Over the years I have found that my fascination with baby brain development continues to grow. And there are certain facts that I keep at the forefront of my mind in my day to day practice with the families of babies and toddlers that I work with.
So today I’m sharing 5 baby brain development facts that I keep in mind within my daily experiences + definitely recommend that you do too!
I’m so excited because understanding how the brain works in infancy has been so helpful to my Montessori + Baby Development practice, as that deep understanding helps us learn about our sweet babies.
Babies are born with 100 billion neurons… and that is why Dr. Montessori describes the newborn child as having endless potential.
And those 100 billion neurons are all of the neurons the child will ever have. How amazing is that?! So basically our babies are born with all the tools they need to learn, grow, and thrive within their new world!
Just after birth, our babies begin learning about their new world outside of the womb by making mental connections, or synapses, at a rate of about 1 million per second.
Crazy right?! When I learned this fact I was sincerely astonished. And it’s important to know that babies learn differently than we do. Adults learn by focusing in on one thing and trying to understand on a deeper level.
A baby’s brain is taking in EVERYTHING. So they are taking in all aspects about their interactions, environments, situations, etc. to learn about their new world.
Our sweet babies are sensorial learners and are learning through all of their senses.
Babies learn by “absorbing” their experiences. (As Dr. Montessori describes in her famous work, The Absorbent Mind.)
So consider a baby laying on a quilt under a tree at the park. They are taking on everything from the every bird chirp they hear to how the quilt feels beneath them. Their brains are wired to absorb their entire environment!
That said, babies can get overstimulated quite easily because their brains can’t discriminate any stimulus that they are exposed to. So they learn it and absorb it into the synapses that are literally and physically growing their brain!
Babies brains double in size during their first year of life. All those millions & millions of mental connections that they are making about their world grows their brain at a vastly exponential rate!
Isn’t that amazing?! Infancy was once thought of as a time in life where one just get to “get through” to a time when the child understands on a more conscious level.
And now we know just how important every with our infants and toddlers interaction matters!
Things that we naturally do, like hug and hold our babies, positively affects their brain development!
There was an amazing study done by Washington University that showed that babies who regularly received physical nurturing from their mother had a larger hippocampus. (This is the part of the brain responsible for memories, learning, emotion, and stress regulation.)
So essentially, the more loving interactions we have with our sweet babies the better!
What’s cool about modern research is that we are now just beginning to understand the full complexities of the importance of infancy and toddlerhood, or the first 1000 days of life.
Bonus Fact: During the first three years of life, the baby brain will develop the most and fastest out of any other time in their life.
They literally are absorbing their world, who they are to the world and who the world is to them, through their synapses that are reinforced through continued experiences!
So now we know, birth – age three lays a foundation for the child, including how they will learn in the future.
It’s so important to know these developmental facts about babies brains to keep at the forefront of your mind, as they’ll definitely help guide your day to day understanding of within your interactions with your baby or toddler.
I aim at helping our community optimize infant & toddler development through a Montessori Lens. And since Montessori is an educational approach aimed at optimizing the natural progression of human development, the more we understand about our babies development, the more we’ll be able to guide them on their journey!
“The child has a different relationship to his environment from ours. The child absorbs it. The things he sees are not just remembered, they form a part of his soul. He incarnates in himself all in the world about him that his eyes see and his ears hear.”
Dr. Montessori
Xoxo,
Bianca, Your Baby Tour Guide