Brain Boost: Nurturing Early Development with Sensory Stimulation S5|EP117

Brain Boost: Nurturing Early Development with Sensory Stimulation S5|EP117

 

Today marks the start of the fifth season of Sense by Meg Fora and it’s our 117th episode and I cannot wait to dive into today’s fascinating topic. It’s all about the incredible way that the human brain develops in those crucial early years of life. Joining me in this episode is our wonderful guest host Tove Gant, who is going to ask me all the right questions about the fascinating world of early brain development.

I’m sure you’ve heard people say that the first thousand days of a child’s life are the most crucial for long-term success and development. Well today you’ll find out what I think about that. You’ll find out about how during this period the brain responds to sensory simulation and the impact this has on shaping future cognitive, emotional, and social skills.

You’re also going to learn about how the environment molds the brain and understand how your little one learns to speak your mother tongue and discover the concept of neuroplasticity and neuroplasticity is a game changer for how you’re going to play with your baby. If you are a parent who is worried about developmental delays we’re going to cover that off too and I’m going to give you some practical tips from the field of occupational therapy. So by the end of this episode you will be able to identify whether your baby is getting the right amount of sensory stimulation and exactly what that stimulation is doing to their developing brain.

Plus we’ll discuss the long-term benefits of sensory experiences during infancy. So grab a cup of coffee, get comfortable, and let’s get started. Welcome to Sense by Megfora, the podcast that’s brought to you by ParentSense, the app that takes guesswork out of parenting.

If you’re a new parent then you are in good company. Your host Megfora is a well-known OT, infant specialist, and the author of eight parenting books. Each week we’re going to spend time with new mums and dads just like you to chat about the week’s wins, the challenges, and the questions of the moment.

Subscribe to the podcast, download the ParentSense app, and catch Megia every week to make the most of that first year of your little one’s life. And now meet your host. Welcome back mums and dads.

I’m Megfora and this is Sense by Megfora and as always I am delighted that you have joined us on the podcast where we unpack all the mysteries of early infancy and parenting. And today the mystery that we’re going to be exploring is the way in which the brain develops. Now I know that for most of us we understand that stimulation affects development, but today we’re going to do a super deep dive into exactly how to stimulate your little one to ensure that they do develop optimally.

And when I have these podcast sessions where I’m sharing some of my wisdom, I always ask a host to come on board with me and to actually ask me the questions on behalf of you. And so today I’m welcoming Tove Gantt back. So Tove, a big warm welcome to you.

Thanks Meg, thanks for having me again. It’s a pleasure. I always do enjoy our chats.

You bring a huge amount of context because you’ve got your own three little kiddies, one of whom has special needs and two are under the age of three. And so the life in the Gantt household is very busy. Very busy, that is accurate.

And you also have been, I mean, in my journey watching your little ones and I’ve come and gone from your home, a real master at actually stimulating your children as well. So I’ve been so impressed at times with the activities that you have and I’ll maybe kind of pick up on a couple of those as we talk today. But yeah, I’m going to hand over to you to host us today.

Fantastic. Thanks for having me Meg and welcome mums and dads. So Meg, I mean, I think we all know that the parenting space is a very, very stressful space, particularly where we want to do everything perfectly and make sure our child is getting everything they need and stimulate them and not overstimulate them and stimulate them the right amount.

And it’s all a very overwhelming space for mum. And the one thing that has kind of always stuck with me is that first thousand days that people talk about, right, where they talk about a child’s life being the most kind of critical time for development and success. Is this true? Is this a myth? Like, where is this? Yeah, so it’s really interesting.

I mean, you can take us back into psychological theory going back kind of two, three hundred years. There were theorists who believed that we were born coded in a certain way and that was it. Like, you know, that whatever was the template we were given in our genes was the template that we would play, that would play out through our lives.

And then later on came theorists who said, no, no, no, it’s all about nurture and the way that we look after our children. And that was largely based on the children that they found in the orphanage in Romania, where they found that children who had absolutely had no stimulation and who had been left alone and really just made to survive, only their nutritional needs were taken care of, had profound developmental delay. And so they kind of latched onto the fact that, well, then it must be that stimulation is everything.

