COMMENTATOR (COMM:
High in the Andes, one day a year, the citizens of Ayacucho get to behave like kids. Right now they’re waiting to play… with the Easter bulls. It’s Easter Saturday, Christ dead but not yet arisen. In a world without Christ, tradition here says, you could do what you want. The real kids look on with interest. And sometimes get to take over. If they can stand those noisy adults. Around the square children decorate the pavement with flowers. With a little help from the adults.

COMM:
These from one of the poorest suburbs – Jesus Nazareno. Jesus Nazareno’s mayor has seized the chance to paint a picture of his plan for the future. He calls it the new path.

AMILCAR HUANCAHUARI, Mayor of Jesus Nazareno:
We have some mountains, some mountains and a path – a new path, a new way. A new path, which will be built with the active participation of our children.

COMM:
The mayor thinks the path to a better future starts in the years between zero and five – early childhood. But can the Mayor’s dream can come true? In the 1980s the mountains around Ayacucho were the stronghold of the notorious ‘Shining Path’ Maoist insurgency. Some seventy thousand died.

MAYOR:
At that time the violence that hit the region could mean five or six bodies in our district alone, and the people didn’t know who had killed them. It could have been the police or armed forces, or it could have been the Shining Path.

COMM:
Today Ayacucho province is largely peaceful. But in homes like Hilda’s home in the hilltown of Socos poverty remains. With her mini farmyard her kids can look forward to lunch. But half rural children have growth problems by 18 months. There is a state day care centre, a Wawa Wasi or ‘children’s house’, in the Quechua language. Pre-school enrolment in Peru is high. But there are no trained teachers here. Activity - but not always stimulation. In the mountains kids are often to be found strapped to the back of hard-pressed mothers, and even sisters. This for up to ten hours a day. The truth is, traditional parenting not always good parenting.

LUISA AQUINO QUISPE, Socos Council:
Generally, the babies are carried on their backs, so there’s no communication with them, there’s no way of talking to them. This is the main reason that the children don’t develop properly. That’s why the children are a bit quiet. They don’t develop mentally, they don’t develop physically either, because most of the time they are bound really tightly to the mother and they’re not exposed to society. They’re so hidden away, and this is a general problem.

COMM:
During the ‘80s conflict many families fled to Ayacucho city. There’s brisk business in the market. But kids can still get a raw deal. Kids carried like this do bond with mums. And Sonia’s older kid does go to pre-school – all helped out by the cheese.

SONIA:
All types – there’s Andean, pasteurised, cheese from sechebamba, cheese with oregano, all types.

COMM:
Outside the market, even less stimulation. The danger – perpetuating poverty. In Jesus Nazareno suburb a single slide stuck in a wasteland. The Mayor has a different vision of these children’s future: not the Shining Path but the Mayor’s new path.

MAYOR:
I have a dream. We know that poverty is a product of malnutrition, poor education and poor stimulation. And from this we believe that investment in education, health and nutrition is important, and we believe in the early stimulation of our children. We’re convinced we should work with children from the earliest age and we’re going to form a new society of children. We’ll build a new generation of children. They’ll be more successful and prosperous children and they’ll contribute effectively towards a peaceful future for our country.

COMM:
The Mayor’s dream is simple - a better world because every child gets a better start. Zero to five. But does science support his dream? Across the world evidence on both sides - is mounting up. These the western hills of Kenya. Thirty years ago the Gusii who live here were the subject of a remarkable study, which changed views of traditional parenting.

SARAH LEVINE, co-author “Child Care and Culture: Lessons from Africa”:
There were two things which they didn’t do. One was that they barely spoke to theirchildren. The other thing was that theyhardly ever looked at their children. The reason that the mothers didn’t do this was they had so many responsibilities, domestic responsibilities. And so by the time a child was about one he or she would have stopped trying to get the mother’s attention and that was the most astounding thing for me. At the time I had little children and I found it extremely painful.

INTERVIEWER:
Do you share that reaction?

ROBERT LEVINE:
No, I didn’t share that reaction for a very simple reason. I had lots of Gusii friends, and I knew that as adults they turned out to be perfectly fine people. If you go to Africa you can see the kids can catch up these things later.

COMM:
The Gusii wanted respect from their kids. And long term, the LeVines realized, children’s language abilities seemed unaffected.

ROBERT LEVINE:
I realised… believed already that the Gusii have their own way of shaping a child’s development where they put respect before stimulation. And lo and behold the children learn to speak anyway.

COMM:
Today we found mothers here have changed.

LYDIAH NYABOKE MANDERA:
When I talk laugh and cuddle the baby, he gets to know who I am and stuff like that. The baby gets to know what is good and what is bad.

COMM:
But there was a clear lesson from the study. Traditional childrearing would be the wrong approach in today’s world.

ROBERT LEVINE:
I believe that the older traditional Gusii approach doesn’t work in a world with schools. And that schooling is a tsunami around the world that we have to adapt to, there is no way of going back.

