The Three Keys to a Curious, Competent and Compassionate Little Child

Well, we're here today with you to spend a little bit of time, not as much as we'd like, on the three keys to a curious, competent, and compassionate child. Here we are. This is the Valentine Auditorium where we are right now, and we really hope that in the future, we'll be welcoming you to this wonderful campus and to our beautiful Auditorium.

Well, we're the Institutes for the Achievement of Human Potential. We've been here on this campus since 1955, and our work really began with, uh, adult drug patients who were here, who came here for treatment. And we really moved from that world to the world of very hurt children. It's still our primary work today, but that work, the search, the discovery of how we could help severely and profoundly brain-injured children, led us to knowledge that was inescapably important to all children. And that's really why we're here today to talk to you.

Our objectives: physical growth ending in physical excellence for all kids; intellectual growth ending in intellectual excellence; physiological growth ending in physiological excellence. And if we do these three very, very well, we really get social growth ending in social excellence. We really believe every child on Earth has a right to these four objectives.

Well, we couldn't begin today without talking about Glenn Doman, the founder of the Institutes, also my father. It was really his work, his early work and struggle to help his patients, that led to the creation of a new field, the field of child brain development. And we're going to walk into that world a little bit today. We think it's the most exciting place in the world to be, and we hope by the time we're done, you'll think so too.

That work has taken us all over the world. Here we are in the Shingu territory in the Mato Grosso in Brazil, Central. We wanted to see how our children raised in this environment, 500 miles into the interior of Brazil. These expeditions sometimes took days, sometimes weeks, sometimes months. And here, believe it or not, that's me with Dr. Rosalie Wilkinson, the second medical director of the Institutes. And I had the great privilege, because I was studying physical anthropology at that point, to do the physical measurements on the children that we were so privileged to meet.

Well, here we are in Machu Picchu, in some ways a world away from the Shingu territory, and in another way, just over the mountains. So we went from a pre-stone age culture to highly sophisticated people who came here to escape the Spanish, successfully escape the Spanish. We wanted to see how did they raise their children? Their diaries showed us that they provided their children with stimulation and opportunity. And we wanted to see the actual place they did that.

Here we are in Papua. This is Gretchen Kerr with a Papuan mom and baby, and Gretchen, second director of the Institutes. And again, you're going to see in these cultures, babies always on mother's body because it's a hostile environment for a baby. Floor, the ground, poisonous reptiles, poisonous plants, poisonous insects. So babies are always protected. They're always kept up.

Well, here we are in Kotzebue, Alaska, and that is my Uncle Robert Doman, the first medical director of the Institutes. And here we are within an Inuit family, and my uncle is actually doing a neurological evaluation on this young boy. He's looking to see how well can he use two eyes together at near point. That's important because most of these cultures that we visited are far-point cultures. That is, they spend their lives at far point. But you and I belong to a near-point culture. Ninety percent of what we do all day long is between three feet and our nose. It's very rare you and I are far away when we're in our cars, otherwise no. And we're getting more near-point all the time because of the use of computers.

Well, here we are in the Kalahari with the Bush People, surely the most hostile environment. Hard to imagine how you raise a baby here, but these brilliant, brilliant people, surely the greatest experts in survival in a hostile environment in the history of our planet. An environment where it goes to 120 at night, by day it goes down to 32 at night, and there is no water. There is no water. You have to be an expert botanist to stay hydrated. This is Haps, our instructor. She was, she really didn't let us out of her sight because she knew in her environment we were in danger.

And here, an unusual shot. We've asked one of the moms if she'd put her baby down briefly so we could see how would the baby move, or would the baby move at all. And in fact, the baby moved not at all. He just sat in the sand and waited to be picked up.

Here we are with the Maasai, very proud and haughty people, great hunters, great herding people, also incredibly protective of us. It was not one member of the Maasai who would be escorting us everywhere. They assigned two people to each of us because they didn't, they didn't trust us not to get in trouble. They were right. And again, we're looking at a full neurological evaluation to see how are these kids raised and what effect does it have, in the end, on their overall development.

