Back

8 October 2024

Brain Plasticity and your child.

By Nicky Bartlett

We’ve all heard the following: ‘Practise makes perfect’; ‘Try and try again’; ‘Use it or lose it’; These are phrases most of us recognise and if we think back carefully, we started hearing them as school kids. It’s what our teachers and parents would tell us when we were learning something new. They were inadvertently encouraging us to take advantage of our brain’s ability to change and adapt.

This is called brain plasticity or neuroplasticity.

It is the term used to describe the capacity of the nervous system to alter its activity in response to internal or external stimuli by changing its structure, functions, or connections.

Just as hacking your way through an overgrown forest for the first time, would be extremely challenging and wouldn’t leave much of a path behind you for others to follow, so is learning something new for the first time. But if you kept walking through the same forest following the exact same track, you would eventually create a distinctive path, that would be easier and quicker to walk through each time. Similarly, when we learn a new skill and practise it over and over again, it will eventually get easier and quicker to achieve, until it is no longer a challenge at all.

Each time you practise and repeat something, you are thinking, calculating, and memorising and your brain starts going through physical changes. It stretches and adapts and makes connections, as new information comes in, and like your path through the forest, new neural pathways are created in your brain.

This means that our children’s brains are malleable and can be shaped and influenced. The more they are exposed to something, the more defined the new neural connections will become. The key is to expose them to the right things – positive and constructive experiences to explore and gain skills.

Here are a few recommendations for parents to help mould your children’s brains to create healthy and positive outcomes:

Tend to emotions

Listening to your children and showing them patience, love, and respect, is a wonderful way to support their brain development emotionally. Even if a child seems resistant to nurturing, they still need it.

Feed the body

Encourage enough sleep, healthy eating, and regular exercise. Your child's growing body includes a growing brain, which depends on certain essential components to fully develop and flourish.

Expose to expand

How your child's brain grows, depends largely on what they are exposed to. By introducing him or her to various sensory, social, and physical experiences, you are likely to assist in broadening their interests.

Mistakes are ok!

Failing and making mistakes, although not pleasant, often provide the best opportunities for growth. They are signs that your child may be having difficulties and require more help and support in certain areas. You are there to remind them to keep trying until they get it right.

 

All in all, creating an environment that is diverse, novel and challenging - yet attainable - will enrich your child and stimulate positive changes in their brain, assisting them as they grow towards adulthood.

 

Image Credit - www.freepik.com