Learning English in kindergarten? Cramming vocabulary and multiplication tables with four-year-olds? Today, there are more and more offers for the early education of children, and many parents have already planned their offspring’s everyday life almost as much as their own. This is driven by the desire to offer their offspring the best possible starting conditions for life. But it is also driven by the fear of letting a supposedly particularly receptive phase in the children’s development pass by unused. Again and again, findings from brain research and neurobiology serve as an impetus and argument.
In fact, studies in learning biology show that children learn well at an early age and in some areas even faster than adolescents or adults. For example, even toddlers in multilingual families acquire a second language just as easily as the actual mother tongue. Other study results demonstrate rudimentary grammar and math skills even in infants. The innate learning instinct of children can now also be explained neurobiologically. This means that the brain regularly seeks out its stimuli and for variety, and it tries to create concepts for thinking and explanation. Every learning success at this age leads to a feeling of happiness, which is triggered by the release of the body’s own happiness drugs.
Flying butterflies and disappearing animals
British researchers found that attention and concentration skills can also be trained in eleven-month-old children. For this purpose, the researchers invited a total of 42 infants to their laboratory five times. Half of these children served as a control group and played games or watched child-friendly television programs during this time. The other 21 completed four different exercises to train attention and concentration. In one of the exercises, a butterfly flew across the screen but moved only as long as the children fixated on it. At the same time, distracting objects appeared moving in the opposite direction. In another test, several windows were visible on the screen. An animal disappeared into one of these windows, and the child was then briefly distracted. When the child’s gaze returned to the windows, the researchers observed whether the child fixed on the window behind which the animal had disappeared.
In the final tests, the trained children performed significantly better than the control group. The toddlers showed progress in their ability to keep objects in view or recognize patterns despite distractions. This shows the astonishing nature of the changes after such much shorter periods of training on four- to five-year-olds. The training also enabled the children to better adapt the duration of their viewing to circumstances. This ability is very important in the real world, because sometimes we want to be able to fixate specifically on an object of interest and ignore all distractions, or we want to be able to change the center of our attention quickly – for example, when learning a language in a group. This flexibility in attention span can improve significantly in children after training specifically designed for this purpose.
The gains in concentration skills achieved in the tests carried over to other areas, such as the children’s free play. This is in marked contrast to similar exercises for adults. In the latter, there is usually no transfer of what has been practiced to substantially different tasks. With the toddlers, however, this transfer was observed. This is due to the still more malleable brain of young children. This can be important information when it comes to early intervention for children with potential weaknesses. So if we want to substantially change the mental development of our children, this should be started as early as possible.
When young children watch too much TV
Our 2018 study showed the consequences of not using the critical phase or using it in a negative way. The aim was to determine the influence of television consumption on future academic performance, lifestyle choices and general well-being in two-year-old children. To do so, we analyzed data from 13,425 children whom we interviewed, studied, and observed over several years. Among other things, we asked parents how much television their children had watched at 29 months and 52 months. Teachers and physicians assessed the children’s academic performance, as well as their psychosocial and health status at the age of ten.
The result was as surprising as it was startling, as we found that each additional hour of television consumption among young children was associated with a decline in later engagement in school and mathematics achievement. Specifically, children with heavy television viewing showed a seven percent reduction in classroom engagement and six percent lower performance in math subjects – reading, on the other hand, was not significantly affected. Physical activity decreased by ten percent in general and by 13 percent at weekends, while the consumption of sweets was ten percent higher. Correspondingly, the body mass index was also five percent higher on average than among students who were allowed to watch little or no television as young children. As a result, obesity, diabetes and a form of dementia are up to ten times more likely with increasing age.
Early childhood is a critical period for brain development and the formation of behavior. Heavy television viewing during this time can lead to future unhealthy habits. Between the ages of two and four, even gradual exposure to television delays development. We ourselves were surprised by the clarity of the results, because we had actually expected that the influence of early television consumption would disappear after seven and a half years of childhood at the latest, so the fact that the negative consequences remain is all the more startling. This means that parents need to severely limit their toddlers’ TV time to avoid inculcating a passive mental and physical attitude.
On the other hand, it seems increasingly indisputable that decisive decisions in the development of the brain are made in childhood. Learning processes in the anatomically not yet fully differentiated brain serve not only the storage of information, but also the optimal structuring of nerve cell networks in the sense of later expandable abilities. The most important period of this influence by information offers therefore lies in the preschool and primary school age between the age of 4 and 10.
Because it is not until the age of four that most children have developed an important prerequisite for learning: the ability to adopt perspective. Only then do they become aware, for example, that it can make sense to listen attentively to someone else – because they may know more than they do. And another cognitive quantum leap is just taking place in four-year-olds: Until then, children can find their way around in the everyday world and classify objects such as a red apple according to color or shape. But it is not until the age of four that the offspring are able to recognize that a certain object sometimes has several properties at the same time. For example, it can be both an apple and a red object. In addition, we have some indications that at this age decisive prerequisites for behavior such as empathy, respect and thus tolerance are created.
Should there be a compulsory education program for children at the age of 4?
Mandatory educational offerings for children as young as four can make sense in special institutions, yes. But what exactly might that look like? A kind of university for elementary school and kindergarten children? Memorizing letters, grammar or number sequences? Sitting in rows and listening? No, absolutely not. That would not work, because children at this age cannot yet benefit from listening or do anything with the knowledge. Instead, they should be prepared for the things we have to learn in our knowledge society. And which are already laid down in so-called pre-programmed competencies in the human brain, such as recognizing patterns or speaking.
Even in kindergarten, children can be prepared for learning to read in a simple and straightforward way, for example by rhyming, clapping syllables and singing, or playing other speech games. Mathematics should also be part of early childhood education – but not in the form of subtraction, addition or multiplication, but for example by discovering symmetrical objects or patterns in the group room. In this way, basic knowledge can be created that will make it easier for children to learn and understand in a variety of ways later on in elementary school.
But what about learning English from the age of four? There is still no clear answer to this question based on the results of research. On the one hand, we can learn a foreign language without an accent at an early age, just like our mother tongue – similar to music and sports, because virtuosity and mastery are ingrained in early childhood. On the other hand, we don’t yet know if this will actually do any good. After all, the instructive foreign language lessons we all enjoyed in school naturally proceed quite differently from spontaneous second language acquisition. That is, if an English teacher goes to the kindergarten once or twice a week and practices a few English words with the children, then these words will certainly stick. But whether the children really benefit from this into adulthood, we don’t know (yet).
But are such conclusions and recipes from brain research at all meaningful and permissible? Educators and educational researchers are not the only ones who have serious reservations about this. After all, knowing what happens in the brain during learning and using this information to develop concrete lesson plans that go beyond banalities such as learning must be fun often seems difficult or even impossible.