COMM:
Three thousand miles due north in Istanbul, evidence of how traditional childrearing can be changed for the better. This is a training centre for mothersorganized by the NGO ‘ACEV’. Mums are trained to stimulate and interact with kids. The reason? Many still don’t do so. Failing to interact can be a global phenomenon.

PROF ÇIĞDEM KAĞITÇIBAŞI, Koc University:
The main issue especially with low education parents is that there is not much one to one interaction with their children at home. They are loving parents and they provide their children with warmth and care. However there is not enough adult-child verbal interaction for example. Middle class more educated parents use a lot of language activities and stimulation with their children. They speak with their children much more, whereas low education parents tend not to do that - not enough of it anyway.

COMM:
Thirty years ago Rabia was a working mum from an Istanbul shantytown. Baby daughter Ceren? Well, there was a crèche and relatives. But in 1983 Rabia and Ceren became part of another famous study. There was now pre-school for Ceren, and Rabia was trained to interact, play and read more.

CEREN CAN SENEN:
These lessons are our sharing moments. It is interesting when I look at new paper, a new book, I remember those days. I love the smell of these papers, and it gave me a good start to read another book. It was not a lesson to me, it was fun with my mother. This is the special thing I think.

COMM:
For over two decades researchers followed as many of the group as they could. They compared the children to peers in a control group - whose mothers had not been trained.

CIGDEM:
Young adults who had the early intervention were more successful than the other group, and this was really a remarkable finding. They had more schooling and therefore they joined the labour force later, which meant better jobs, higher paying and more specialized jobs using computers more, participating in knowledge society, and using credit cards more, meaning that they were indebted but they were a part of the modern economy. So they are very much participating in modern society.

STEVE BRADSHAW:
Do you have credit card?

CEREN:
Of course!

COMM:
Today Ceren’s a successful architect. She has her own child. She’s passing on the parenting skills her mother was taught to the next generation.

CEREN:
My mother says something and I believe it. Now my son, I want him to trust me too. The importance of education, it starts before the school. Nobody has this chance before. We had this chance and we go further. They give us a road to walk.

STEVE BRADSHAW:
Wouldn’t most of these other children have caught up in the end anyway?

CIGDEM:
No. No, on the basis of what we know, on the basis of research, indeed they do not. If left on their own they do not really make it in life. What is more likely to happen is reproducing the poverty, and the same kind of life. The big lesson here is by improving children’s early environment, immediate environment, we can offset the detrimental effects of poverty in the world and possible even of violence.

COMM:
In Boston in the USA they’ve been trying to find out if there’s any biological evidence that stimulating young minds works. Working closely with Harvard university, scientists have been peering inside the brains of infant baby volunteers.

PROF JACK SHONKOFF, Harvard Centre on the Developing Child:
A lot of people think not much is going on inside a baby’s brain, they figure a baby is just laying their crying. What science is telling us more and more every day is what an incredibly rich and exciting and complex environment the head - the inside of the head of a baby is. Babies are voracious learners, they are eager to kind of master the world. We don’t have to do something to make that happen. In the early weeks of life babies can differentiate the voice of their mother from others. Babies are attentive to detail in their environment. Babies in the crib notice things that adults don’t realise they notice. Their brain is trying to figure this out all the time and they are wired with feelings and emotions, and their capacity for human relationships and the capacity for mastering their environment, and it all unfolds right in front of our eyes. Sometimes we don’t even notice it but if we look closely we can see it and we know that it’s there in every baby from the moment of birth.

COMM:
Scientists have long had evidence to suggest babies learn by interacting with carers. In a classic experiment babies seemed able to imitate their mothers’ smiles within forty minutes of birth. In another baby primates bonded with cloth dummies that rocked them. They ignored other machines even if they gave the babies food. Human babies, it was reckoned, needed interaction too. And, more recently, the Romanian orphans. In this inadvertent experiment young children deprived of early interaction struggled even after being adopted. The lack of early stimulation only too apparent.

JACK SHONKOFF:
If you put children alone in a room, if you put babies alone in room and put educational video tapes for them to watch, babies will not learn from videotapes, in the same way baby songbirds won’t learn to sing from tapes of the songs of their species. It’s an interactive process, the brain is wired to depend upon that interaction to establish its circuits, and without the interaction the circuits don’t get made properly. It’s a basic principle of biology.

PROF CHARLES NELSON, Boston Children’s Hospital:
Are you gonna be one of my freshmen in my Harvard seminar? In a couple of years? So today what we’re going to do is look at his brain’s use of oxygen. But the other thing we’ll do eventually is that we have these caps that have sensors on that allow us to measure electrical activity…

COMM:
In the hospital lab Dr Charles Nelson is trying to find out just how the wiring works. They’re studying the healthy brains of normal kids.

PROF NELSON:
I lost you didn’t I? Can you say ‘de-oxygenated haemoglobin’? No. [To mum] So what’s cool about this is that... It’s a very exciting time to be studying brain development in children, largely because the technology has improved so dramatically over the last twenty years that we can now peer inside the brain of a young baby or a young child and not so much tell what they’re thinking as much as tell what’s going on in that brain.