Well, why all the trip around the world? We wanted to know how much of what's in a child has to do, if that child is born in London, how much has to do with London, and how much has to do with the child. That was the critical question for us. And you know, when we were doing this work back in the '60s, there really wasn't any measurement tool. Piaget had done more work than anyone else, but he had looked at everything a baby does. He had not asked the question, what are the critical stages? What are the stages that if you don't go through them, you're going to pay a price at the other end? That was our question.

And all of those different cultures helped us to step back and take a look at that question because the, uh, the notion that here in Philadelphia, PA, we're raising our babies in a modern and sophisticated and effective way compared to a baby in Kotzebue, Alaska, uh, well, that's a naive assumption, number one. And number two, it turns out to be totally wrong. Um, babies in Kotzebue, Alaska are given a great deal more freedom to move right from birth than the modern baby in Philadelphia, PA. A lot to learn from these cultures.

So how do we evaluate our children? Well, we created back in the early '60s the Institutes' Developmental Profile. It is the oldest, and I believe, most reliable neurological measurement tool ever created. Even the tools that have been made since the creation of the Developmental Profile, they're rather crude by comparison.

Well, I wanted you to see the profile. I know you can't really read it, but I wanted you to have an understanding of the idea of the profile because it's so important. And you can see that there are seven levels. We start right at the bottom with all the reflexive abilities of the newborn baby. You can see at the far left, you're going to see the brain stages that actually make those things happen. And you see a time frame of when the average child will accomplish those things, when the faster child will accomplish it, and when the slow child. You see the sensory pathways in the brain: vision, auditory, and tactile. Confidence. Now, we don't have taste and smell. Those are pleasure-seeking pathways for human beings by and large. So the critical pathways are vision, auditory, and tactile. You also see the three motor pathways that come out of the brain: mobility pathway, language development pathway, and manual competence. So we can measure our kids in these critical stages to see where is a child compared to that average child. For the brain-injured child who comes to us, this is critical. There is no science without measurement. We have to be able to measure exactly where he is and measure, once we start working with him, whether the things we're doing are really effective.

But this profile is equally important to the parents of well children. And when our parents learn about this profile, they feel greatly empowered to understand their kids' development and to see where they can strengthen it and where it's already very strong. Let me give you an example. If we go back for a second, if we go back to that first column, the visual column, the very bottom, that red box, it says "light reflex." I'm going to blow it up so we can get a sense of how, how could this be helpful to you? If you had a baby right now, how could this be helpful to you? Well, the light reflex is simply the ability of the eyes' response to light. And here we see a dilated pupil. This would be what the pupil would look like in darkness. And we know if we got a flashlight and we flooded light in, that pupil will constrict. That's the light reflex. And that's something you're going to be looking at from the time the baby is born. Make sure he has a good light reflex.

But what is more important? We can stimulate that reflex. We can actually influence the brain and the growth of the brain by putting light down that pathway. What are the keys to a curious, competent, and compassionate child? What are those keys? What if all your child really needed was stimulation, opportunity, and you? Well, that, I think, that'd be pretty great. If that, if those were the three things, I think that'd be pretty great because everything there is very doable.

Well, first of all, we, we need to know what's appropriate stimulation, wouldn't we? Effective opportunity? And what about you? So, what we're going to be looking at in our brief time with you is what is appropriate stimulation, what is effective opportunity, and why are you so important? Let's look at what we believe parents need to know. Some of the things, there are many things parents need to know, but let's just take a look at a few things that we think are very, very important.

