As we reported here, children’s brains appear to largely reach adult development much sooner than previously believed — 11 or 12 — not in their mid to late teens.
Does this mean children have the experience and judgment to put that cognitive development into proper context? No, but it does mean that teens tend to integrate more of the knowledge they gained from ages 6 through 10, rather than learning new basic skills. For instance, we know the basic social tools of talking to people we like and getting along with others in a group setting as a young child. But in teen years, we form cohesive peer groups that have strong ties to our own beliefs and experiences, and we socialize often toward specific short-term goals.
What they study didn’t find is just as interesting:
There were hints of much-cited differences in verbal and spatial ability between boys and girls, but these differences were not as sharp as those described in previous reports. In fact, there were no sex differences in verbal fluency. There were also no differences in calculation ability, suggesting that boys and girls have an equal aptitude for math.
Although these are still relatively early findings, it will be interesting to see if these hold up and continue as the study progresses.
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2 Comments to
“Kids’ Brains Grow Up Faster”
These preliminary results from brain imaging from 6 t 18, show basic brain development reaches maturity during pre-teen years (ages 11 and 12). This finding confirms our 5 year project results to date of pre-teen self-assessment reports from over 500 students participating in the “Coping Skills for Kids” classroom project. We take “base-line” coping capability self-reports from students before introducing basic brain literacy and healthy coping skills principles. After the 2-hr. sessions are complete students make a written report on these same coping capabilities (emotional resilience and self-acceptance).
I developed this classroom project and evaluate data by school, grade and gender. We have found that from 4th to 6th grade is an opportune time to help pre-teens learn and practice healthy coping skills for getting over anger and sadness through recognizing common emotionally wounding experiences which become amplified during teenage years. These pre-teens readily grasp the concepts and show gains from 40 to 80 percent of students in each class.
It would be great to have longitudinal data of post-project coping confidence during teenage years, but we first wanted to see immediate changes brought about by using an experiential learning emotional health education approach. The next step is engaging institutions in this type of classroom program and doing follow-up research.
Those interested in this ground-breaking, real world emotional health promotion project — based on brain research by NIMH — can find out more at our website.
I thought that… It had been known for a while that the second neural proliferation cycle was indeed complete about then but that a fair amount of pruning was still going on. And Hebbian learning (refinement), of course.
I’m not sure how *basic* the basic tasks were supposed to be, but that seems to be crucial since it is being used as a measure of *maturity*.
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Last reviewed: By John M. Grohol, Psy.D. on 19 May 2007
