Rough Draft

From birth, our everyday experiences and interactions with the people around us help to grow and shape the brain. The child-caregiver relationship is a key element in healthy cognitive development, and has a lasting impact on the child’s life. Through this positive relationship the child learns and cultivates their understanding of people and the world around them. These experiences will help determine the level of motor skills, visual skills, and learning abilities that a child will possess in their future. A responsive caregiver provides the serve-and-return interactions a child needs to develop healthy brain circuitry. A healthy example of serve-and-return is when an infant babbles and gestures to an object, the caregiver responds accordingly by smiling and naming the object. This interaction lays the foundation for creating a link between the object and the word. As children age they learn about cause and effect, spatial relationships, problem solving, number sense, and classification. They learn these skills through the use of symbolic play and imitation.

Opportunities to learn cause and effect begin very early in life and happen many times throughout the day. The infant learns that crying causes an adult to pick them up and attend to their needs, or when they shake with certain toys, the toys make noise. The depth of their understanding of cause and effect grows as they do, which means usually around three years of age, children can make predictions about what could happen and what was the cause. Through the development of understanding cause and effect, the child builds the basis for problem solving, making predictions, and realizing the impact they can have on others.

Children begin learning about spatial relationships d...

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..., or cold. Dr. Kathleen Armstrong, director of pediatric psychology at the University of South Florida medical school, ran medical tests, vision and hearing tests, and brain scans that revealed that there was nothing physically wrong with her. Danielle did not respond to affection or comfort, refused to make eye contact, and would not engage with people. Due to her severe neglect, at the age of seven, Danielle did not know her own name, was unable to speak or use a toilet, and did not understand how to interact with others. When Danielle was nine years old, she was adopted into a patient family who hoped that their love and affection would make a difference in her life. While she has made improvements socially, there are still cognitive abilities she cannot perform such as speaking, problem solving, controlling emotional responses, and basic personal hygiene care.