and an emotional response, and they have particular difficulty under- standing complex emotional experiences or mixed emotions (Denham, 1998).

Differences in family expressiveness (Dunsmore & Halberstadt, 1997; Halberstadt, Crisp, & Eaton, 1999) also influence children’s ability to understand various emotional situations. Generally, more expressive families provide richer opportunities to develop emotional understanding. How- ever, there are limits to the benefits of expressiveness. Conflict-ridden families and violent communities offer many emotionally intense experiences, but these environments often leave young children frightened, confused, and unable to process emotion signals in accurate, adaptive ways (Camras et al., 1996; Repetti, Taylor, & Seeman, 2002).

Finally, cultural contexts may complicate children’s development of emotional understanding. For example, rules about how and when to show feelings may be easy for children to understand in the familiar culture of home and community. In Nina’s Mexican American household, children are encouraged to express their feelings less intensely than is permitted in her family child care home. In a culturally diverse child care or school set- ting, the rules may be confusingly different. And for children whose home language differs from that of their early childhood program, even the words that represent feelings can be obstacles.

Teachers should not be discouraged by these multiple challenges to emotional understanding. Teachers can do more than just sit back and wait for children to mature. The emotion centered professional will develop a rich array of strategies to help children of every age, family history, and cultural environment gain a better understanding of their own and others’ feelings.

SETTING THE STAGE

Much positive learning about emotions occurs without direct adult instruction. Terry supports children’s emotional understanding by establishing an environment that enhances concept development, by allowing children opportunities to experience, observe, and express feelings dur- ing spontaneous peer play, and by being attuned to teachable moments throughout the day.

Supporting General Concept Development

In many ways, learning about emotions parallels and is a product of children’s understanding of many other concepts, such as time, space, number, and causality (Scholnick, Nelson, Gelman, & Miller, 1999). By support- ing concept development and learning in all domains, early childhood professionals will simultaneously enhance children’s understanding of concepts of emotion (see Resource Note 3.1 and Exploration 2 in Part II).

As in Terry’s family child care home, children gain conceptual under- standing when their learning is embedded in many real-world exemplars of a particular concept. Young children may use these exemplars to con-struct models or prototypes of particular concepts, including concepts about emotions (Shaver, Schwartz, Kirson, & O’Conner, 2001). A child’s mental representation of “sad,” for example, comes to include not just the vocabulary word sad, but also associated causes, frequently observed sad situations, and memories of sad behaviours. 

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How We Attach : Relationships Between Children and Parents

Babies are born into the world dependent upon their parents for their very survival. It is most often the mother, but can be another loving, sensitive caregiver, who initially provides food and comfort for the newborn and to whom the infant develops a primary attachment. The baby and mother experience an intimate connection that gives the infant a sense of security. For infants, having a primary adult who is caring for them in sensitive ways, one who can perceive, make sense of, and respond to their needs, gives them a feeling of safety. 

The sense of well-being that emerges from predictable and repeated experiences of care creates what the attachment theory pioneer John Bowlby called a “secure base.” This internal model of security enables children to develop well and explore the world around them. Secure attachment is associated with a positive developmental outcome for children in many areas, including social, emotional, and cognitive domains.

Attachment research points to the importance of the parent-child relationship in shaping children’s interactions with other children, their sense of security about exploring the world, their resilience to stress, their ability to balance their emotions, their capacity to have a coherent story that makes sense of their lives, and their ability to create meaningful interpersonal relationships in the future. Attachment lays a foundation for how a child comes to approach the world, and a healthy attachment in the early years provides a secure base from which children can learn about themselves and others.

ATTACHMENT, GENES, AND DEVELOPMENT

An individual’s personality develops from a transaction among a child’s innate, constitutional temperamental characteristics (such as sensitivity, outgoingness, moodiness) and the experiences that the child encounters as he or she develops within the family and with peers. The genes that children inherit have a large impact on their development, influencing the inborn characteristics of their nervous systems and shaping how people respond to them. 

Genetic factors can directly shape the way the brain functions and, in this way, have a direct impact on how we behave. These factors are both the genes themselves and the “epigenetic” molecules on the chromosomes that control when, which, and how particular genes will be activated and create the proteins that shape neural structure. Because these epigenetic factors are shaped directly by experience, the activation of our genetic machinery is influenced by what we experience. 

