Tragically, we can consider the effects of such extreme early neglect through examples like the international adoption of children from Romanian orphanages in the early 90s after the fall of the Ceausescu regime. To not experience these basic environments, for a child to experience less than should be most basically ‘expected’ by a human brain, would require extreme neglect. In the case of language development, the most convincing sensitive period is for being able to perceive the speech sounds of a language, again quite a basic human skill. The kinds of things that have been convincingly shown to have sensitive periods in humans are very basic things like depth perception, and even then the sensitive period is thought to extend to age four. The idea of sensitive periods is compelling, but ultimately largely irrelevant to any typical child rearing environment. But to go wrong you have to go really wrong A broad implication could be, wrongly, taken that this means we must learn things early or we will not learn them at all. All animals studied, including humans, show sensitive periods as juveniles. A sensitive period is a time in a young animal’s life when their brain and behaviour are most susceptible to being changed by the environment for example, song birds must learn their species-specific song early in life. The intuitive importance of those early years was backed up by the emergence of some intriguing neuroscience, key among which was the idea of sensitive periods. Children develop from being almost entirely dependent new-borns to independent, communicating individuals who can dance, sing, and tell stories. Obviously the first three years of life are an extraordinary and vital part of child development. This is something that we wanted to address here because the policy implications have been huge, especially in the States, and the idea is based on some key findings in neuroscience, and yet it’s still not clear cut what’s true and what’s hype.
This idea was first propounded in the late 90s in America, and became the ‘zero to three movement’, which aimed both to change parental attitudes to early development and to affect public health policy. This is the general idea that the first three years of life are a critical period for children’s brain development, and that deprivation over those years will result in persistent deficits in cognitive, emotional and even physical health.
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