Although seeing this image many will think that these are two children of different ages, the reality (unfortunately) is that they are two three year old children with a very different brain, not because there are differences in birth, disease or the like, but because while one has been cared for and loved, the other is not.
In short, and now we talk about it, the image on the right shows what happens to the brain of a baby, then child, when nobody attends to you according to your needs.
Extreme negligence
As we read in IFLScience, it is a child who in his short life suffered what is known as severe or extreme negligence and sensory deprivation. Come on, something that nobody in their right mind would do with their children, because to achieve this they would have to have it all day and night locked in a room with no one to give him a minimum of communication or affection, and with inadequate nutrition.
In Babies and more How to help the baby's brain develop in the first trimester of life This image so surprising, and that it hurts us so much because we imagine the life that this little one has been able to have, comes from an article by Professor Bruce D. Perry, head of psychiatry at Texas Children's Hospital, to which he refers with these words:
The CT scan on the left is an image of a healthy 3-year-old boy with an average head size. The image on the right is of a 3-year-old boy who suffers from severe neglect of care and sensory deprivation. This child's brain is significantly smaller than average and has enlarged ventricles and cortical atrophy.
The importance of the first years in development
Although some authors consider that the time children spend with parents is not decisive in their development (probably because they consider that if they are not there, other adults will take care of them), the reality is that early childhood is very important because it is the time when the foundations of the emotional world of children are laid, and with it comes the understanding of concepts such as empathy, solidarity, affection, happiness, suffering, joy, etc.
We do not mean by this that at three years a child already understands all this, but that is when he begins to feel involved in social relationships that will cause different feelings, and the way of living or feeling them will be drawing his personality, his self-esteem and his self-confidence, depending on his character, and according to previous relationships with their parents.
Because as we talked a few months ago: babies who are more attended from the beginning tend to have more security and confidence in their abilities and possibilities, and those who are less attended to in their cries and complaints tend to be much more cautious, fearful and distrustful.
In Babies and more, how to help our baby's brain development?If there is also omission of care, lack of stimuli, poor attention by adults, poor diet, physical structure and brain size may be affected. Already a few years ago, the Networks program issued an essential documentary that explained, among other things, how those adults with less self-control, more aggressive and with more stress and anxiety, were the result, in large part, of a childhood of little attention and little affection.
The children of the orphanages of Romania
Contraceptive methods and abortion were banned in the last years of the communist dictatorship in Romania. This caused thousands of children to be abandoned in orphanages, where they had a terrible childhood, with little food and little care.
The child on the right of the image is one of them, like so many hundreds of other children who have been studied at one time or another and have shown what we all imagine, who grow up with less white substance than normal children, with affectation important in the areas of attention, sensory processing, executive function and the regions responsible for emotions.
As I said a few lines above, you have to do it very badly as parents to get to get such an affectation, so to extrapolate it to our children, our children, we just have to think about the basics: love and love are very important for children, as they are for all of us, adults. That's why when a baby cries, we should go whenever possible so that feel taken care of and comforted, and so on until it grows and just stop crying.
In Babies and more The child's brain forms a thousand new connections per second in the first three years of lifeAnd children do not have to stop crying because they discover that we will not attend them, as many doctors, psychologists and other professionals suggest when they tell us that we have to let them cry "to learn" to be without us, but for everything the opposite: because we have cared for them so much about babies, and we have taught them so much about children, that a day comes when they don't need us the same way, and what was a problem whose solution was our presence and containment, happens to be a problem that they themselves already know how to solve, because they have learned with us and feel safe and capable of doing things without help.