Learning is an inverse function of age. The inverse function of age. The younger you are, the easier it is. It's easier to teach a four-year-old than a five-year-old. It's easier to teach a three-year-old than a four-year-old. It's easier to teach a two-year-old than a three-year-old. And yes, it is easier to teach a one-year-old than a two-year-old. That's reality. The brain grows faster between birth and six than it does at any time later in life. And here's the most important thing we're going to say: the brain literally grows by use. The brain grows by use. Just like the biceps. We all know if we pick up a 25-pound weight over and over again, we're going to get a bigger biceps. The brain literally grows by use. There isn't anything more important for a parent to know than this.

Now, what are some of the problems? We are raising our children by accident instead of on purpose. You know, if I ask computer people who just got a big fancy computer and they've brought it home and they've taken it out of the box and they've plugged it in, if I ask them, is it, is it useful right now? They'd say, well, no, not until we, we give it information. You have to provide data to the computer, and then it becomes useful. And the more data, the better, it turns out. And I said, well, do you have to do that carefully? And they'll say, oh, yeah. I said, well, does the pro, the computer ever get programmed by accident? And computer people are kind of horrified by that question. Instead of somebody were just coming in and throwing in any old data, uh, we'd fire them. This is a very sophisticated tool, and we don't want corruption. We wouldn't, we don't do things like that by accident. But yet, if we step back and really ask the question, in the first six years of life, is there a plan? How are our babies learning? How are our young children learning? Pretty much by accident.

We often spend our child's time instead of using it. Pack them into the car, dash them off to this, dash them off to that, bring them home. But when Mom really sits down at the end of the day, she says, I feel like I'm a chauffeur. Dad says, I feel like I, I drive a car, drop them off, pick him up. But not always is there a big take-home for the child, and Mom and Dad aren't always part of that process. They deliver and pick up. So there is a sense that we are missing our kids' childhoods, and that's because, largely, we are. We love our children, of course we do, but we don't always respect them. We don't always respect them. I would propose to you that your child, if there's one thing your kid knows, he knows you adore him. He knows that. That's a given. But he wants your respect, and he will do many things to get your attention and get your respect. And often we miss those things. We're so busy saying, "I love you. Do you know how much Mommy loves you? You're the most beautiful boy in the world." That's all wonderful. We do that so well, and it is the most important thing in the world we could possibly do. But from the kid's viewpoint, he says, "Yeah, I know you love me, but do you respect me?"

So a big part of what, what we do is teach our parents to understand their kids enough so they say, "Wow, of course I love him, but wow, he's, he's so capable. He's so intelligent. He has such a big heart." All of these things are equally important. What do we do? We provide stimulation and opportunity. That's what we do all day, every day. We're looking at, we search and discover better ways to stimulate, better ways to provide opportunity, to make both of those things better and better and better. We stimulate the sensory pathways, and we provide opportunity for the motor pathways. The sensory pathways, we know there are five pathways in. We can see, we can hear, we can feel, we can taste, and we can smell. And I've already said, of these five, tasting and smelling are pleasure-seeking. We're going to put a lot of energy into seeing, hearing, and feeling because for us, for you and I, those are the important pathways. For the motor pathways: mobility, language development, manual competence. These pathways need opportunity.

How do we do what we do? Well, I think I can summarize that neatly, actually. All that we do is to provide the brain with visual, auditory, and tactile stimulation with increased frequency, intensity, and duration in recognition of the orderly way in which the brain grows. But we do, how do we do it? Well, I've already said, and I want to say again, the five most important words for the early development of the child are: the brain grows by use. It grows by use. So how do we do it? Well, and this is an old teaching in neurology. My, when my father learned it, um, his professor probably learned it from his professor. And it is simply this: to increase central nervous system transmission, you must provide stimulation with increased frequency, intensity, and duration. Very simple, but very profound.

You know, over the years, sometimes my father was quoted as saying this. And by the way, my father would have loved to have been the first person on planet Earth to have said this, but no, he, he said it probably preceded him by 50 years. But I think why he is associated so strongly with this is he might have been the first person to pay attention to it, huge attention. Because from the moment he learned that, he started to say, "How do I use that to save this patient in my office who's had a stroke and who can't walk and can't talk? How do I use this to save a three-year-old who's paralyzed? How do I use this with a newborn baby who has a central nervous system sitting, ready, willing, and able to take in stimulation? How do I use it for the benefit of mankind?"

