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Balanced Beginnings for Babies

Scientists began to seriously study the brain development of babies in earnest in the latter decades of the twentieth century. The push for the development of artificial intelligence triggered extensive research into how the brain works. One important revelation of the studies was that the rapid brain growth of the first three years after birth is never repeated again during a person's life. Researchers began to realize that the amount of appropriate stimuli that the brain experiences during that initial period is the single most powerful determinant of learning ability later in life.

Gloria Crook began culling through dry data and the scientific vernacular in scientific journals in 1979. From the information about the brain, she distilled its practical use for babies. As new babies were born to the families involved in the Robert Muller School, Gloria and Marti Cockrell began developing exercises specifically to enhance their brain development. All of the activities evolved from fully documented research that was already accepted as valid by the scientific community. Over a period of nine years, the parents and teachers at the Robert Muller School experimented and refined the exercises as they stayed abreast of current research. They observed closely the responses of the infants to various activities.

The program that has evolved is distinguished not only by its scientific soundness, but also by its sensitivity to the infant. Every exercise is carried out with the permission of the baby. It is an astonishing phenomenon to witness. A baby may begin crying even though he has been fed and changed. His cry signals boredom, a need for proper stimulus for his brain. In one exercise, the mother holds her infant in her arm as she shows him a black and white picture on a black and 8" x 11" card. As soon as his mother holds up the card with a picture of a smiling face, the baby stops crying and his eyes lock onto to picture. Slowly, the mother rotates the picture from left to right as his eyes follow. After a couple of minutes, the baby looks away, signaling completion of the exercise. However, he seems happy and content, as if some deep need has been satisfied. Gloria teaches, "Retention is best exhibited when there is repetition to the point of patterning new pathways in the brain. When clear motivation is added to the patterning, retention will happen with ease."

Rather than being imposed, even the daily scheduling of Balanced Beginnings activities is in response to the infant's needs. Starshine Nolan, a graduate of the Robert Muller School (RMS), shares the program with her baby and has helped other mothers to do likewise. She points out, "Infants take comfort in order and rhythm if it is not forced upon them. Rather than deciding a schedule for your baby, and then forcing them to adhere, have your baby put you on a schedule."

Also included in the Balanced Beginnings kit are tapes in French, Arabic, and Spanish. Research has established the indisputable advantage of exposure to foreign languages during infancy. Studies have proven that a person who has at least heard the sounds of a particular language during those all-important first three years can learn the same language years later with superior ease and without an accent. Realizing the importance of hearing the sounds of various languages, the group began to enlist people to create tapes in their native tongues. These were then included in Balanced Beginnings for the babies to hear.

Some people argue that they will just love their baby and that nature will direct their care. There is one problem with this assumption. We have had generations of lives lived indoors, with the use of baby beds and carriers, generally removed from the sights, sounds, and smells of nature. As a result, there is a danger that the most natural and supportive ways of being with babies have been forgotten. These are certainly not as readily available as in an infancy lived while carried next to the mother's heart, in the midst of the plethora of stimuli from nature, and in the heart of a busy village. It is highly unlikely that any modern family relying on random experiences would provide the full range of activities required to stimulate all areas of infant brain growth. Why not learn about all the beneficial ways mothers might offer these experiences to their infants to consciously and naturally facilitate their babies' development?

Gloria points out that babies cry not only because they are hungry or need to be changed. Their cries are just as likely to signal boredom. They crave adequate stimulation for the rapid brain growth that is taking place in the first three years of life. It behooves us to use our creative intelligence to consciously retrieve those forms of stimulation. This might include infant massage and exposure to a variety of sounds, textures, smells, visual shapes, symbols, and contrasts, so as to facilitate maximum brain and organ development in those first three years. Conscious, informed provision for the maximum brain and organ development of babies is fundamentally no different than conscious, informed stewardship of the Earth.

Balanced Beginnings includes a wide range of planned and spontaneous beneficial activities, some of which mothers might incidentally carry out. Gloria writes, "The entire key to understanding Balanced Beginnings is this: there is only ONE period in individual life when rapid brain development takes place. That is the ONLY time when experience will have LIFE-LONG effects in learning ability, BECAUSE the connections between brain cells during this particular rapid brain growth period forms the matrix of pathways for all later learning. This period lasts for only the first three years.

According to Gloria, "When there is not a plethora of pathways, the person will be a slow learner. When there are pathways in only a few areas, all learning will be 'shuttled,' if you will, through those existing experienced pathways and some subjects will be exceedingly difficult-just as is the case with most of us. We learn fairly easily in some areas, while others are difficult and information is not retained easily in those difficult areas."

The research behind Balanced Beginnings is more widely known now, but one advantage of the curriculum is that its originators put the results of their pioneering work into sequenced lesson plans. The program includes 3" x 5" lesson plan cards, pictures, and foreign language tapes.

Mothers who have faithfully used Balanced Beginnings with their babies have discovered that each developmental process taken into account in the babies' experience has caused an obvious and prodigious ability that was lacking in their peers who had not had the experience.