Research now shows that the care babies get has dramatic and long-term effects on how children develop and learn, on how they cope with stress, and on how they react to the world around them. And, that it can affect how they continue to learn later on in life. Just as good food and exercise can help our bodies grow, good early experiences can help our brains grow. Now there is even stronger evidence that there is a link between brain activity and brain growth. Even before babies can walk and talk, their brains are developing.
Neural pathways are the connections that allow information to travel through the brain.
The more pathways, the larger the brain. Interestingly, the neural pathways that are developed in your child's first three years can act like the roadmaps to later learning. A child with a larger brain or more neural pathways may be able to learn more easily once she gets into school. One study, completed at the Baylor College of Medicine, showed that babies who had the chance to play often and who were held and touched often as infants, have larger brains with more neural pathways than children who received less attention and care when they were babies. You've heard about nature vs. nurture.