Baby Brains
Have there been many changes in the research into the development of children in the past 50 years?
Indeed there have. Unlike several decades ago, we know now that it is essential to start in infancy. Fifty years ago, I myself was only a baby. At that time, my brain was developing at full power. But even after my brain was fully developed, it took some time before I realised that to better understand the development of children we have to observe and study them from a very early age. This is what we are doing now, for instance at the Child Research Centre. Here, we will be following more than 6,000 children, from birth to 18 years, in the coming years.
Our research will include the development of social skills in children. We know that observation and processing social information plays an important part in this. Children develop these skills in their first years and they are related to the vast development of their brain in this period. For this reason, we have to start our studies with babies; only in this way will we be able to find out why some children develop more social skills than others.