Infants and toddlers experience brain development and learning at the greatest rates of their entire lives. For those first few years, kids have to be tiny students of sociology, physics (yes, the bowl of cereal does always fall if you drop it), and language learners, while also learning how to control and use their bodies.
They’re also learning other skills at rapid rates, including impulse control, emotional regulation, and risk assessment (don’t crawl off the side of the bed!).
These same skills are some of the ones adults still find themselves trying to improve or learn, often with great difficulty, but from the outside looking in; it’s hard to appreciate just how much of it a toddler is doing.
Inhibitory Control
Now, scientists have used a non-invasive brain imaging technique to see how toddlers’ brains are working as they learn one of the most vital of these skills, and it turns out that 16 (months, that is) is the magic number.
Inhibitory control is the term behavior scientists use to describe the ability to stop oneself from carrying out an action. It’s what you’re doing when you decide to stop and roll up the bag of chips instead of eating the rest of them, for example.
In a touch-screen game, this might look like being told to tap the red circle three times and then the green square instead. It’s an active decision not to tap the same thing for a fourth time but to take a different action instead.
Observing Skill Growth — At Home And In The Lab
As parents, we watch this brain development in our infants and toddlers daily. We see when Little Timmy throws his peas off the highchair tray, picks up his cookie, preps to throw, and then stops himself and takes a bite instead. We witness this skill growth in real-time — but scientists get to see an aspect of it we don’t see by actually peeking at the brain itself.
In this case, they used a technique that is considered non-invasive to watch how toddlers’ brains activate during tasks. They gave the kids, first at ten months of age, then at 16 months, a tablet with an inhibitory control task and watched to see what would happen. According to ScienceDaily:
“The earlier study found that 10-month-olds used the right side of their prefrontal and parietal cortex for inhibitory control. In this latest study, the team show that by 16 months, toddlers use the left parietal cortex and both sides of the prefrontal cortex more extensively.”
Notably, scientists did not find that this correlated with the toddlers’ success at the task. So, the skill of inhibitory control moved from one part of the brain to another, regardless of whether the skill level improved.
Practical
So, what does all that mean for us as parents? Scientists have learned something valuable about brain development, but how do we utilize this information at home to help our kids grow?
One important thing we can take from it is a reminder that skills cannot happen before the brain is ready for them. That means that if your toddler doesn’t yet have the self-control not to burst into tears in the store because she can’t eat her cookies until you’ve paid for them, or you’re despairing of him ever learning not to color on walls, neither you nor your toddler have failed.
It also means that these pivotal moments, like this period between 10 months and 16 months, are critical in development, and we can utilize that by offering our child as many opportunities as possible in this stage to develop those skills.
These can undoubtedly be touch-screen tasks such as those used by the scientists, or could be inventive games involving different shapes and colors of toys, pointing to objects in books, making animal sounds, or variations on the ‘Red Light Green Light’ game — anything in which the inhibitory control is exercised.
