Toddler

While on maternity leave, a friend of mine watched a television special about brain development in the first three years of life. It preyed on her mind in the coming weeks as she struggled with her own fatigue while trying to care for an infant and a toddler. One day, after fending off her daughter's repeated requests to play while trying to nurse her fussy baby, she threw a parental temper tantrum. Then the guilt really kicked in. "I was beside myself. I kept thinking I have only eight months to repair the damage before she turns three."

If you're a parent, you can't have missed the media's obsession with the "new brain research." We've heard how millions of neural pathways, crackling with electrical impulses, form during the first years. We've heard about critical periods where, without proper stimulation, certain functions might not develop properly. And many of us have seen those alarming pictures of the underdeveloped brains of Romanian orphans.

Recently, organizations have sprung up with names like Zero to Three, Invest in Kids, Voices for Children and I Am Your Child, all of which seek to raise awareness about the importance of early brain development and turn scientific knowledge into tools parents can use. Unfortunately, an unintended outcome of this information campaign is that parents now have more sophisticated and compelling reasons to feel guilty. One television commercial features a child dressed as an eggplant and another as a flower. "Will a child lie and vegetate," it asks, "or blossom intellectually?"

No pressure or anything.

Toronto mom Jo-Anne Grier saw the poster version of the eggplant commercial on her way to work one day and all but burst into tears. "I wanted to turn right around and go back home and do some flash cards with my daughter," she recalls. "It just seemed like whatever I was doing with her couldn't possibly be enough. The immediate message is just a bad feeling."

In a brilliant stroke of inclusiveness, these messages manage to make stay-at-home and working parents feel equally guilty. The latter may worry, like Grier, that they don't spend enough time with their children during those critical first years. Stay-at-home parents get to ponder headlines like this, from The Toronto Star . "Where do day-care kids end up? Top of the class, study shows." The article talked about data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Children and Youth (NLSCY), which indicated that children who had participated in early learning programs were more likely to be doing well in kindergarten and grade one than those who had stayed home with a parent.

The purpose of such research is to help us give children a good start in life. But, in our scramble to report every fragment of a finding, we're starting to make child-rearing seem too difficult and important to entrust to mere parents.

One day while on adoption leave with her infant son, Daniel, Catherine Clute pondered such things after visiting a daycare centre. "I thought, 'These people don't seem all stressed out. They aren't still walking around in their jammies at two o'clock in the afternoon,"' recalls the Chester, Nova Scotia mother. "When you're doing this for the first time, it's easy to be intimidated by someone who has training and has made a career out of early childhood education."

Clute participates in an online forum for stay-at-home moms, many of whom are cynical about this kind of information. "Some of them say these studies are a ploy by the government to get us to go back to work and contribute to the economy," says Clute.

That's a stretch, but one could question the information the public was given about this particular study. Although the headline suggests the head start in grade one was because of daycare centres, the study actually referred to every conceivable type of non-parental care, as well as programs used by stay-at-home parents, such as nursery schools, drop-ins and playgroups. There's no telling if a once-a-week playgroup had the same effect as 40 hours in a daycare centre. So what this study most likely tells us is that resourceful parents know how to make use of community programs, although the news coverage implied that children of stay-at-home parents were academically at risk.

There was also a disturbing subtext in this study. Because it used such a broad definition of early childhood programs, it suggested that anyone - anyone at all - is better at preparing children for school than a parent. The Globe and Mail's coverage, which bore the headline, "Stay home toddlers lag lag in school," included the following quote: "Just because you've got a high level of education and income doesn't mean you know how to play with a baby."

Those were fighting words to conscientious stay-at-home parents. Ironically, the source of that quote, Ann Peel, executive director of Voices for Children, says she was actually trying to be supportive. "I was worried that policymakers would interpret this study as saying stay-at-home moms weren't as effective as professional child-care workers, " she explains. "I thought it was important to remind everybody that parenting is a learning process and we want to support parents in that learning." That's quite different from the disempowering message parents like Clute inferred from her comments.

Part of what's going on here is that advocates like Peel are trying to inform parents and lobby governments at the same time. The messages are not exactly the same - governments need a hard sell, and parents need a more supportive tone. However, it all gets mixed together in the media, and the push meant for policy-makers comes across as a slam against parents.

"The idea that early experience is important is not new, but in the past I don't think most people would have assumed it involved so many physiological changes in the brain," says Daniel Keating, professor of human development and applied psychology at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto. "What we can show now is that early experience has biological consequences that will play themselves out."

What's also new is that this research is now being used by every interest group that thinks science might bolster its argument - daycare advocates, parent educators and even the toy manufacturers who create those items that unlock our child's brain potential. Some use it well, some use only the parts they need, and every time the message gets passed down the line it becomes more oversimplified and less helpful. As Jo-Anne Grier says, "I can't get the image of that eggplant out of my head."

This is a shame, because if we look carefully at the parenting tips offered by groups like Invest in Kids (who created the eggplant campaign), they're not telling us to use flash cards or Mozart CDs. They're saying things like play peek-a-boo, sing songs, read stories. They' re talking about fostering a secure attachment. And even if most of us already do those things, the hope is that the message will trickle down to parents who don't. However, the effect is often that good moms and dads start to think they aren't doing enough.

"Sometimes anxiety is raised the most in parents who have the least reason to worry," Daniel Keating admits. "It's hard to find the right balance between saying, 'We have this information and we'd like to give it to you,' and saying something that sounds like, 'You're not doing a good enough job.' "

It's all so simple, and yet the messages we are bombarded with make the process of parenting seem anything but simple. When you strip away the academic detail, what the lobbyists are really saying is this: The first three years of life are important, so we should spend public money on young children, give them good child care when they need it, and give their parents information and support. That's hard to argue with. And that kind of message would make our stressed-out mom from the opening scenario feel better, not worse.

November