One of the most important things developmental researchers have found is how sensitive a baby is to early environmental experiences. Dr. Tiffany Field of the University of Miami has demonstrated that premature infants, developmentally delayed infants, infants exposed to cocaine during the prenatal period, and other "at risk" infants respond in dramatic ways to the simple sensation of touch. For instance, premature infants that are regularly massaged gain weight faster and go home from neonatal intensive care units sooner than other premature infants. Such regular massage also appears to improve or facilitate the attachment relationship between parent and child, as well as improving the infant’s resistance to stress and disease. Other studies have demonstrated that the infant’s sensitivity to environmental stimulation begins very early, possibly as early as the fifth month of pregnancy. When tested after birth, it appears that some infants recognize stories read to them by their mother during prenatal development. Although controversial, such findings reinforce the idea that early experience can have lasting effects on development.

How much of a child’s personality and future is shaped in the early years?

This question is hotly debated in developmental science. Freud thought that the first five years of a child’s life were determinative of an adult personality. Typically, developmental psychologists do not take such an extreme view now, but we do recognize that the first five years have a powerful and long-term effect on personality development. Children seem to be born with a particular temperament, which over the course of a lifetime becomes an adult personality. Activity level, sociability, and emotionality are relatively stable dispositional traits across childhood and in many instances are predictive of adult personality. If you are an active, socially outgoing, emotionally reactive child, you will most likely be an active, extraverted, talkative adult. But that outcome certainly isn’t written in stone or predetermined in some genetic manner. Although there is a fundamentally biological basis for childhood temperament and adult personality, it is the quality and kind of environmental experience that has the most pronounced effect on development.

How important is it to stimulate a child early in life through reading, teaching, etc?

Critically important. In early childhood the nervous system is very plastic, so there is a great deal of potential to optimize neuronal development during this period that diminishes across the first few decades. Although most human brain cells are produced during prenatal development, the connections between those cells depend on early environmental stimulation to develop properly. Reading to your children, talking to them, focusing your attention on them while they are reading and/or speaking to you serves to stimulate their nervous system development. Let them know that reading is important to you and it will be important to them. Speaking to your child is equally important. Our verbal abilities develop early in the first year of life. Even though children may not be able to speak yet themselves, they quickly come to understand that speech makes things happen. The more vocal interactions you have with your child, the stronger their verbal abilities and larger their vocabularies will be in the school years.

We hear a lot about physical abuse and what is does to young children. What about psychological abuse? Why is it so devastating to a young child?

Adults develop various psychological defense mechanisms to deal with insults, emotional abuse, and threats to our "self-esteem." However, young children have not fully developed the ability to deflect criticism and to deal with the unkind things we occasionally say to one another, or to put them into the proper perspective. For instance, when an adult tells a child that they are "stupid or dumb" the child believes them. The adult is bigger, a figure of authority and command. If you are 5 years old and one or both of your parents tells you that you’re a failure, there is a tendency to believe them. Young children don’t shrug off insults from others as an adult would. Some words spoken in haste or anger may affect the course of life for decades.

We are hearing more and more about depression in teens and adults. Are the seeds of depression sown early in life?

This is another controversy in developmental psychology that has gone on for some years: whether or not children can become depressed in the same manner as adults. Increasingly we are learning that the answer is yes. Indeed depression in children may be as widespread as depression in adults. A behavioral reflection of the sadness and melancholia that plagues many of their parents is found in children. Infants may also be at risk for depression, particularly if their mother is suffering from depression. Young children are very sensitive to their parents’ emotional states. They constantly reference their parents’ facial expressions to gain information about their emotional state at any given moment. This is particularly true during times of uncertainty or stress. If the child learns that your primary emotions are sad ones, they may come to reflect those emotions themselves. The child becomes withdrawn, listless, and uninterested in exploring the environment. This can undermine their developing cognitive and motor abilities as well as their emotions.