“One cannot, from nothing, learn how to learn.”- Peter Carruthers

“Build cognitive crutches for limping perceptions.” –Reuven Feuerstein

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Nurturing Early Prerequisites for Learning and Development

Human infancy comes equipped with a biological groundwork. Even before birth, gestation becomes a period of complex preparation in which the developing brain and body construct the platforms upon which later learning stands.

These biological systems make possible later development enhanced by experience, nurture, socialization, modeling, instruction and imagination. The infant brain is not a blank slate; it is prepared to search for patterns, to detect structure, to remember, to make sense of their world, to predict, to plan and to act with intention.

Among the innate systems that support later, more complex learning that will require increased attention, memory, and intention are a remarkable set of interrelated early skills and capacities.

The newborn perceives the world in three dimensions. The infant begins with a rudimentary recognition of shapes. Even in the first days of life, babies follow with their eyes and ears the movements of their caregivers. They show awareness of simple patterns and actively seek out more patterns. They turn toward the sounds and attend to facial expressions and actions of adult caregivers. They recognize familiar faces, familiar smells and familiar movements and rhythms. And they pay particular attention to changes and differences.

They observe their caregivers’ actions. They imitate a tongue thrust, raised eyebrows and simple repeated gestures. They show pleasure in social interactions and participate in a kind of early communicative reciprocity. They practice verbal coos; engage in turn-taking and back-and-forth gestures and attempt reciprocal motions and verbal communication. They strive to predict what will happen next and what to do next.

Out of these seemingly simple acts, later abilities such as better focused attention, joint attention, improved memory and more nuanced communication are constructed.

Nature is not equally generous for every child. These innate preparatory mechanisms vary in strength, scope and reliability. A child’s health, wellness and early interpersonal experiences can alter the effectiveness of each intertwined developmental domain. As children mature the conditions necessary for learning grow more complex, particularly when some essential early prerequisites were not provided by nature.

Children with developmental delays have diverse and distinct challenges. Their inborn biological foundations for communication, for connection and for learning may be imprecise and incomplete. Yet every child is equipped with some degree of readiness. All children have more potential than may be immediately obvious.

There is always some foothold, a platform that has to be found or constructed from which to build. The child’s fragile strengths and early potential require attentive nurture, consistent support, empathic understanding and carefully designed interactive learning experiences tailored to the uniqueness of this individual child.

The first steps in therapeutic intervention reconstruct the prerequisites that nature didn’t complete. These include the foundational processes normally cultivated during gestation and the first two or three years of life.

Too often, educational and therapeutic programs overlook these essential prerequisites. They leap ahead, focusing on the memorization of isolated behaviors or meaningless tasks or content. They insist on performance before preparation. They start too high, move too quickly and bypass the ground-level structures that children need to advance.

Children with developmental delays are not blank pages. Nor are they bound forever to their current limitations. There is almost always a preserved core to build upon that organizes and integrates brain, mind and motivation. But to advance, they must be nurtured with collaborative development team planning, patience and inspiration.

Initial mediation, regardless of the child’s chronological age, begins with the co-construction of the earliest prerequisites. This includes learning how to help this unique child to attend to, and respond to, relevant objects, people and events depending on the context.

It includes building the foundations of joint attention, establishing playful and reciprocal social interactions, encouraging curiosity and exploration, creating meanings and understandings, developing imitation, and supporting the regulation of movements, rhythms, feelings and emotions.

It includes fostering spontaneous repetition in real-life daily experiences and nurturing gradual, integrated development within and across all developmental domains. It involves ensuring safety and supporting the learning and implementation of basic self-help skills. What it does not begin with is instruction in “shapes and colors, counting, or early literacy tasks such as reciting the alphabet.” Academics for children with significant developmental delays come later, after the groundwork processes and prerequisites in all developmental domains are secured.

Parallel Assessment and Parallel Development respect the sequence of learning and development in children with neurotypical advantages. It does not simply catalog deficits or rush ahead into skill-building or cognitive construction without first establishing the early foundations of human connection: trust, social referencing, imitation, reciprocal communication, kindness and concern, the essence of play, the ability to learn how to learn, purpose and a sense of identity and belonging.

We learn together, child and adult mediator.

We co-construct one another’s capacities to connect, to wonder, to investigate, to remember, to adapt, to make meaning. And when these processes are guided by sincere belief, genuine empathy, careful attunement and inspired mediation the first true steps of more meaningful communication, learning and development can take hold.

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