Children

Children run the highest relative brain energy demand of any age: at about 2% of adult body weight the brain uses about 20% of resting metabolic rate in adults and about 66% in a 5-year-old, almost entirely on glucose. Growth, learning, and hormone balance all sit on that energy floor. See Brain, Intelligence, Pregnancy.

Energy and brain growth

Prenatal and early brain growth track glucose availability and the progesterone/estrogen balance. Recurring limits on brain growth and intelligence in this framework are lack of glucose, excess estrogen or insulin, and PUFA; progesterone is the main protection against the estrogen/insulin side of that set.

Zamenhof-type work put prenatal glucose abundance at the center of brain growth, with estrogen and insulin lowering blood sugar and progesterone and thyroid sustaining it; Marian Diamond's rat work split the same way (more estrogen in pregnancy, smaller cortex and weaker learning; more progesterone, larger brain and better learning). Details and IQ context live on Intelligence and Pregnancy.

Structural plasticity

Learning changes brain structure in childhood, not only brain activity. See Brain.

Instrumental music training is one measured route. In 5-to-7-year-olds followed for about 29 months, a high-practice group (by total weekly music time) developed a larger anterior midbody of the corpus callosum, the fiber tract linking motor-related areas of the two hemispheres, than low-practice and control children. Corpus callosum size did not differ at baseline; weekly music exposure predicted both the size change in that subregion and improvement on a motor-sequencing task. Intense early practice, not preexisting anatomy, accounts for the larger anterior corpus callosum seen in adult professional musicians who began before age seven.

A 2005 review in the same series framed the research program: adult instrumental musicians show structural and functional brain differences versus matched nonmusicians, with intensity and duration of training as important predictors, and music training in children produces long-term enhancement of visual-spatial, verbal, and mathematical performance.

Father engagement and play

Active father engagement predicted positive child outcomes across 24 longitudinal studies (22 positive): fewer behavioral problems in boys, fewer psychological problems in young women, enhanced cognitive development, and lower delinquency and economic disadvantage in low-SES families; cohabitation with the mother and her male partner associated with fewer externalizing problems. No specific form of engagement outperformed another in that review.

Father-child physical play, including rough-and-tumble play, links at weak-to-moderate population effect sizes with child aggression, social competence, emotional skills, and self-regulation across 16 studies (N = 1,521 dyads) in a 2017 review and meta-analysis; both frequency and quality of the play interactions matter for those associations.

In 2-to-6-year-olds videotaped at home, higher father-child rough-and-tumble play frequency associated with more physical aggression when the father was a less dominant playmate; father dominance during play moderated the aggression link.

Activation parenting encourages children to take safe risks, challenges them physically and socioemotionally, and sets limits that keep stimulating interaction from tipping into over-arousal. Higher-quality paternal activation parenting in early childhood associates with better self-regulation and lower internalizing and externalizing problems.

Talking with children

Back-and-forth conversation with young children tracks their language skills more closely than the sheer number of words they hear. In a cross-sectional brain-scan study, 36 children aged 4 to 6 wore small recorders at home for a weekend. Those with more conversational turns with adults (an adult speaks and the child answers, or the other way round) showed more activity in Broca's area, a brain area used for speech, while listening to stories, and they scored higher on language tests. The number of adult words heard showed no such link with brain activity. Conversation explained only part of the gap in language scores between children of more and less educated parents, and family income added nothing once parents' education was counted. A single snapshot like this shows an association and cannot show that conversation caused the differences.

The older "30-million-word gap" comes from a small observational study of 42 families, each recorded for one hour a month from infancy to age 3; the 30 million figure is an extrapolation from those hours. A later study of five American communities did not reproduce it.

In a randomized trial, coaching parents of babies to talk with them more raised back-and-forth turns, and the coached group's children used more words months later; a smaller randomized trial with 4-to-6-year-olds raised turns, with no difference in language scores between groups.

When I lived in Mexico, I noticed kids were different from kids in the US. In the US, the idea was to give kids "age-appropriate" information. In Mexico, adults treated children as little adults. They were fully responsible and could be communicated with.

— Ray Peat

Early maternal contact

Continuous skin-to-skin contact after preterm birth lowered salivary cortisol reactivity at one month versus standard neonatal care, and at four months mother and infant salivary cortisol levels correlated; close parental contact and human touch buffer infant stress reactivity and speed regularity. See Sense of touch, Pregnancy.

Practice

Keep blood sugar steady with regular carbohydrate. Support thyroid, sleep, and daylight. Limit seed oils. Prefer stimulating, low-isolation learning over obedience-only schooling; see Intelligence.

See also

• Sense of touch
• Pregnancy
• Brain
• Intelligence
• Pregnancy
• Glucose
• Progesterone
• Autism