And then more recently, we’ve gone through the kind of nature nurture debate around, you know, is stimulation that important or is it actually hard coded in our genes? And from there, we went on to look at epigenetics, which is the fact that we can actually turn on and off genes. So there’s been a lot of advances in the way that we think about brain development over the years. And the answer to the question about how important the first thousand days are is that it is very, very important.

About 30 years ago, 20 to 30 years ago, we thought it was all important and that all neuroplasticity happens in that period. But the reality is that we know that the brain actually can continue to develop throughout life. And neuroplasticity is a great word.

It basically means that our brain is plastic or moldable. There’s a better word for it is moldable. And so this neuroplasticity happens throughout our lives so we can learn new skills.

But the reality is that in the first thousand days, it happens at a very, very rapid rate. So just to unpack that a little bit from the date of conception, so you can take a thousand days from a date of conception or you can take it from the date that the baby’s born. Either way, it’s either pregnancy plus the first two years or the first three years of life, approximately, is what those first thousand days are.

Now, in that period, you go from having no brain cells, as you can imagine, at the beginning of pregnancy. Within pregnancy, this proliferation of brain cells actually exploding and developing within the brain itself. But those brain cells on the day that the baby’s born are completely unconnected.

They have very few connections between those brain cells. And brain cells are made up of two or three parts. One of the key parts is the actual neuron itself.

And then between that, we have synapses and axons that kind of connect those brain cells. And what we know about brain cells is that they’re kind of a little bit similar to the old fashioned mobile phones, which if they didn’t have connectivity, then they were actually pretty useless. They didn’t have any apps on them.

You couldn’t speak to anyone. You couldn’t do anything. You know, the modern day, obviously, mobile phones are still useful without connection.

But the reality about brain cells is that they are completely useless without connection. They can do nothing. And it’s that connection between the brain cells that happens incredibly at the most incredible rate from birth and a little bit in the last trimester, but mainly from birth.

And so when we talk about neuroplasticity, a lot of it is around that. It’s around how do those connections happen and how do they get laid down and then how do they become reinforced? One of the things that happens with these connections is that a brain cell connects to another brain cell at a massive rate. And a lot of connections actually happen that are pretty superfluous or pretty useless.

And so pruning happens as well. And so pruning and making of connections is what neuroplasticity is all about. So, and that’s what happens in the first thousand days of life is that we’ve got the development of the brain cells.

We’ve got the connections between the brain cells. Then we’ve got the brain cells that are not needing to be connected, those being pruned and kind of falling away. And that’s where we start to see the phrase, use it or lose it.

So if you don’t use those brain cells, you will actually lose them. They will eventually fall away. They’ll be eaten up because the brain uses so much energy that the body has to kind of get rid of any extra brain cells.

Otherwise we would have massive heads and no energy for the rest of our lives. So that’s kind of in a nutshell what neuroplasticity and those first thousand days are about. They’re just this incredible time of connections happening and learning.

So what can we do as parents to help the connectivity of those brain cells? What is that? Is that linked to like different sensory inputs? Where does that, how does that happen? Yeah, so the way a brain cell connects with another brain cell is basically by sending a message from one to the next. As a brain cell sends a message to say, like for instance, let’s just take a visual brain cell because your visual nerves actually start in your eyes, in the optical nerve, which connects directly into the eyes. So you see something, it is, you know, a flash of red.

The information immediately travels along the optic nerve and it has to go through to what’s called a relay center in our brain. And that relay center basically says, hold on, let’s just quickly connect this with all the other sensory information that’s going on. So is there a smell of a fire? Cause maybe it’s a fire that this flash of red or is there a big sound like a bang? Maybe it’s an explosion or is there the sound of traffic? And then maybe I’m actually driving and a light has gone red or whatever, you know, whatever it is.

