We all know that humanity has reached an incredible level of development in the course of evolution due to the peculiarities of his brain. But have you ever thought about how different the brain of the child is from the brain of an adult?
It would seem that the laws of development will be the same and the child only needs to gain skills, experience and train the intellect. Partly, it is. But the child up to the age of three is the creator of himself – he constructs his personality from total nothing, the child’s brain from the moment of prenatal development forms an incredible number of neurons, and after the birth this number only increases.
The child forms memory, experience, skills of mastering his own body, then understanding his integrity and the fact that he can also influence the world around him and change reality with the help of his hands and the work of the brain. We understand this principle of how the brain works. But besides this, the child has an amazing and only inherent feature – an absorbent mind.
This is a special kind of mind inherent in a child from birth to 6 years. This fundamentally distinguishes the structure of the brain between children and adults. The absorbent mind is like a sponge that absorbs water along with everything that can be dissolved in it indiscriminately. The child does not divide the information received into categories, does not understand the concepts of good and bad, he absorbs everything around him.
After all it is the environment that is the material for creating of himself. It is amazing that the child’s brain does all this without the participation of consciousness. This is the main characteristic of the absorbent mind. In the same way, the child does not apply any effort to gain new experience or knowledge. You have probably noticed how easily the child can memorize hundreds of cities on the map or repeat a complex phrase without understanding its meaning, how easy it is for small children to learn languages and how delightfully their memory is developed. The second feature is that the children’s brain is tireless, it does not know fatigue.
These two features just draw a clear line of demarcation between the adult and the child.
An adult will never return that ease to absorb new information and master new skills – we all need to do this already consciously, making efforts, working and getting tired. That is why it is so important not to miss the first years of a child’s life, it is necessary to offer the child’s brain an environment and a resource for nourishment as much as possible.
This is a time when all windows of growth and opportunity are open and the child can easily and effortlessly form a solid foundation that will help him shape his brain already in the later stages of development, when the absorbing mind gives way to conscious activity and thinking.
The third surprising feature in the clear distinction between the brain of an adult and a child is the universality of the above principles. Absolutely all children on platen have an absorbent mind. This is not affected by place of birth or living, or epoch, or racial affiliation. The absorbent mind appears in every child at the same stage of development and passes the baton on the development of the “adult” brain also at the same age range.
Therefore, when we look at the child, we must always remember that we are very similar and we are very different. Children have an amazing gift, given by nature for a short period of time, and it is in our responsibility to consciously help children use this gift to the fullest.
