Photo: Kate Samp for Strategies for Children

Last year, we blogged about the landmark Institute of Medicine report, “Transforming the Workforce for Children Birth Through Age 8: A Unifying Foundation.” This report is still a hot topic for many in the early education and care field, but at nearly 700 pages, it’s not light reading. Thankfully, the team at New America’s EdCentral Blog is unpacking the report chapter by chapter, most recently they’ve looked at Chapter 4 which could be nicknamed, ‘Babies Are Smarter Than You Think.’

“Many people often make assumptions about what babies are capable of understanding,” EdCentral explains. “For instance, some mistakenly think children are solely concrete thinkers; however, research shows that infants and young children are able to think abstractly.”

EdCentral sums up the case by pulling key quotes from the report: “eight facts that show babies are smarter than you might have thought!” The facts are:

• “Infants engage in an intuitive analysis of the statistical regularities in the speech sounds they hear en route to constructing language.”

• “Infants also detect when an adult makes eye contact, speaks in an infant-directed manner (such as using higher pitch and melodic intonations), and responds contingently to the infant’s behavior.”

• “Young children rely so much on what they learn from others that they become astute, by the preschool years, in distinguishing adult speakers who are likely to provide them with reliable information from those who are not.”

• “Babies are developing incipient theories about how the world of people, other living things, objects, and numbers operates.”

• “Infants…are beginning to understand what goes on in people’s minds, and how others’ feelings and thoughts are similar to and different from their own.”

• “One-year-olds, for example, will look in their mother’s direction when faced with someone or something unfamiliar to “read” mother’s expression and determine whether this is a dangerous or benign unfamiliarity.”

• “Only when babies have evidence that the speaker intended to refer to a particular object with a label will they learn that word.”

• “Babies also perceive the unfulfilled goals of others and intervene to help them…Babies as young as 14-months-old witness an adult struggling to reach for an object will interrupt play to crawl over and hand the object to the adult.”

To read more, check out the EdCentral blog.

To learn what the implications of these facts are for adults, read Chapter 4.

And, of course, never underestimate the learning power of babies.