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A child's brain development determines their future. There's a common belief that a child's earliest experiences are critical and can be an indelible blot on his or her future. An eminent child psychologist at Harvard University, Professor Jerome Kagan has long criticized that view saying how can that be, if a baby has no long term memory? He and a colleague have done some more work on this. They took babies at 9 months, 17 months and 2 years old, and got them to imitate some actions, like putting a ring in a bottle in a certain way and shaking it to get a sound and then followed them up four months later to see whether they could remember the sequence. The nine monthers had no memory of the action whereas the older infants did. The reason they reckon, is that the frontal lobes of the brain are still developing into the second year of life and it's these which assist the ability to retrieve such past events. There's a technical message here about brain development and another which is that experiences a bit later in childhood, are more significant for the child's future.
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