So it starts to connect the rest of our world. And that’s what sensory integration is about. It’s kind of the connection of all the different parts of the world to say, oh, okay, this is, this now gives my world meaning.

That’s what that red flash meant. So as that information travels along, it kind of forms a little pathway and the more those pathways are used, the stronger they get because a myelin sheath is laid down around those neurons to actually just, or those synapses to actually kind of connect the one brain cell to the next. So yeah, so I mean, so the answer to your question is yes, sensory stimulation is what is critically important when it comes to brain development.

And so it’s what we hear, see, smell, you know, feel the movement that goes into the brain, all of that lays down these pathways, a huge amount of our brain, a greater percentage of the greatest percentage of our brain is made up of sensory cells. So it’s actually incoming information that we have to take note of. A lesser part of the brain is actually made up of what we call our motor neurons, which kind of give instruction to do something like to speak, to run, to smile.

You know, those neurons are slightly less than our sensory, but effectively what happens is that the sensory information comes into our brain, our brain registers it, it integrates it with all the other senses, and then it forms a behavior. And that behavior of smiling, running, opening our mouths to eat, that behavior is what looks like learning or where we actually see the manifestation of the stimulation. In a world that has absolutely no stimulation, you would not have that learning happen because you wouldn’t know.

So if you never saw a face, you would never be able to register that that was a face, that that’s a smile, that that’s an emotion, you know, so you would have a completely, a child who’s got completely blunted affect and doesn’t engage emotionally because they’ve never learned it. So all learning is dependent on multisensory stimulation. And it’s so interesting.

So when your child is born, we’ve got our sensory senses. So when your child is born, you obviously expose them in environments, and this is, I guess, the nature nurture conversation, right? How much of each of these things plays a role? So if my child is born, let’s say Jagger’s born, and I do one for one everything one should do to stimulate all the tick boxes, his reaction to my stimulation, is there a part of that that is just hard coded into him? Like he’s, he was born a sensitive kid. And so he’s just going to respond differently to Nova who was born, you know, not sensitive and more of a social butterfly.

Are those things hard coded? And was there actually the ability as a parent to almost change their sensory diet or appetite by actively doing certain things at a very young age or exposing them to, you know, the sights, the sounds, the touches, the activities? Yeah, look, I mean, everything that happens in the early days does wire us. And so exposure does make a big difference. So, and, you know, we’ll see this, for instance, with our little ones who have a lot of noxious stimulation in the early days, like lots of injections, needles, pipes, tubes, medical investigations, their sense of touch starts to be wired for the fact that touch is dangerous, it’s painful, it’s not, it’s not nice, I’m not happy.

And so, you know, in that way, it’s an example of a child who might not have been a sensory sensitive child, but they become sensory sensitive, because that’s the exposure that they get. So that is an example of how the environment molds the brain. And it can happen in different ways, you know, I mean, language is a perfect example.

So, I mean, you could have a child who was born genetically to English speaking parents, who was then adopted by a Japanese couple, who only speak Japanese to them. He’d never heard Japanese in utero, he’d never heard it in 15 generations back in his family. And yet he learns to speak Japanese absolutely seamlessly.

And the reason for that is that that’s what he’s been exposed to. Now, genetically, he might have been, he might have had some or other advantage or disadvantage for in terms of capacity for learning language. And that’s where we say people have a gift for language or somebody can pick up a language so quickly, I can’t, you know, somebody else can pick up so quickly.

So yes, there’s a genetic base into what our capacity or our tendency is towards language. But the actual exposure itself is then what molds the brain and the fact that actually we now would then speak Japanese going forward. And Meg, as an OT, can you provide some examples of how you’ve seen the kind of sensory simulation impact children with developmental delays? This episode is brought to us by ParentSense, the all-in-one baby and parenting app that helps you make the most of your baby’s first year.

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As an OT, can you provide some examples of how you’ve seen the kind of sensory simulation impact children with developmental delays? So that’s an interesting question. And actually, I mean, it was a question that I started to ask myself very early on in my career. I was probably only about two years out of OT school or maybe three years.