Experiences directly shape children’s development and can influence the specific activation of genes and the sculpting of the connections that make up the structure of the brain. As you can see, the nature-versus-nurture “controversy” is misleading because nature (genes and their regulation) requires nurture (experience) for a child’s optimal development. It is not one or the other. Genes optimal development. It is not one or the other. Genes and experience interact with each other to shape who we are.

So what can we do? The great news is that you can shape neural growth and function, and even epigenetic regulation, by the experiences you provide! And so here we will continue to dive deep into the specifics of what you can DO to optimize development.

Attachment refers to one very important aspect of the experiential forces that shape a child’s development. The human infant is one of the most immature of offspring, having a brain that is quite underdeveloped compared to how complex it will become as the child grows. Also, we as human beings are exquisitely social: our brains are structured to be in relationship with other people in a way that shapes how the brain functions and develops. For these reasons, attachment experiences are a central factor in shaping our development.

Some people worry that the findings of attachment research indicate that our early years create our destiny. In fact, the research shows that relationships with parents can change and as they do the child’s attachment changes. 

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How to Make Reading a Success for Children

Reading comes easily to some children, but most struggle with some part of the complex process, such as recognising words, sounding out words with letters that have several pronunciations, memorising high- frequency words, reading orally with fluency and expressiveness, under- standing vocabulary, or comprehending stories. When your child is asked to face stressful reading challenges, he feels much like that little boy facing the daunting staircase. For some children, learning to read is so frustrating that they stop caring about books completely. The child who loved hearing you read bedtime stories over and over suddenly just gives up. If learning to read is this hard, why not just play a video game or watch television?

Learning to read should not be a discouraging, joyless struggle. You can observe your child as he tries to read, and see which skills are weak, where he struggles, and where he succeeds. Because you know your child’s learning-style strengths and what interests him, you can make reading a goal he can achieve with a positive attitude. You can select the strategies offered here that match your child’s specific challenges and learning styles, and by doing so, keep up his motivation. 

Why Reading Is a Challenge: It’s Unnatural

Reading is not a natural part of human development. Unlike spoken language, it does not follow from observation and imitation of other people. There are specific regions of the brain devoted to speech and processing oral communication, yet there is no specific center of the brain dedicated to reading. Instead, the complex task of reading requires that multiple areas of the brain work together through networks of neurons. This means there are many potential dysfunctions in structure and information transfer that can interfere with successful reading. For children to become joyful, successful readers, they need to develop the neural pathways that connect the parts of the brain that turn print into words, and words into thoughts and memories. Considering how inter- dependent and intricate these reading networks are, it is astonishing that anyone is able to read at all!

Learning to observe carefully is the first step toward building strong patterning skills in your young child.

OBSERVATION ACTIVITIES

Your child needs to be a good observer in order to recognise patterns. Try using the following games to build your young child’s observation skills:

• Play “colour detective”: As you drive together in the car, have your child say “red” each time he sees a red car. Then ask him to be on the lookout for another colour.

• Play “shape hunt”: Ask your child to lead you around the house and point to all things that are shaped like a circle (or square, etc).

• Place a few household objects on a tray and allow your child to examine them. Then ask him to close his eyes as you remove an object. When he opens his eyes, have him try to recall which object is missing. Gradually increase the number of objects on the tray as his skill improves.

• For a synnaps change of scene, spend some time with your child observing the details of a leaf. Encourage her to tell you all the things she notices about the leaf. Try this with other objects indoors as well as in nature. Natural-history museums with collections of rocks, butterflies, and bird eggs are great sources of objects that are similar but reveal differences upon closer observation.

• Read a very familiar story or poem aloud, and leave out a word or sentence. Make a game of asking your child to say “I noticed” when you leave something out. After a few tries, give him the opportunity to recall the missing words. You’ll be building his memory skills along with his auditory observation. 

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1. PATTERN IDENTIFICATION ACTIVITIES

   The brain recognises and stores information by seeking out familiar patterns. Learning takes place when your child’s brain recognises some- thing new as fitting into one of its stored patterns, and links the new sensory input with that memory circuit. Try the following activities to practice pattern identification with your child. 

Button-Matching Games

Take a large bag of assorted buttons (you can purchase these at most sewing stores for a few dollars) and make small groups of buttons that share simple characteristics, such as colour, shape, or number of holes.

