The Zero-To-Three Movement

There’s something called the “zero-to-three movement”, that claims that the first three years of human life is a, to quote an introduction from the “Zero To Three” website, “critical period when a child undergoes the greatest human growth and development”. Then there are scientists who criticize this movement for having misinterpreted research results. The last week I have been reading, and re-reading an article about this, entitled Baby Steps and written by Malcolm Gladwell.

I think the article is very interesting, but I feel that there’s something missing. There’s so much talk about the synapses, or neural connections in the brain, which are formed at a “furious pace, forming hundreds of thousands, even millions … every second” during the first few years of life. Here’s there no controversy – scientists and zero-to-three people agree. After the age of three, “our brain begins the long task of rationalizing its communications network, finding those connections which seem to be most important and getting rid of the rest”.

Gladwell writes that science doesn’t know whether it’s the number of synapses formed in the early years that matters, or if it is how effectively they are “pruned”. Director Rob Reiner is one of the supporters of the zero-to-three movement, having founded the I Am Your Child campaign. The FAQ at the campaign’s website says, regarding which connections are pruned:

When a connection is used repeatedly in the early years, it becomes permanent. In contrast, a connection that is not used at all, or often enough, is unlikely to survive. For example, a child who is rarely spoken to or read to in the early years may have difficulty mastering language skills later on. By the same token, a child who is rarely played with may have difficulty with social adjustment as she grows.

I get the feeling from Gladwell’s article that he’s too stuck with the synapses – that a normal rate of synapse formation means the child is developing in a healthy way. He refers to John Bruer’s book The Myth of The First Three Years, which “quotes Steve Petersen, a neuroscientist at Washington University … as saying that neurological development so badly wants to happen that his only advice to parents would be ‘Don’t raise your children in a closet, starve them, or hit them in the head with a frying pan.’”, meaning that you would have to do something of the kind to keep synapses from being formed.

I’m definitely not a neuroscientist, but reading between the lines, I suspect that it’s true that even an abused child can form synapses at a normal rate. If this is true, paying attention to the synapses only – that is, the structure of the brain – wouldn’t be that interesting. It is probably a bad thing for the zero-to-three movement to keep referring to the research of neuroscientists – at least as long as they don’t find anything about which synapses are healthy and which are not.

But as I said, Gladwell’s article is interesting, and I especially like his findings about two-year-olds, or “terrible twos”, being like “scientists, who develop theories and interpret evidence from the world around them in accordance with those theories”, where he quotes the book The Scientist in the Crib by Alison Gopnik, Andrew Meltzoff, and Patricia Kuhl: “the child is the budding psychologist; we parents are the laboratory rats.” Gladwell writes:

The paradox of the zero-to-three movement is that, for all its emphasis on how alive children’s brains are during their early years, it views babies as profoundly passive – as hostage to the quality of the experiences provided for them by their parents and caregivers.

Gopnik and Meltzoff are a psychology professors, and Kuhl is a professor on speach and hearing, and Gladwell writes that they in their book conclude, “Children won’t take in what you tell them until it makes sense to them. Other people don’t simply shape what children do; parents aren’t the programmers. Instead, they seem designed to provide just the right sort of information” – that is, that parents’ “influence on infants ‘seems to work in concert with children’s own learning abilities.’”

Gladwell refers to another book, Three Seductive Ideas, by psychology professor Jerome Kagan: “As Kagan puts it, a person’s level of ‘anxiety, depression, apathy and anger’ is linked to his or her ‘symbolic constructions of experience’ – how the bare facts of any experience are combined with the context of that event, attitudes toward those involved, expectations and memories of past experience.” This seems to me to be more about the “meaning” of the synapses, rather than their structure and numbers.

Gladwell writes that Kagan refers to a large study, following hundreds of children from birth to adulthood, which showed that “the best predictor of who would develop serious academic or behavioral problems in adolescence … was social class: more than eighty per cent of the children who got in trouble came from the poorest segment of the sample”. So, the conclusion of Gladwell’s article is that the zero-to-three movement doesn’t, although they claim they do, have support from science, while at the same time, social factors are what determines if children become peaceful or violent adults. To me, this speaks largely in favor of government intervention, for changes in social policy. In this case, it’s comforting to read that neuroscience says that you can recover from a bad childhood (although I’ve never really doubted this) – although it doesn’t (yet) speak in favor of the first three years being critical for how you turn out as an adult.