I was working in a private practice in Johannesburg and a kid came in. And at the time I was working a lot with developmental delay and I would do a thing called clinical observations. Any OT who’s listening will know what that is.

And I was doing clinical observations with this child, which means that I was looking for some neurological soft signs. And that would be, is he low tone? And as an example, that would be one. And he’d come in with developmental delay in terms of he was just very uncoordinated.

So he couldn’t skip. He wasn’t great on the playground. He couldn’t catch or throw a ball.

He’d been sent in for his gross motor skills. He was a really kind of clumsy kid. And so I did my clinical observations.

I was looking for some neurological soft signs and there was just like nothing. This kid was so well integrated in many respects and I couldn’t find any reason for this low tone. He did have low tone, but I couldn’t find any reason for it.

And then I started to mine down with the mum and I said to her, tell me about his formative years. And I think he was about five or six, I can’t remember. And she said, no, he had grown up in a flat in Hong Kong.

So I said, okay, that’s interesting. And tell me about his school. Now his school that he’d gone to from the time he was two years old, because he was in creche, his mum was working, both parents working, was on the 59th floor of a high-rise building in Hong Kong.

And so I said, well, what did his playground look like? And she said, well, they didn’t have playgrounds, obviously, you know, they had playtime, but they didn’t have playgrounds. And before I kind of, you know, within a very short period of time, I realized actually he’d had no exposure. He’d never climbed a tree.

He’d never run down a hill. He’d never rolled down an embankment. You know, he hadn’t done all the stuff that, you know, a kid growing up with a big outdoor space had done.

And so it was a really great example of how the environment had molded his brain and his skillset. And so exposure to something like movement and gross motor activities or lack of exposure to it had resulted in what looked like a developmental delay or some sort of delay in his gross motor skills. So as an OT, when I look at it, you know, kids will often come in and, you know, one of the first questions I’ll ask is, you know, is there a syndrome? Are there neurological hard signs, which is things like significantly high tone or spasticity, as it were, or are there some soft signs, you know, what are his equilibrium and balance reactions like? So I look at all of that.

And sometimes when those aren’t there, then I’ll start to look to the environment and say, okay, none of that is there. Then what went on in his formative years that actually either wired him for or not for good development. And so I guess a question on that is, can you unlearn that? Can you then teach him those things? Was that analysis for you then a way to say, it’s not a developmental delay in that there’s a like a longer term problem.

It’s a skill that he needs to learn. And there’s just, as a parent, you now need to do these activities to teach him this because it wasn’t exposed or how does one get over that, overcome it? Well, that kind of goes back all the way to the very first conversation I had when we started talking today and that concept of neuroplasticity. If we didn’t believe in neuroplasticity, in other words, if we didn’t believe that the brain could be molded and formed and that new synapses could develop, then we’d say, that ship sailed, you know, like, sorry, that’s going to be a lot in life.

You’ll probably never learn to write neatly or never learn to, you know, climb a tree. You’ll never be able to play cricket or whatever it is, you know, that would be your lot. But because we, and you know, all developmental therapists, whether you are a medical doctor, an OT, a physio, a speech therapist, we all believe in neuroplasticity.

We all believe that the brain can be molded and formed. It’s a lot easier in the first thousand days. Like you just have to, I mean, I know you’re going through with Nova and Jagger at the moment, like you say something and they repeat it to you three seconds later, you know, and then you kind of regret that it would happen to be the word shit.

But anyway. That’s not a real life example, anyone. So, you know, the point is that there’s this incredible neuroplasticity early on, but if you miss the boat, so little one who comes out of Hong Kong and hasn’t had gross exposure, have we missed the boat? No.

And that’s the beauty of therapy. That’s the beauty of intervention. So, you know, by then going back to the beginning and saying, right, we’re going to do lots of movement activities.

We’re going to do lots of exposure to floor time. We’re going to do puzzles on the floor. So, you know, I always talk about with babies, floor time, floor time, floor time, get them on their tummies, get them out of their car seats, get them on their tummies.