But let's look at that newborn, the first 12 months of life, a little bit, because I don't want to just give you a vague idea. I want you, by the time we finish, to have a very clear idea. This is what the Institutes means when they say stimulation. This is what the Institutes means when they say opportunity. So let's take the newborn. It's so clear with the newborn. And let's look at an example of stimulation and an example of opportunity.

Well, here we're back to the profile, and we're going to look at that. We're going to take the visual pathway, and it's a good place for us to start. It's a good place to make an example because the visual pathway is so important for human beings. We are more visual than we are anything else in a sensory way. So this is a very, if we're going to stimulate only one thing for the baby, only one sensory pathway, I would argue it should be the visual pathway.

Well, what would be appropriate stimulation? How would you do that? Well, we're back to that light reflex. We see dilation and we see constriction. We can make that happen. Now, with the average baby born last week in Philadelphia, will he experience a light reflex? Sure. Anytime he's in a dark room and mother comes in and she turns on the light, he's gonna, that light reflex will go into play. That'll be good. But if we look at the last week, maybe that accident occurred five times, if he's lucky, maybe 10 times in the whole week. We're proposing, why should we leave this to accident? This light reflex is important, and the more we put in stimulation, the faster the reflex gets, the better the reflex gets, the more consistent it gets.

Well, why does that matter? Well, because you develop level one on that developmental profile, you're going to move into level two more rapidly. Well, that would be good for the baby, wouldn't it? Because, you know, when the baby's born, he's blind. And he's blind for a long time. He's not really going to see if we don't do anything. If we do everything by accident, maybe he'll be seeing detail sometime at 10 weeks, 11 weeks, 12 weeks. That means that baby is going to have to wait 12 weeks before he can see the smile on his mother's face. Now, I, I use that example because I don't myself think there's anything more important to the baby than to see mother's face. And when the baby begins to be able to see mother's face, what a huge difference in the quality of his life. He sees mother's face, he says, "She looks happy. Everything's going to be okay." But until he can see that face, he lives essentially in a blind world, and that's not a happy world.

What are we going to do for this baby? After we stimulate that light reflex, we're going to create a user-friendly environment. We're going to enrich his environment so it becomes user-friendly. We're going to make it easy to see, and we do that by providing contrast. We're going to put him, not in that baby pink nursery or the baby blue nursery where he will see nothing, we're going to put him in that black and white nursery where he has the contrast between absolute black, absolute white. It's much easier for him to see. And I think you can see in this slide, that baby is actually looking at that floor. That baby is, vision is turned on. There's something there for me to see. When we put a baby in an environment where there really isn't anything the baby can see because there's not enough contrast, often the baby just goes to sleep.

Well, here's the next step. Wow, did this mother understand enrichment? She's taken the black and white environment, her baby can see black and white. She's now moved on to putting simple detail and color in that environment. And boy, I love this, this particular picture. Mom has, uh, a crawling track, which we'll talk about later, and at the bottom of that track, we have polka dots to welcome the baby that the baby can see. And we have an entire zoo of black and white stuffed animals. I think this mother really understood the importance of a user-friendly environment, an environment that's designed for the baby, not for my convenience, not for your convenience, but for what's good for the baby. Yeah.

Well, here's the next step. Believe it or not, as we're working our way up that developmental profile, this is little Maria. We saw her on that black and white floor. Well, it wasn't long before she graduated from the black and white floor to all those beautiful images on the wall. And now mother has made more sophisticated detail. And what's that detail called? That's a reading word. And I hope you can see that baby is looking at that reading word. So here we have a baby literally beginning to learn her language through the visual pathway, just as she's also learning through the auditory pathway at the same time. So this is really the beginning of a reading program. And I, if we had the profile, and there it is, we can see we have taken her from level one, that light reflex, all the way to the beginning of the top of the profile, there, level seven, the purple, that's reading. Now, you know and I know, in our society, that's a six-year-old. But Maria didn't have to wait until she was six. She actually is up there learning words, enjoying them, differentiating them, understanding them at a much, much younger age. I mean, if we go back for a second, and I ask the question, how old do you think she is? Three months? Four months? Five months? Six months? Well, I'll tell you, she's none of those. She is nine weeks old.

