The other day I read an article about the importance of intellectual stimulation for infants up until the age of three – and beyond, of course, but apparently the first three years are crucial though it is tempting to ignore them in the mistaken belief that not much goes on at that undeveloped age.
Children who get the right kind of stimulation in infancy do better all round by the time they are in their teens, and even have higher IQs than those who received little or no stimulation at that early age. And the ‘right kind of stimulation’ does not mean Mandarin, violin lessons and maths, but playing with simple toys and being around proper conversation and also involved in it.
Research in this field was triggered originally by the findings of community health workers in Jamaica in the 1980s, who worked with poor mothers and babies whose physical development had been hindered by malnutrition and illness. The community workers provided, besides better food and milk, some basic books and primitive toys cobbled together from cast-offs and rubbish. The mothers were taught how to play with their infants and talk to them.
Researchers followed those infants into early adulthood, and found that they performed better all round than their peers who had not had the benefit of that help and support from health workers. The research was led by Sally Grantham-McGregor at University College London, with Susan Walker of the University of the West Indies.
Related research has long pointed to the first three years after birth being a key shaper of the brain and thus, of life itself. This means that they are the most important years and the ones in which a little time and money go a long, long way. But here’s the rub: they are also the years when the child has not yet started school, unless it is one of those kindergartens where they go at around two years old, and so is completely at the mercy – if we can put it that way – of the mother. If the mother is hopelessly uneducated and knows no better about the importance of play and proper speech, then the inevitable ensues and the child is ‘lost’.
It follows, therefore, that state-sponsored education programmes should not stick to formal schooling from the age of four, but begin with preparation for that in the more crucial first three years of life. The state can’t and shouldn’t get into playing with babies and talking to them – imagine that – but it is perfectly placed to sponsor or organise programmes for mothers who come from a social background where play and talking to children are either undervalued or dismissed outright as a waste of time and money.
When I was a child, I took toys, games, books and piles of comics for granted as an inevitable and obvious part of childhood. With four children, there weren’t exactly pots of money to spare. Instead of having picture-perfect costly bedrooms with few or no amusements, we had pulled-together bedrooms sinking under the weight of toys, books and comics which we were never bothered about tidying up or putting away. Looking back, I could say that our parents had their priorities in order, and that in turn shaped my own. Several of my childhood friends had roughly the same set-up. But looking back, too, I also remember that other childhood friends lived in a completely different situation: their bedrooms were absolutely perfect, bought complete from the G-Plan showroom, but they were Spartan, with no toys or any of the other trappings of childhood. They were most certainly not bedrooms in which you could lie on the floor with a box of paints.
At most, they might have had a teddy bear or a doll on the stretched-tight bedspread (“Don’t sit on it or my mother will get really angry”), and a couple of those Trolls – remember them? – on the dressing table. Yes, a dressing table for a little girl – because in the thinking of those days, you bought a child’s bedroom, as you did your dining room, to see her right through until she married and left home, when she would (oh how funny it seems now) take it with her.
Then there were the bedrooms of the children I hardly knew, classmates I visited on strange, rare occasions, who lived in towns that seemed completely alien, as tended to be the case in the socially and geographically divided and separate Malta of the early 1970s. Their bedrooms were a complete revelation that screamed out evidence of an unbridgeable cultural difference, except that in primary school a child doesn’t have the words to express that kind of roughly-shaped observation.
They had no toys, none at all. No books for children, nothing. Some of them did not even know what comics were, and when presented with helpful and encouraging evidence of these delights (“Here, take it home and show it to your parents”), would return a day or so later to say in what must have been their parents’ patronising tone that those parents considered such things to be rubbish, a waste of money that ruined your English.
Well, I was raised on a diet of comics and children’s magazines, so there you go. I was an early subscriber, aged around two or three, to Teddy Bear, a comic-cum-magazine for infants, and had the most wonderful Proustian moment when, in a garage sale hunting for props for a magazine shoot a couple of months ago, I came across a single, pristine copy of Teddy Bear, dated July 1966, with that familiar svelte teddy on the cover, and became entirely absorbed in it to the amusement of the seller. It goes without saying that I snapped it up, for 10 cents, and it sits on my desk.
I have no doubt that despite cultural, social and educational progress, the same situation still prevails today, and lots of parents still consider anything spent on children’s playthings to be a complete waste of money, prizing instead private lessons and the draconian demands of homework, of which I approved neither as a child nor as a parent.
I suppose the difference now is that much of the problem is concentrated at the bottom end of the socio-economic scale, whereas in my late 1960s/early 1970s childhood it pretty much spanned the entire social spectrum. Those of us who had lots of things to amuse ourselves with, even if there wasn’t much money, tended to be the ones with the younger, more enlightened Westernised Sixties-style parents. In contrast, I knew children from highly privileged backgrounds, in financial and social terms, who had the bedrooms of a monk or a boarder at a particularly strict 19th-century public school.
One can’t help but wonder about any possible links, in the light of this research, between deprivation in infancy (not of food and material comforts, but mental stimulation) in what must be a sizeable chunk of today’s adult population, and the serious difficulties, which are manifest, in absorbing, collating and analysing information and assessing situations. If we would like future generations of Maltese to be brighter at this kind of thing than we are, perhaps a good way to start would be through state or council-sponsored mother-and-baby groups, in which the mothers are not hectored about breastfeeding and hygiene but about, more crucially, the importance of not leaving their infant strapped into a pushchair to stare at a wall, with verbal interaction composed of, at most, “See how nice the bunny is.”
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