And the reason for that is that if you do that from the time your baby’s born in their awake times, they are going to roll. They are going to crawl because they having all of this amazing exposure and activation of their flexor front muscles and the extensor back muscles. Now, if your baby’s missed out on that, let’s say it’s not too late.

So often one of the therapy things we do, and we actually do it in our place in schools as well. We don’t put children in chairs to do the activities. They lie on the floor, you know, doing a puzzle while they’re lying on the floor.

What are we doing? We’re making sure that they are activating their back muscles and their shoulder girdle and their elbows and all sorts of control. And so we’re doing activities with them that actually stimulate this, you know, different aspects of motor development. So the ship doesn’t sail, but it is easier in the first thousand days, which is why my focus has always been on the young baby, because I believe we can do so much.

It’s such an impactful time of life. And Meg, what is the role that emotional engagement plays in sensory stimulation and how can parents kind of foster this aspect effectively with their children? So we’ve spoken about the environment. So this would be the emotional, you know, engagement.

Yeah. So, I mean, there’s a couple of things there and I’d like to focus on two aspects. The first one is that just the emotion of fun and play and happiness is an incredible neural stimulant.

Like, we know we make connections better when we’re having fun. You know, I, at my ripe old ages, decided to take a paddle. I am loving the game.

And because I have such fun, I’m actually getting better at it. You know, so it’s not too late to teach this old, you know, old dog a new trick. Exactly.

So it’s not too late because I’m having fun. So we know that fun is important. And so play and emotional engagement and happiness are really, really important when you’re playing, when you’re trying to stimulate your little ones.

So if your little one is not having fun, and that’s why, you know, these drill exercises where kids have got to learn things, you know, with a lot of stress. And I mean, you and I have recently spoken about a situation that where you’re trying to teach one of your kids something and there’s stress. It’s very much harder to learn when there’s stress hormones in your brain.

You know, as we can imagine, fun and engagement and happiness is important. And it’s not always part of it. I’ve got a kid going through A-levels at the moment.

She’s not loving this, but she’s doing it. So the point is that when situations are happy and, you know, emotional engagement does have an impact on brain development. The other side of it is that children really do learn how to engage and they wire their brain for socialization through their early engagement relationships.

And so that’s why stimulation is not just about learning the colors, learning how to throw a ball. In fact, maybe the more important aspect of early stimulation is the emotional side. And that is just connecting.

And, you know, I just love watching on TikTok and Instagram, these incredible videos of this just delight and this engagement and this falling in love between father and baby and mother and baby. Because when you see that, you can see how they’re making connections for relationships later and making connections for relationships later is equally, if not more important than learning to read or write. And Meg, the balance, so this is, I mean, I’ve always found this very tricky with my kids because you’re so desperate to stimulate and do the activity and get it right and check that box, probably a bit of an A-type vibe on my side, but, you know, make sure it’s all done.

And then you kind of, I’m not pushing them to do it, but you’re doing it. How do you find the balance or what are the triggers or the signs where I’m doing too much and I’m potentially causing overstimulation? Because I know how bad that is in terms of then them not learning, then them shutting down. I mean, we saw that with Nova as a preemie.

She was so overstimulated by her environment upstairs. That was the first thing you did when you came into our home life was remove her out of the environment. She’s not learning, she’s not taking anything, and it’s too overwhelming.

And then there’s almost no point to doing it, right? Because they’re so overstimulated, they don’t want to sleep, then it kind of goes the other way. So what are those, what is the balance between providing the right sensory experience without causing that overstimulation for your child? Yeah, no, that’s a very important question. So, I think it is this case of we do need to stimulate our babies, but we need to do it not at all costs.

And I think there was a great quote that I quote in the Baby Sense book where we talk about that good mothering and good parenting is not a case of the more is the better. It’s a case of actually reading your baby’s signals and giving them just the right amount of what they can cope with. So being in tune with your baby’s signals and knowing when they’re becoming overstimulated becomes very important.

