Time Critical Brain Development

How normal pathways can be manipulated

Brain image from Freepik.

Children and puppies have a lot in common. They are both baby mammals born completely helpless and needing the constant care of their mothers to survive and thrive if they are to reach the adult stage of mammalian development. Their brain development begins early in intrauterine life and the life experiences of their mothers is responsible for the species-specific brain “wiring” that they are born with.

They both have time critical phases of brain maturation that can be derailed if they are interrupted by people or unusual circumstances and not allowed to proceed as expected.

Obviously, one of the differences between baby humans and baby dogs is in the time taken to grow to maturity. The critical periods of puppy socialization are completed around 16 weeks of age, while us humans have a few years up our sleeves to correct any problems that arise.

What happens to puppies who miss out on being socialized to live in our families, sharing space with us and our own children, dependent on us for all the necessities of life?

The short answer is that they become too dangerous to live with. They can be very fearful of everyday objects and situations, so are unreliable and overly aggressive. These are the dogs that go from home to home until someone finally has them euthanized because they’ve bitten one too many people.

The critical pathways needed to teach young dogs acceptable behavior (manners, if you like) and how to approach new situations were not laid down normally. This study looked at the effects of Covid lockdowns on the relational experiences of puppies and found that the level of isolation during critical periods of development had a profound and lasting negative effect.

This is not a safe dog. Photo by ARTISTIC FRAMES on Unsplash

Romanian orphans; are they the human equivalent of unsocialized puppies?

Bluntly speaking, yes, they are.

A 2017 study looked at the outcomes for Romanian children who had spent their early months/years in the orphanages set up to deal with the many children born during the reign of the dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu but were later adopted by parents living in the UK. It compared these adoptees to English adopted children whose early lives had not been blighted by the extreme neglect that marked the lives of the children born in Romania.

As young adults the babies from Romania had profound deficiencies in both overall intelligence and in executive functioning, despite intense rehabilitative efforts from their adoptive parents.

It has long been understood that deprivation and neglect changes the brain structure of babies and young children in ways that can’t be totally ameliorated.  How children are cared for has a direct impact on their development over the entire lifespan.

You need more than ears to hear.

Many countries have initiated newborn hearing screening procedures in an attempt to find which babies are born congenitally deaf. This is really important as all babies cry, babble and make random vocalizations, even the ones who can’t hear. Before the advent of this testing, it may have taken as long as several years before it was realized that little Mary or John could not hear their parents or indeed, anything at all.

Plainly put, hearing as a deliberate state requires aural input; if nothing is heard, the brain pathways that develop and refine hearing in babies and toddlers never develop normally and structural changes in brain maturation can be seen by age four.

It could be argued that one of the most important tasks we face as new humans is to acquire communication skills that will serve us throughout our entire lifespan. Although there are many ways to communicate, in our species the primary method is through the use of first, a spoken language, normally followed a few years later by a written language that uses symbols that are interpreted as spoken words.  

Children born deaf do not magically pick up spoken language when they are fitted with a cochlear implant that finally allows them to hear because their brains have no way of interpreting the sounds they are hearing.

I am reminded of the Far Side cartoons where a dog owner is talking to his dog and the speech bubble that the dog is hearing says “blah, blah, blah”. To give deaf children the maximum chance for speaking, ideally interventions need to be in place by the time a baby is six months old.

Congenitally deaf children provide another example of how the path of brain maturation can be derailed by a lack of normally expected input from the world around them.

Linguistically deprived children’s brains also deviate from an expected path.

It has been known for a long time that talking to babies and small children is important for their future life course. Studies have demonstrated that youngsters who are spoken to more (especially if an adult initiates conversation, not monologues) do better in school and have an increased income as adults when compared to children from less linguistically rich families.

So-called feral children are those who have been kept from hearing any adult language at all. Some of these children have been rescued in adolescence, but the total lack of language exposure in the critical time period at the beginning of their lives has resulted in brain changes that can never be overcome. Because the development of language is very complex and slowly acquired over the first few years of life, it is found that despite intensive rehabilitation, these children never learn to speak in any sort of comprehensive way.

How important is language anyway?

Language is a necessary prerequisite for fully engaging in our world. If you have no language, you have no way of communicating with others and others can’t communicate with you either. (And yes, I recognize that signed languages are real, but these are always going to be limited to the relatively few others who use them.)

Language development is considered an essential part of mental development. Language is one of the main components of verbal reasoning as well as communicative and social interaction skills.

Language acquisition is a very complex skill, the results of which start to become measurable by six to eight months of age. Like many other factors in human development, it progresses in predictable pattern which is not dependent on social era, culture or language spoken.

Are you a girl or a boy?

Even very young infants can tell if the adults around them are female or male and by age two most have figured out that there are two categories of sex. By age three, they know which sex they are and, language wise, know that different words are associated with people that are dependent on their sex as the major factor.

So, what happens to babies/children's brains when they are prevented from going through normal developmental phases by the adults around them? Adults who interfere in their nascent abilities to distinguish between who is a woman and who is a man? Who confuse their learning about the fundamentals of the grammar of their mother tongue? 

It should be apparent that the first four to five years in the life of a human is a labyrinthian maze of complexity, along with a one-shot deal for normal brain maturation. Growing children undergo periods of rapid development and negative experiences can disrupt those developmental periods, leading to changes in the brain later on. The most obvious changes are in the brain regions that help balance emotions and impulses, as well as self-aware thinking. 

Deliberately socially “transitioning” children and/or telling them they are wrong in their perceptions around who is a woman and who is a man can cause trauma for children that may manifest in learning deficits, not hitting developmental milestones in a timely fashion and a tendency to develop a mental health condition.

As a society, we are now going to be faced with a generation of children grown to adulthood whose brains have been altered in harmful ways. Who have been brought up to believe that they can remake their bodies in any image they can desire. Who believe in the lies told to them about mammalian sex.

Unlike those unsocialized puppies who grow into dogs, but can never be trusted as safe around humans, these children are mainly only a danger to themselves, but they are also a profound reflection of the sins of adults who stole any sort of normal adulthood from them by their deliberate acts of vandalism on the brains of our most vulnerable family members. They are also totally dependent on the unstinting compliance of others to confirm their disordered and confused thinking.

Another pertinent characteristic of the mature brain is a high degree of self-awareness, which is a prerequisite for reasonably robust mental health and self-confidence. A brain damaged by circumstances such as untreated congenital deafness or by the deliberate act of adults interfering in normal language acquisition may never reach its full potential.  

J. M. Barrie wrote in his 1911 novel Peter and Wendy “All children, except one, grow up.” He was referring of course to his created character Peter Pan. Those ideologues for gender identity are creating an entire generation of Peter Pans, who will have a chronological age that increases with each birthday but the minds (and after the administration of puberty blockers) the bodies that reflect them as children who never grew up.