Warm blankets, clean diapers, full bottles, lullabies and snuggly hugs have effects that extend far beyond satisfying your newborn baby’s basic needs. At birth, your baby’s brain is the least developed organ in his body, completely dependent on environmental factors and relationships with caregivers to provide a foundation for physical and emotional growth.
Identification
The forebrain, midbrain and hindbrain--as well as the structures within these main brain parts--have different functions. To work correctly, nerve cells within each main part and structure must be able to communicate with the others. At birth, the nerve cell structures are in place but remain unconnected and, as a result, do not communicate with each other. The process of wiring the brain begins at birth when nerve cells, also called neurons, begin making connections, or synapses, that allow messages to travel and structures to communicate.
Process
Brain development in your newborn baby takes place as experiences create synapses that constantly form and reform. It's possible for an 8-month-old baby to have as many as a trillion synapses, although not all will remain, according to ZeroToThree.com. Repetition of an experience will reinforce a synapse, allowing it to become permanent; however, the opposite causes a process called pruning to discard it. Although this process occurs throughout your lifetime, it's most active from birth to 3 years of age.
Gender Differences
Brain development timetables differ between the sexes. ZeroToThree.com attributes this to the emergence of male and female sex hormones that influence nerve cells in your newborn baby’s brain. While boys eventually catch up, girls tend to develop connections at slightly faster rates than boys do. This includes such areas as vision, hearing, memory, smell and touch.
Effects
If experiences leading to normal development do not occur, or don't occur often enough to make the connection permanent, they may be lost forever. For example, there's a small window of opportunity to correct congenital cataracts during early infancy. If doctors correct the condition outside this window, pruning will have already discarded the connections between your newborn baby’s eyes and brain, and your child will be blind.
The same is true with emotional aspects of your newborn baby's brain development. Newborn babies cry to communicate needs for food, comfort and safety. Meeting those needs establishes and reinforces positive connections, allowing your baby to move on and begin forming and reinforcing connections that come from exploring his world. Failing to meet basic needs, or meeting them inconsistently, means your baby’s brain will stay focused on basic needs and shut out stimulation required to develop social and thinking connections.
Requirements
Educarer.com identifies 10 items your newborn baby needs to help her brain develop normally. These include interaction, touch, a stable relationship, a safe and healthy environment, self-esteem, quality care, communication, play, music and reading. Social and environmental interactions are as important to a newborn baby's brain development as food is to supplying nutrients her brain needs to grow, according to Educarer.com.