And of course, every baby’s stimulation levels or thresholds are different. So Nova was a preemie and she just, you know, and your house was very busy. And so, you know, there was a mismatch for what she needed at the time.

I mean, she is a social butterfly now, but there was a mismatch at the time for what she could cope with. So it’s very important that parents watch their baby’s signals. And because there’s no hard and fast rule that I can say to you, look at three minutes of visual stimulation at three months old.

It’s not like that. It’s very much around the signals and they will signal, they’ll have different levels that they can take in at eight o’clock in the morning versus five o’clock in the afternoon. And they’ll have different levels that they can take in if they’re feeling healthy and robust versus when they’re teething, because then there’s a base of pain, which makes them more likely to be overstimulated.

So the very best thing that a parent can do is learn how to read their baby’s signals. And actually, when I wrote the Baby Sense book, going back to the early 2000s, that was really what it was about. It was just about reading your baby’s signals, because I knew that if you could know how to read your baby’s signals and understand when they’re becoming overstimulated, then you will know whether it’s time to stimulate or whether it’s time to have downtime.

And, you know, downtime can look like many different things. It can be just putting your baby in a carrier, facing outwards, walking around the garden so that they’re looking at the trees and the birds and, you know, and going for a walk around the block. That’s great downtime.

It’s, you know, there’s a little bit of stimulation going on there in the outdoor world, but they’re not, there’s no sounds, although the natural sounds, there’s no artificial sounds, there’s no artificial colors, and it’s much more tranquil environment. For a newborn, no stimulation or watching stimulation might mean that you actually just put your newborn who can’t roll in the middle of your double bed while you’re doing your makeup, and they’re staring at the roof. Like a lot, a lot of times moms will go, what? I feel like they need a mobile over their head, or I feel like I should be playing music to them.

But actually just putting them in the middle of nowhere, just while you’re doing your makeup and you’re talking to them from a distance is perfect stimulation for a newborn. So, you know, it becomes a balance. It becomes, yes, stimulate your baby, but watch for those signals and give them periods of lovely downtime as well.

And Meg, you mentioned your ParentSense book, and I remember you, in the book, in the book, you mentioned a framework. That’s the BabySense book, I think. ParentSense is an app.

No, no, the BabySense book. You mentioned a framework called TEAT. Can you explain how this works and what, how can parents integrate this in their daily lives and how it links to kind of sensory stimulation and signals? Yeah, so I think this is a really good segue to kind of tying everything up and for this podcast and, you know, the T E A T acronym stands for Timing, Environment, Activity and Toys.

And it was a framework that said everything in its right time, place and, and different activities, different toys for different times. So, so let’s talk about it. The first T obviously stood for timing and that, that kind of led me to onto a, in a direction where I said, look, you don’t have to put stimulation in one package at 10 o’clock in the morning or exactly in between the morning feed and the afternoon feed.

It doesn’t have to sit in one time of the day. It needs to fit in with all different parts of the day. So you can stimulate your baby in at bath time, at travel time, at feed time, at play time and at sleep time.

So it was kind of weaving into the day, the different stimulation opportunities. And so that was what the T stood for. So in the book at bath time, I gave a whole lot of different bath time activities.

And then, you know, in, in the E in the play time of the day, there were a whole lot of play activities. So play time activities. So you have different activities tied to different times of the day.

And sometimes those activities are stimulating, like for instance, bubble bath, maybe, but sometimes they are dampening or regulating like lullabies in the nursery as your baby’s going to sleep. So that was what timing was about. The E is the environment.

And that’s that sometimes you don’t even need a toy. You just need to be in a space like on the beach or in the bath. That’s the environment and how we can structure the environment.

The A was a specific activity, right? It is tummy time, put a mirror up at 45 degrees in front of your baby because they’ve got 10 minutes of calm alert state. They can actually focus in on an activity. So there were activities.

