“No matter what business you’re involved in, first and foremost, you’re in the brain change business.” So asserts Houston child psychiatrist, Bruce Perry. In line with that premise, it makes great sense to know at least a few of the basics about how your own and your children’s brains grow and change in ways that could possibly help make them work like Einstein’s, Michelangelo’s and Mother Teresa’s all rolled into one!

The brain is perhaps best thought of as a collection of interconnected endocrine glands – roughly 52 individual parts controlling different actions. They all must work together to “process energy and information.” Thinking about the brain in such terms – as a network of organs that must optimally process the energy and information of our daily lives – turns out to be a very useful template to help us understand our own and our children’s reactions to the world, and to make good decisions about what might be best for them. Ideally, we only want our children involved in activities that their brains are developmentally suited to handle, and perhaps a little bit more. It’s the “little bit more” that can become tricky, which is how we build resilience in our kids. I’ll be discussing resilience often in these columns.

As you might suspect, timing plays a significant role in the kinds of energy and information our children’s brains can process at any given point in their development. So does the source of that energy and information. It can come from outside us, as well as from inside the body (exogenously and endogenously).*** Timing also determines the quantity and quality of energy and information a child’s brain can process. An obvious example is that for the first few years, children’s brains cannot process language very well. However, they can process sound, and children are particularly sensitive to the loudness, frequency and cadence of the mother’s voice. This is known as prosody, and in future columns we’ll talk a lot about prosody’s extraordinary capacity to not only grow and change children’s brains, but also a spouse’s brain as well!

Another important way to think about your child’s brain is as an associative organ. By that, I simply mean that it learns a lot by putting things together. Things like words and pictures, up and down, hot and cold, thoughts and feelings. By pairing things that make the brain feel good with things that we want our children to learn, the neurons in the brain become richly connected. A variation of this is sometimes known as “Grandmother’s Rule: You may do what you want to do – when you’ve done what you need to do.” By pairing preferred actions with less exciting necessary duties, like brushing teeth and going to bed at a set, regular time, reinforced learning takes place. It is such associations, repeated frequently over long periods that produce what we generally think of as learning. One interesting finding about such learning by Nobel Prize-winning neurobiologist, Eric Kandel is that learning involves five pulses of serotonin, “The Happy Molecule.” Therefore, it begins to make perfect sense that children learn much more when they are happy than when they are not. Thus, learning and play go hand in hand, and not only during childhood, as I am sure a number of you readers have already figured out!

Finally, one last thing to realize and remember about the brain and the business of trying to change it, is that the brain is exquisitely “plastic.” What I mean by that is parents can do a lot of things less than perfectly with their children and the possibility for later improvement and correction remains not only strong, but something you can almost always count on the brain to try to accomplish. I like to refer to this as “healing constantly trying to happen.” In future columns I will be addressing many of the ways that new scanning technology – machines like Transcranial Magnetic Stimulators, that make us briefly brilliant and let us see parts of the brain at work in real time – is offering us clues to some of the best ways we can begin to take advantage of neural plasticity.

*** Many friends and writing teachers caution against using big words in columns like this, claiming “if you want to be read widely, you have to use simple words.” I disagree. I think any one of us can read and understand little words and big words, if a writer cares enough to take the time to explain what they’re talking about.