What would be effective opportunity, if that's good stimulation, an example of good stimulation? What would be effective opportunity for a newborn baby? Well, we're going to say effective opportunity would be to make it easy to move. Movement is vital to life. It needs to be user-friendly. It needs to be a floor that is smooth and warm, clean, safe. But it is vital that the baby, beyond that floor, right from birth. Our baby is literally, in the first few hours, will be on their bellies. You know that Inuit family that you saw in the slides? If you're an Inuit baby, you are put on mother's body right at birth, and you crawl up mother's body to the breast to nurse. That is the custom because the Inuit people recognize that the baby arrives with mobility, and you have to give him a chance to use that mobility, or he will lose it rapidly. I'm sorry to say.

But in our culture here in Philadelphia, as soon as the baby has been washed and cleaned in a hospital, what happens to him next? He will be bundled with a blanket from his neck down. Not one, not two, not three, not five blankets will be wrapped around him very tight, and he will be effectively paralyzed from the neck down. Then he will be placed on his back where he will be staring at lights in the nursery in the hospital that stay on 24 hours a day. He will be yards away from his mother so that when he cries to, to try to get her attention, she will never come for the simple reason that she won't hear. We have carefully placed her far enough away so she can't hear. You know, I think if we sat down and we said, "Let's create a baby hell," let's create a baby hell. I don't think we could have done better than the modern practices of paralyzing the baby from the neck down, putting the baby on the back, having him stare, and he has 10 or 12 or 20 other babies also in this terrifying state, all crying at the same time. Wow. Wow.

Inuit babies have a much better introduction to life. They are free to move. They do move. And our baby should be moving right from birth. This is Beatrice with her baby Maria. Maria is a few days old, two or three days. She has a user-friendly crawling track. She will have many opportunities during the day to move down that track. Here we have Isolde, and it's Isolde with her mom. Now, her mom, Isolde, is a little older than Maria, um, she's probably a week and a half, two weeks old, maybe a little older. You can see she's already got her head up, and she comes down her track very, very easily. It's no big deal to her. And mother has done the smart thing of elevating one end of the track to make movement more easy because every day the baby gets heavier. And you can see, so she already is much heavier than little Maria, makes movement more difficult. So if we fail to let the baby move in the first few days of life, maybe we come back in a month and say, "Okay, now the baby can be on the floor." Now the baby is like a beached whale. The baby's put on a lot of weight. The baby has, to some degree, forgotten what it feels like to move because the baby's been immobile. It's kind of a disaster. So babies need to have the maximum amount of opportunity on their bellies, free to move, all day, every day. Right now, the last study I saw said that American babies spend as little as three minutes a day on their bellies, free to move. Three minutes a day is nothing. Babies need many, many, many opportunities to be on their bellies so they can make the experiments they need to make to figure out, "How do I get forward? How do I go backwards? How do I roll over? How do I do those things?" Only the baby can discover those things through trial and error, but he needs opportunity in a safe, user-friendly environment to do that. Baby will go on from crawling to creeping, maximum opportunity to creep in a safe environment.

