Pediatrician  T. Berry Brazelton, M.D., professor emeritus at Harvard Medical School and founder of the Brazelton Touchpoints Center at Children’s Hospital Boston, is known for his pioneering work in understanding infant development. Now a cover story in a recent issue of Harvard Magazine examines the Touchpoints approach, and a companion piece offers a brief history of Dr. Brazelton’s contributions. (The video above was created for the 2010 Work Life Legacy Award event honoring Dr. Brazelton.)

In 1943, when Dr. Brazelton graduated from Columbia University Medical School, doctors regarded infants as “a bag of neurological reflexes,” Joshua Sparrow, M.D., a psychiatrist and Touchpoint’s director of strategy, planning and program development, tells the magazine. “Surgeons performed some procedures on infants without anesthesia,” the magazine reports, “and infants in intensive care, routinely separated from their parents, were kept in brightly lit incubators wired with noisy alarms.”

Dr. Brazelton and other pediatricians noticed, however, that babies turned when they heard their parents’ voices. (more…)

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One of the documented benefits associated with high-quality early education is a reduction in crime. Children who participated in high-quality programs, research shows, are less likely to be arrested or incarcerated later in life, according to landmark longitudinal research on the effects of high-quality early education on low-income children. That’s why police chiefs, sheriffs and district attorneys around the country are interested in early education. Economist Tim Bartik of the Upjohn Institute estimates $2 to $11 in crime-related cost savings from every dollar invested in high-quality early education.

So we read with interest a recent Boston Globe column by Gareth Cook that describes researcher Richard Tremblay, who began his “crime-fighting career” working in prisons. Too late, Tremblay realized. So he started working with juvenile delinquents. Still too late.

“So Tremblay switched to kindergartners,” Cook writes. He developed a program for young children and their families that proved effective “in steering its charges away from the path to violence,” Cook continues.  “Yet even with the success, Tremblay came to believe that kindergarten was still not early enough. And so he has begun looking for ways to start violence prevention at birth – or even before.” Part of the answer, Cook writes, is to find ways to strengthen families, including home visiting, to support parents of infants and young children – and expectant mothers. Family engagement, we add, is also an ingredient of high-quality early education and care.

“It’s a strange impulse – to see the spark of crime in babies – but Tremblay is part of small group of scholars whose ideas deserve a wider hearing,” Cook continues. “Crime is of course a complex social problem. But crime can also be seen as a mental-health problem. And scientists are now uncovering the conditions in the brain that give crime fertile ground. Much of the evidence points to damage in the brain’s emotional circuits, most likely in the first years of life.”

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The adorable video of babbling twins that has gone viral in cyberspace is more than a glimpse of two very cute babies. It is a lesson in early language development. The delighted (and delightful) back and forth and playing with sounds will lead to words, the basis of human relationships and the foundation of later literacy. What, exactly, is going on?

Boston.com points us to “The science behind babbling babies,” an interview with speech and language specialist Hope Dickinson posted on Children’s Hospital of Boston’s Thrive blog.

“They’re demonstrating a behavior known as ‘reduplicated babbling,’ because the sounds used are repeated, which you can hear in their use of ‘da-da-da.’ In a more informal way, I guess I would describe it as turn-taking with babbling, or conversational babbling,” Dickinson says.

“It’s fun because these two are demonstrating great mimicking of multiple aspects of conversation. It really demonstrates how very young children communicate and know how a conversation works, even before they have the words to use. They will eventually begin to replace the babbling strings with words,” she says.

“One thing they are using wonderfully is turn taking, as in first one ‘talks’ and then pauses and the other responds. They are also imitating the various intonations we use in conversation and speaking. There is fantastic rise and fall to their pitch and tones. Sentences or exclamations end loudly and emphatically, and there is also some questioning (rising) intonation. They are using gestures to supplement their talking, much like adults do. Their body distance is even very appropriate for most Americans; not too close, but not too far either.”

How can parents nurture and support their children’s language development? “The ‘usual’ staples of good language stimulation are simply: Talk to your child throughout the day and as much as possible, try narrating what he’s doing and seeing, what you’re doing and seeing, and what is going on around you,” Dickinson says.

For more on children’s language development and the path to literacy that begins at birth, check out the video “The Young Reader’s Journey.”

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