The Brain, Childrearing and Early Intervention: What Has Been Learned since the Harvard Preschool Project?

Dear Colleagues,

Dr. Burton White carefully examined young children during his ten-year study of infants aged 8 to 18 months to determine how early experiences affect the growth of healthy, bright, and competent adults. The study came to the following conclusions: A) Human competence has its roots in a crucial developmental stage between the ages of 8 and 18 months. More than at any other point in time, the child's experiences during these few months have a lasting impact on their ability to think critically. B) The mother is the single most significant environmental aspect in a child's existence, and she has a greater impact on the experiences of her offspring than any other person or circumstance. (C) A child's ability to develop basic linguistic, intellectual, and social skills depends on the amount of live language that is spoken to them. (D) Children who have unrestricted access to their homes' living spaces advance far more quickly than those who do not. (E) The nuclear family is the most significant method of delivering education. In order to raise capable, healthy children, family structures must be strengthened, and interpersonal relationships must be improved.

This Special Issue aims to support the idea that parenting "carves" the structure and function of the brain. The project examines the practical significance of evidence that parenting affects brain development and can provide us with an understanding of how family experience shapes human development. It is noteworthy that some research with community samples and experimental work (such as parent training) suggests that tentative conclusions regarding effects of parental involvement are possible, even though the generalizability of most findings is limited due to a disproportionate but understandable focus on clinical samples (e.g., maltreated children with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)). These initiatives ought to concentrate on normal parenting, parenting under experimental control, differential susceptibility to parenting effects, and pathway models connecting parenting to brain development and, consequently, to behavioral development. It may be said that research on parenting and child brain development is at "the end of the beginning".

We welcome your participation in this important undertaking of examining the effects of parental instruction and early childhood learning on the developing and developed brain.

Prof. Dr. Gerry Leisman
Guest Editor

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• brain development
• child rearing
• early intervention
• parental involvement
• parenting, mother–child
• nuclear family