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The first 1001 days of a child’s life are crucial in terms of brain development. During these first two years, a baby learns to crawl and walk, and to speak and understand its first language. All of these processes are regulated by the brain. Optimum brain development requires a proper balance between sufficient sleep and encouragement of sounds, language and play. What can parents or caregivers do to promote this development? Our youth researchers Corette Wierenga, Caroline Junge and Jeroen Dudink share their advice, based on their respective fields of study.

Tips for promoting hearing

Sensitive periods
As a neurophysiologist, Corette Wierenga conducts research into brain connections at the cellular level. "External influences are incredibly important when it comes to shaping the brain. The information contained in genes alone is not enough to guide the brain's development," Wierenga says. Our brains must receive the right input at the right point in time. Babies undergo several sensitive periods in which the brain is shaped based on the information it receives. "When a child is born deaf and doesn’t get a hearing aid until they're an adult, it is a struggle to get their auditory cortex to develop properly at that point. If they didn't get the right input during that critical period, the brain structure remains in an unfinished state."

There's not much point in reciting Shakespeare to your newborn baby.

And what constitutes the right input for a child? "Too much of the same thing is not good. If a child only hears one song or interacts with just one person, their brain won't develop elasticity. And obviously, no input at all is bad as well. If you never hug your child, they'll never learn that touch can be a pleasant, trusted sensation." It is also important that the input is not too advanced for the child. "There's not much point in reciting Shakespeare to your newborn baby. But a simple lullaby or talking to your baby in easy-to-understand words is very good for them."

Tips for promoting language acquisition

Language development
Babies begin developing language while still in utero. Caroline Junge, an experimental psychologist and researcher into early language development, explains: "An unborn baby's sense of hearing develops between the 26th and 30th week of gestation. This is when babies learn the rhythm of their first language. Dutch and English have fairly similar rhythms, while French is very different." It has also been shown that babies can remember sounds they have heard in utero. "That is one of my favourite studies. Babies whose mothers watched the soap opera Neighbours every day while they were pregnant were compared with babies whose mothers did not watch the show. The children whose mothers had watched the soap opera reacted when they heard its theme song. The other infants did not. How remarkable is that – that we can perceive sounds even before we are born! And remember them, too."

Individual differences
In a typical group of children who are developing language, there will be large differences between individuals. "The big question here is why. Parents who talk more, ask questions and read aloud help a child to develop their vocabulary and pronunciation. On average, children with an older sibling tend to be slightly behind in their development. The more one-on-one contact a child has with a parent, the more that child will learn about its first language." A child's personality will influence their language development as well. "The more a child initiates interaction, such as by pointing out or showing things to their parent, the more often they will elicit a verbal response from the parent. And the more language a child hears from the parent, the faster that child will acquire new words."

Keeping their attention
When speaking to children, people do many things to catch and keep their attention. "We tend to raise the pitch of our voices, enunciate clearly and repeat ourselves a lot. This is a very natural thing to do. Even young children will unknowingly apply these tricks to keep a baby's attention focused on them. Parents also tend to speak in the third person: 'Mama is going to run to the shop now.' We do everything we can to make the message as clear as possible for the child."

Tips
As a parent, what can you do to boost your child's language development? "With babies, what you often see is that they seek out repetition and then, at a certain point, start to crave novelty. You can learn more from challenging situations." The focus, in other words, shifts from lots of talking and repeating to lots of talking and variation in the language offered. "Reading aloud to small children is crucial for their language development. It's even better to do it together, turning reading into a dialogue. Ask your child a lot of questions. That exchange becomes increasingly important as your child gets a bit older."

Tips for promoting good sleeping habits

Sleep
Sleep and a good sleep rhythm are also vital for optimum brain development and a child's ability to learn language and other skills. Jeroen Dudink is a neonatologist and researcher who advocates for greater attention to sleep. "Sleep tends to be more or less ignored when we talk about health. Yet we spend one third of our lives asleep. And it's even more important for young children and infants. Babies in their mother's womb sleep up to 22 hours a day."

Premature babies
Unfortunately, the premature babies admitted to the neonatal ward are able to get much less sleep each day. Research shows that the average is around 15 hours. "The babies must be woken up to feed them or administer medicine, or to change their nappies. This interferes with the premature babies’ sleep rhythms. That is why it's a good idea to schedule care around their sleep." But how can you tell if a premature baby is asleep? While a trained eye can see the difference, a baby in ‘active sleep’ can look very much like a baby who is awake. To solve this problem, Dudink reached out to in 2019. "We combined data on sleep, pulse and respiratory rate. Then we used those data to develop a predictive algorithm that automatically analyses a baby's sleep cycle. We hope that, in the future, nursing staff will be able to check the monitor to see if a baby is still asleep. That way, some interventions can be put off for a little while until the baby is awake."

Active sleep
A baby's sleep rhythm is very different from that of an adult. REM sleep makes up around 10% of an adult's sleep, whereas 80% of a baby’s sleep is active sleep (which is comparable to REM sleep) "During active sleep phases, a baby will show a lot of spontaneous movements. They may kick or strike with their arms, frown, cry and make sounds; they practically create their own symphony. They are generating their own activity and working hard to develop fully." It is precisely that lack of active sleep that Dudink finds problematic for premature infants. "We expect to find a strong correlation between lack of active sleep and problems with the social-emotional development of these children later on. Our research will explore whether this hypothesis is correct."

Sleep tips
And what can parents do to help their older children get the best possible sleep? Together with sleep experts from De Hoogstraat and Kempenhaeghe, Dudink is working on an infographic with sleep tips for infants. ‘Let me go ahead and share a few tips. Learn to recognise the signs that your baby is tired. Appearing overstimulated can be a sign of fatigue as well. Try to establish a rhythm; a bedtime ritual can be useful in that regard. Babies have to learn how to sleep.’ But the conditions in their bedroom need to be comfortable, too. ‘When putting them to bed for the night, try to make sure the bedroom is dark and pleasantly warm, but not too hot.’