So now we've used the baby to say, "This is what stimulation could be. This is what opportunity." Let's look higher on the profile. Let's look at those first six years of life. What would be appropriate stimulation? Well, there's so many answers to this question. I'm going to take one thing and illustrate the answer, but there are many, many, many different areas we could look at. And I've chosen reading because it's so important, and because we already began with the visual pathway, so it seems logical to continue up that pathway. And we've already seen Maria. Here she is, beginning on that pathway. And we make reading easy by giving her a large print, familiar words. We use very brief sessions. It's a very joyous and happy moment for Mom and baby. It's very relaxed. The baby learns easily, easily. Just as the baby is taking in language at an incredible rate from the auditory pathway, the baby can take in the same information through the visual pathway, as long as we make it big enough. So we're just supplying the visual pathway essentially with the same information that we would be giving the auditory pathway. Everyone knows, every mother talks to her baby from the instant the baby arrives. That's natural. No one would say to a mother, "Oh, shouldn't talk to the baby till he gets to first grade, and if you do, he might be bored with English when he gets to first grade." No one would say something as silly as that because hearing the baby, hearing the mother tongue through his own auditory pathway, it's his birthright. We know that. Well, we would propose it's also his birthright to be able to read his language, and we shouldn't be postponing that stimulation until he's six years old and brain growth is slowing dramatically.

So mother might do something as simple as large print words, labeling the house. You see, "door," "refrigerator." She just scoops up her child, walks around her house and says, "This says door." Very simple, very logical, just common sense. Child quickly learns the labels of the house. Some others change them and add new things all the time. Then mother and child play games with the words. "Who do you like best?" And then they laugh when she points to grandmother, and her sister says, "Why did you point to grandmother?" Then she points to sister. So there are so many games that our kids love to play with their words because their words are a natural part of their environment.

Here we see Carlotta, and she's very young, but she reads many books a day with her mom. They sit down, mother chooses books that have very large print, and they read those books again and again and again. Here we see two little girls, a three-year-old and an 18-month-old, and Mom has written this book for the three-year-old, large print. But you can see the baby is horning in, why? Because this baby has got a lot of single words and is already very interested in a book. Here's a three-year-old surrounded by his books. Those are his books. Those are books that his mother very lovingly has made using the word processor. She's taken all the subjects he loves, and by the way, they are sophisticated books. They are large print so he can read them easily, but they're sophisticated books on all kinds of subjects.

Well, here's another sister and brother, and you can see this is a much more sophisticated book that mother has made. Her little girl is reading, but even the baby at a very young age, look at his attention and his interest. Why? He's learning single words, so the printed page is something of great interest to him. Here's Alec, I think he's three in this picture. He's reading his own commercial books now. He's got a big library, and he can take a book anytime he wants and read the things he wants to read. Here's a little girl, age three and a half or four. You can see her library, and mother finds books with good-sized print, the subjects she loves. She is an independent reader. Isn't that wonderful?

And here we see Heather. Heather's five years old in this picture, and Heather was here one day, and we had a visitor who wanted to, who asked her, "Would you read to me?" And so she pulled this book off the shelf, and she chose to read the last page of the book. The book she has in her lap is "How to Teach Your Baby to Read," and she's reading the very last paragraph, which for me is very, very touching. But I thought it was a wonderful choice for her to make as a five-year-old. At this point, Heather can read just about anything and always had her nose in a book.

Well, you know, we could talk about mathematics. We could talk about encyclopedic knowledge, music, foreign language. If we had time, we would do so. I wanted to give you an idea of what that reading pathway looked like and felt like, but these other areas are equally astonishing and fun, and kids love them. You and your child can learn absolutely anything and everything together that you can present in an honest, factual, and joyous way. That's the good news. It can be whatever you and your child together want to learn, and it can be a little bit, or it could be a lot, depending on what you and your child want to do together.

Now, we're back to the developmental profile because we've looked at stimulation, we've looked at that sensory side, using vision through the reading pathway. Now I want to address the same issues in mobility on the motor side. What would be effective opportunity for that kid? And we're going to look at physical excellence.

