Birds, Flowers and Fruits !

The twilight is a transition time at dawn. It is an interface between darkness and light. It is a short period and yet is an interface each day. 

I have noticed that there is an interface between winter and summer. It is a short time of spring. 

During that season which is now getting over for this year, I noticed three changes in the garden. We are left with only a few visiting birds, with the day temperature rising many birds seem to have migrated to cooler places. 

The flowers bring vibrancy to the garden. Most of the flowering plants bear the blossoms which make the garden look alive and colourful. The jasmine bushes and the rose bushes around our cottage make the front garden look colourful. 

All the fruit bearing trees have fruits getting ready for harvest. This is the season for cashew,  jackfruit, Rambutan, and Peters in the garden!

The 'spring time' is therefore a short time which brings anticipation and delight. 

In a conversation with some parents in a group, I found parents feeling surprised that the head circumference in the first year of life increases nearly by 10 centimetres, suggesting that it is the fastest growing phase of brain in human development. It is a sign of the brain differentiating into multiple functional areas and lateralising the functions in to two hemispheres of brain. It is during this time the  brain  receives, processes and retain memories of emotional, visual, auditory, sensory, motor, and kinaesthetic experiences to form the grounding, upon which the brain ensembles all association to develop cognitive, language, social and behavioural  functions. 

The parental active interactive involvement with a baby in the first year is a defining interface for developing the usual primary experiences of infancy. 

The parental absence of interaction or its replacement with visual media exposure deprives the brain of all the human interface that brain is wired to process physiologically during infancy. The visual media of animation, flashy movements, colour and machine language are foreign to an infant brain. Yet when the brain is exposed to it for hours in a day during infancy, the brain conditions itself to such an input suppressing the receptivity to normal human interactive efforts. The machine language environment fails the brain to develop its usual physiological pathway of neurogenesis, gliogenesis and synaptogenesis modulated by the normal social and emotional engagement from primary care givers. The physiological acquisition of information and processing that brain was originally primed during infancy gets impaired !  

Let me say the first two years in the life of a child from birth is the spring time of childhood, where the first time experiences become formative for their subsequent neuro-maturational development. The cognitive, social, emotional and language development and pre-school skill acquisition are dependent on the experiences of infancy and toddler seasons. 

If childhood of the first three years since birth, was a season of hours of exposure to visual media, then parental attention ought to turn to get a child experience the normal social, interactive, communicative and engaging environment through multiple indoor and outdoor play based activities. It is yet another transition time to redeem childhood pathway of learning through exploration, observation, interaction and social communication !

A home is the garden of life for pre-school children. It is a spring time of opportunity for priming children to grow up in the human interface and not machine interface!

M.C.Mathew ( text and photo)