COMM:
Babies’ eye movements and the dilation of pupils can also be tracked by millisecond. That may help us understand how fear and aggression are wired into children’s brains. Why for example babies seem fascinated by faces that exhibit fear.

PROF NELSON:
What baffles us is why that is, and what the eye tracking allows us to do, is to say do they look at a fearful face differently than they look at other emotions and is there something inherent in a fearful face that draws the child to look at it differently? Maybe they focus only on the eyes and they don’t really scan the rest of the face, or maybe they repeatedly scan the face. We don’t know and that’s what we’re hoping to find out with this eye tracker. Do they look at fear differently than they look at other emotions?

COMM:
The science is still experimental. The consensus so far – early years of brain development may be vital emotionally and socially. But academically? That’s more controversial.

DR JOHN BRUER, author ‘The Myth of the First Three Years’:
To think that getting to the children early because brain development provides some kind of magic bullet for later success is something we should be very sceptical about. I would say the evidence is robust that there is no critical or sensitive period for acquiring mastery of school subjects. Emotional and social development as occurs with mothers and the families is a different thing. But again there’s no guarantee that because I’ve had a cuddly mother I’m going to do well at arithmetic – they’re very separate issues.

COMM:
There had been hopes scientists would find young brains so pliable they can be artificially ‘enriched’ – say by playing babies classical music. In fact there’s scant evidence from Boston to back such pushy parenting.

PROF NELSON:
I think one of the things that brain science hasn’t helped us address yet is this very concept of enrichment, so for a child being brought up in Boston for example who is watching dvds that are exposing him to three different languages and naming colours and shapes – will that long-term have any implications for that later development? And I am of the opinion the answer is no to that question.

COMM:
Brain science has not yet backed the more utopian dreams of early childhood development. But does it justify calls for more funding? There is a debate.

DR BRUER:
If we really believed that there was really good evidence that these first three years were special for learning, that would dictate taking resources that are now used in elementary school, high school, adult education and pouring them into the first three years of a child’s life. There’s nothing wrong with that if it worked, but if brain development isn’t the problem there’s a huge opportunity cost here.

SHONKOFF:
I’m not saying that science has all of the answers to everything that ails all societies around the world in early childhood, but there’s no question, no question at all, that we are learning more and more about how the early foundations for learning and physical and mental health and behavioural regulation – which includes the possibility of violent behaviour later on – the foundations are built in early childhood. What the basic principles of neuroscience tell it is that it’s better to get brain development right from the beginning, than to try and come in and fix it later. And if we build a strong foundation in the beginning of life we get much better outcomes in the long run, and for actually less money, less cost, than the much greater price that’s paid for trying to fix things down the road.

MAYOR
Caramelos, gelados!

COMM:
Back in Peru our Mayor is offering sweets, ice cream – and his dream for the future. He’s a doctor himself, he knows the science, and reckons there’s enough to justify his optimism.

MAYOR:
All of us in this district have a great dream. We want our district to become great. And this depends on each one of you. Now you’re going to tell me what each one of you wants to be when you grow up. Let’s start. What’s your dream?

GIRL:
I want to be an engineer.

MAYOR:
What’s your dream?

GIRL:
Engineer.

MAYOR:
What’s your dream?

BOY:
Scientist.

MAYOR:
What’s your dream? GIRL:
I want to be a nurse.

BOY:
Lawyer

MAYOR:
Give yourselves a round of applause.

COMM:
And the Mayor has been backing his dreams. He’s found funds for a new pre-school – for at least a few families.

MAYOR:
They are children who arrive here carrying the heavy burden of coming from a chaotic family. They’re undernourished and have low self-esteem and tend to be violent and hostile as a way of defence. This has changed enormously because we’ve given the kids good nutrition, we respect their rights and their self-esteem improves and their ability to learn improves.

COMM:
On a patch of grass, mothers trained just like in Istanbul.

NURSE:
So the aim is that she follows the rattle, as you can see here. Look. Take the rattle, take the rattle! So you can see she wants to grab the rattle. And if she manages to this will also stimulates touch as well. So this is a complete stimulation.

COMM:
For kids like Max and Esmeralda, their own new deal – parents learning fast.

VICTORIA HUAMAN BALBOA:
I didn’t know how to do this because there was nothing like this, here.

COMM:
The big lesson for parents everywhere: interacting works, the older ways may not be the best ways.

VICTORIA:
There was nothing to teach me how to sing to them, nothing like this.

COMM:
We’re close to the end of Easter week. In Ayacucho’s cathedral, a chance for the Mayor to renew his inspiration. Amid the final Easter celebrations, grim news reaches Ayacucho. The remnants of the Shining Path have killed 13 soldiers in the province. The Mayor’s ‘New Path’ won’t guarantee peace or prosperity. But he still believes starting young means a brighter, not a darker future.

MAYOR:
We have a dream. That’s why we’re working with children from the earliest years. We want to create a new society of children who love peace and who are working for their prosperity. We want to improve their self-esteem, improve their conditions so that we can see a better future for our children in our region and in our country.

END

Back to main text