Well, we already started with the baby, didn't we? And we said that that baby needs the maximum time on the floor. We can generalize and say, at all levels, kids need the maximum time to move independently. Starting right from our friend here who's, oh, I think Doran's about three and a half months here, and parents are going to make the floor an exciting place to be where he wants to move, where he needs to move. And let's see if we can see an example of that. Here he is, and he's thinking about moving, but Mom and Dad are going to give him a good reason why he'd like to move across that floor. They've given him a goal. What kid doesn't want to crawl across the living room and knock something down?

We teach our babies to swim. And again, people are always so impressed that such young babies dive in the water and are really water babies. But in fact, babies are born swimmers. They've been in an aqueous environment for nine months. The sooner we get them back in the water, the happier they are. And here's the little guy who's just two. I think this is Gareth, and this game he's playing with Dad, if it was up to him, he'd do this about a hundred times a day. It's parents who get worn out and say, "We, it's time for a nap."

We teach our kids to brachiate, to move hand over hand in an overhead ladder. And we start at a very young age. This builds a great chest, which helps our kids to talk better and more clearly. It helps manual competence, so our kids can be able to write when they want to write. And it's a huge amount of fun. So here we see Olivia with her mom, and she's learning to brachiate.

Well, here's Gareth again. Now he's skiing. He's a great swimmer, but he started with cross-country. And I, I hear in the grapevine that he's, he's now moving to downhill. Of course, our kids are runners. This is such an easy part of the physical program. Everybody can find a place to run. And our kids start running at young ages. By the time they're four or five, they're running several miles and maybe doing a little 2K or a 3K with their neighborhood. Our kids do rope climbing, or any of the outside, maybe it's going to be rock climbing, whatever you've got, whatever's available. Kids love anything physical when it's taught properly on a gradient.

The ultimate, we think, the ultimate physical activity for we human beings is gymnastics. Here we see, uh, Michelle. I think she's probably eight or nine here. She's doing well. This is called a no-handed cartwheel, an aerial. It's very difficult to do, but she's making it look quite easy. Our kids love gymnastics, they love ballet, they love the martial arts. Uh, there's so many great things kids can do in physical excellence.

Well, let's return to where we started. What if all your kid needs is stimulation and opportunity? I hope now those two words are a lot more comfortable. What if all your kid needs is stimulation, opportunity, and you? What if, what about you? We've talked about stimulation, we've talked about opportunity. You are the best and most important teacher your child will ever have, ever, their whole life. Why is that? Well, we believe parents are not the problem, parents are the answer. Parents are always the answer. My father said that for a half a century, and we feel it more strongly today, having met thousands of parents from around the world who come here to learn. Parents are magnificent because they love their kids, and because they know their kids. These are the two most important characteristics of a great teacher: to know the student, to care about the student. You know your child better than anyone else. You love your child more than anyone else. All you need is to understand how the brain grows and how to provide stimulation and opportunity. You just need a little, little how-to.

Well, if you have the idea that there's more to learn from anything we've just said, you're right. There's a lot more to learn. We've given you some hors d'oeuvres, but we hope that you are hungry for the whole meal because there's a great deal more to learn, and that knowledge will make you stronger and better equipped to have a great time with your child. You know, I know I'm, I'm not young, I'm older, but life goes by so fast, and children grow up so quickly. There are too many parents who say to me, "Why didn't I spend more time when my child was little? I was so busy putting a roof over our head and food on the table, and that I missed those years. And now I have time, but my child doesn't have time for me." Well, that's, that's a great tragedy. It should be the other way around. We should have a world that invests in the first six years, where everybody conspires to say, "The first six years, that's when our kids need us," because they really do. So learn more. There's a great deal more to learn. Time is precious. Your time is precious, but your child's time is precious. Every minute he's changing. You know, if you have a one-month-old baby right now, a week from now, that baby will be different. It won't be the same. Your child will never be any younger than your child is right now. Right now, he's learning faster than he'll ever, ever learn in the future. Right now, we propose you schedule a free consultation to find out what's the next step, what's the best thing for your child, for you, for your family, what will fit in your life to make your child's life better, to enrich the environment, to provide stimulation and opportunity.