And then the last T was for toys, which were what toys were appropriate for that age baby. And so if moms are interested in that, it really is a lovely framework to understand what you can do with your baby at any given time of their life each day. And I remember you in the book, in the book, you mentioned a framework. Well, that’s the baby sense book, I think. Yeah, it’s an app.

Oh, OK. Yes. No, no, no.

The baby sense book. You mentioned a framework called TEET. Can you explain how this works and what how can parents integrate this in their daily lives and how it links to kind of sensory stimulation and and signals and? Yeah, so I think this is a really good segue to kind of tying everything up and for this podcast.

And, you know, the TEET acronym stands for Timing, Environment, Activity and Toys. And it was a framework that said everything in its right time, place and and different activities, different toys for different times. So let’s talk about it.

The first T obviously stood for timing. And that that kind of led me onto a in a direction where I said, look, you don’t have to put stimulation in one package at 10 o’clock in the morning or exactly in between the morning feed and the afternoon feed. It doesn’t have to sit in one time of the day.

It needs to fit in with all different parts of the day. So you can stimulate your baby in at bath time, at travel time, at feed time, at play time and at sleep time. So it was kind of weaving into the day the different stimulation opportunities.

And so that was what the T stood for. So in the book at bath time, I gave a whole lot of different bath time activities. And then, you know, in in the in the play time of the day, there were a whole lot of play activities, so playtime activities.

So you have different activities tied to different times of the day. And sometimes those activities are stimulating, like, for instance, bubble bath, maybe, but sometimes they are dampening or regulating like lullabies in the nursery as your baby’s going to sleep. So that was what timing was about.

The E is the environment. And that’s that sometimes you don’t even need a toy. You just need to be in a space like on the beach or in the bath.

That’s the environment and how we can structure the environment. The A was a specific activity. Right.

It is tummy time. Put a mirror up at 45 degrees in front of your baby because they’ve got 10 minutes of calm alert state. They can actually focus in on an activity.

So there were activities. And then the last T was for toys, which were what toys were appropriate for that age baby. And so if moms are interested in that, it really is a lovely framework to understand what you can do with your baby at any given time of their life each day.

That’s fantastic. Thanks, Medha. And finally, in the long term, what potential outcomes can parents expect to see in their children when they’ve been provided with the appropriate sensory experience during a baby’s infancy? Yeah.

So the potential outcomes are different for every child. You know, for some little ones, it’ll be that they will be incredibly emotionally wired, so emotionally attuned. And they’ll go on to be a psychologist or, you know, somebody who changes the world through impacting people’s lives because that’s what they’re wired for.

And for other people, for other children, your outcome might be absolutely brilliant sporting prowess that you go on to become a brilliant sportsman or a swimmer who can who breaks world records. So, you know, I think that you’ve got to realize that you don’t measure success based on one, just one specific kind of set of rules, you know. So the outcomes that we’re looking for are to have somebody who is quite diversely, has diverse strengths.

You want somebody who is in touch with humans. I mean, that’s really important in life. You want somebody whose language skills are good enough to get by for them to be able to match the job that they choose, which for some kiddies, they’re not going to be very verbal and they’re going to end up sitting behind a computer coding the next AI for the future, you know, in 2050.

So, you know, success looks very, very different for different people. And, you know, I think the one important thing is connection, is human connection. And the other one is that they have the resilience to be able to cope with what life throws at them, you know, and mental flexibility.

And I think those things are really the outcomes that we’d ultimately want. But along the way, the skills that we’ve spoken about, which are things like language skills and ball skills and, you know, handwriting and all of those, those things are enablers in life. And they, you know, kind of help you to meet the task, meet the demands of the tasks.

Right. Well, thanks Meg. This was super helpful, really, really interesting.

And I’m sure all the mums and dads listening will find some value in this on their journey, whether they’ve got a newborn or a three or four or five year old. So everyone, thanks for tuning in and subscribe, like, follow us. And we look forward to seeing you next week.

That’s great. Thanks so much, Tuve. Cheers, everyone.

Thanks to everyone who joined us. We will see you the same time next week. Until then, download ParentSense app and take the guesswork out of parenting.