VSK learners may find matching buttons elsewhere, such as on the shirts in his closet, which adds movement to the activity. Ask your child to look for a piece of clothing in his closet he believes has buttons that match the ones you gathered. For example, if you group together various two-hole buttons and he thinks he knows the pattern, he can look for shirts with two-hole buttons to show you. The movement will refresh his synapses.

Guess My Category

In this activity, your child decides the categories, sorts the figures, and has you guess the pattern of things taken from his collection of small toys, plastic animals, or toy vehicles.

What Belongs? What Doesn’t Belong?

To increase the challenge and build more connections to the way words and letters form patterns, group together three items with a shared characteristic and have your child describe what they have in common. 

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Multiple Intelligences in children

 Multiple intelligence theory suggests that rather than intelligence being an all-or-nothing entity, it is made up of distinct learning proficiencies that can work individually or together. There are generally eight agreed-upon classifications of intelligence strengths. All of us are presumed by this theory to have all eight intelligences in varying amounts. Your child’s learning may be most efficient and successful when he applies his strongest intelligence to the task. Here’s a quick overview of those eight intelligences:

Linguistic intelligence includes sensitivity to sounds, rhythms, and words. Proficiencies in this intelligence include organisational abilities, logical deduction, memory sensitivity to spoken and written language, mnemonics, and structured, sequential notes or instructions.

Logical-mathematical intelligence includes proficiencies in logic, patterning, conceptualisation, and abstraction.

Musical-rhythmic intelligence includes sensitivity to auditory tone, pitch, and rhythm. Proficiencies include auditory patterning and auditory memory.

Visual-spatial intelligence includes sensitivity to the relationships of objects, concepts, or images in different fields or dimensions. Proficiencies in this intelligence include mentally creating and visualising spatial relationships, as in mapping or diagramming, and starting with a big-picture conceptual overview before filling in details.

Bodily-kinesthetic intelligence includes sensitivity to physical, spatial, or sequential movement through time and space. Proficiencies include sense of time, proportion, prediction of sequence, and visualisation of movement.

Interpersonal intelligence includes perceptiveness and sensitivity to others’ moods and feelings. Proficiencies include the ability to interact with and lead people with understanding by interpreting their intensions, needs, emotions, and desires.

Intrapersonal intelligence includes understanding of and confidence in one’s own beliefs and goals. Proficiencies include an ability to reflect upon one’s own thoughts and feelings, introspection, analysis, and reflection.

Naturalist intelligence includes perceptiveness of things existing in the natural world, such as plants and animals. Proficiencies include organizing things into categories, detailed observation, and pattern recognition.

LEARNING STYLES

Learning-style preferences refer to the way children prefer to approach learning and how their brains most successfully process information. Where intelligences are seen in what children relate to in the things, information, and people around them, learning-style preferences are reflective of how they relate and which way of presenting information is most likely to stick with their neural-network patterning.

There are dozens of different names for learning-style preferences, though three main ones dominate, and for the purposes of this book, I will consolidate these into three general categories.

Auditory-sequential or analytical learners tend to process information in a parts-to-whole manner. These children respond to logic, order, and sequence. Auditory-sequential (AS) preference is evidenced

in children who respond best to spoken information. These are often children with linguistic and logical-mathematical intelligence strengths who tend to learn best by evaluating patterns and connections in information they hear. AS learners often respond well when they study information methodically—making timelines, lists, and other sequences using facts about the information they need to study. They also respond to talking or reading aloud to themselves and being quizzed verbally when they study.

AS learners prefer dealing with one task at a time in organised working spaces. Because they tend to be analytical thinkers, they prefer solving existing problems rather than creating their own. They use logic and deduction. If your child is an AS learner, he might enjoy expanding on a concept or theme by reasoning out and predicting logical implications that follow from a rule or guiding principle. AS learners usually prefer learning activities that have one correct answer and can be broken down into logical, sequential steps.

Visual-spatial learners usually are high in visual-spatial (VSK) intelligence and process information best when a topic is introduced as an overview before the details are taught, in a whole-before-detail or global introduction. They think primarily in images and prefer visual explanations, videos, diagrams, computer simulations/graphics, and demonstrations. They enjoy success when learning is less structured and more creative and interactive.

Because children with visual-spatial learning-style preferences tend to see or visualise patterns and connections, they enjoy solving novel problems with more than one solution. They choose or create their own problems and evaluate them through reasoning and intuition.

VSK learners enjoy starting with a larger concept and then adding details to that concept through inductive reasoning. To do this, they often like to see the final product and then, without instruction, use their intuition to figure out how to get the final product or solution.

These children like discovering or creating relationships between themselves and what they are about to study. 

Kinesthetic preference learners generally have the proficiencies found in children with bodily-kinesthetic intelligence and many of the proficiencies found in children with visual-spatial intelligence. They like to touch what they are learning and respond well to learning activities with movement, role playing, and hands-on exploration with math manipulatives and science experiments, and may need to move during breaks rather than just change to a different sedentary activity. 

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THE SCIENCE BEHIND BETTER LEARNING

THE KEY TO BUILDING BETTER BRAINS

Everything we learn comes to the brain through our senses. But the brain has built-in obstacles to sensory information input. It is an amazing organ, but it is not able to process the billions of bits of information that bombard it every second. To deal with the barrage, it is equipped with filters to protect itself from input overload and focus on the data most critical for survival.

How your child’s brain responds to environmental sensory data determines what information gets his attention. Only selected information passes through his lower brain filter (called the reticular activating system, or RAS) to enter his thinking brain.

 

RAD Learning

There are two essential brain processes and three main brain systems that are keys to building better brains. The processes are patterning and neuroplasticity. The three systems are what I refer to as RAD, which is short for:

R: Reticular activating system (RAS) A: Affective filter in the amygdala D: Dopamine

The Reticular Activating System (RAS)—The Brain’s Sensory Switchboard
The RAS is the attention-activation switching system located at the lower back of the brain (brain stem). It receives input from the nerves that converge into the spinal cord from nerve endings in the arms, legs, trunk, neck, face, and internal organs. The RAS sets the state of arousal and vigilance of the rest of the brain. It is the RAS that selectively alerts brains to changes in their environment that impact their survival— sounds, sights, and smells that may indicate danger or signal opportuni- ties to find food, mates, or shelter.

The Amygdala—Where Heart Meets Mind

The sensory information that children receive—the things they see, hear, feel, smell, or touch—stimulates the intake centers of their brains beyond the RAS.

The areas most active when new information first enters the brain are the sensory cortex areas in each lobe of the brain. Each of these regions is specialized to analyze data from just one sense (hearing, touch, taste, vision, and smell). This input is identified and classified by matching it with previously stored similar data. The sight of a lemon, for example, connects with the visual cortex in the occipital lobes. The feel of the lemon is recognized by the somatosensory (touch) centers in the parietal lobes. This sensory data must then pass through the brain’s emotional core, the limbic system, especially the amygdala and hippocampus, where emotional significance is linked to information (sour taste is yummy in lemon sherbet but yucky in unsweetened lemon juice). On receiving sensory data, these emotional filters evaluate its pleasure value. That decision determines if the information is given further access to the higher brain, and if so, where the data will go.

Dopamine—Working to Prime Your Child’s Brain

Dopamine is one of the brain’s most important neurotransmitters. (Some of the other neurotransmitters in the brain include serotonin, tryptophan, acetylcholine, and norepinephrine.) These neurotransmitters are brain chemicals that carry information across the spaces (synapses) that form when one nerve ending connects with another. During the last trimester of fetal development, the brain creates thirty thousand synapses per second for every square centimeter of cortical surface.

The brain releases dopamine when an experience is pleasurable. As a pleasure-seeking organ, the brain also releases dopamine in expectation of rewarding, pleasurable experiences. This has several advantages. Dopamine release increases attentive focus and memory formation. When dopamine is released during enjoyable learning activities, it actually increases children’s capacities to control attention and store long- term memories.

HOW THE BRAIN BUILDS MEMORY

When your child’s brain turns sensory input into memory, she learns. The construction of new memories allows her brain to learn by experience and predict the outcome of her behaviour. Memory is a survival requirement for animals that must learn, store, and recall how they should respond to physical needs and changes in their environment. They reactivate stored memories to recall and predict. Where did they go to find food? What places were dangerous because of predators? Where was the safe cave that provided shelter?

Each time your child remembers something, he is also reactivating a neural network that his brain previously created. When he adds new memories related to information already in brain storage, the neural circuit for that pattern or category of knowledge grows larger as more connections form between nerve cells. In essence, the more information stored in the brain’s networks, the more successfully we respond to our environments. The more we learn, the more information stored in our neural networks, the more likely our brains are to relate to new information—hence, learning promotes learning. 

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