When my wife called my Seattle office the afternoon of January 19, 1987, I knew something was wrong. Rushing out of a computer system demonstration for a client, I raced home to find her collapsed on the floor. Our son wasn’t due for nine weeks. But, a few hours later, Benjamin was taken by cesarean section. Monitors detected he was dying in a placenta disintegrating around him. Patti had lost so much blood that her life was in danger.

Although more than 16 years have passed now, some memories remain vivid. I often reflect on the powerful impact my decisions, emotions, actions and inaction have on our children’s lives.

When Benjamin was in the incubator for seven weeks to gain weight—his low was about two pounds—I remember Patti driving to the Tacoma General NICU daily to talk with—and touch—our tiny son. I was so busy with business at the time I thought it wasn’t important for me to see Benjamin every day. I didn’t need to reach through the openings in the incubator’s side and feel his small stick-size limbs as Patti felt compelled to do. After all, he seemed so peaceful resting there by himself, amazing me with his calm maturity for a person so very tiny. He didn’t really need me, I thought.

Three years later, Benjamin was diagnosed with autism.

I was wrong. Benjamin had needed me more then than I could imagine.

Most fathers neglect to take the opportunity to help, stimulate growth, and nurture—at least sometimes and often out of ignorance. Benjamin already had autism—a serious neurological disorder, caused by brain damage, which leaves the child unable to process information in a normal fashion—but didn’t know it. I would learn that much of his recovery depended on me.

Early stimulation is critical

Our tiny son had gone from hypoactive (being underactive) for the first 12 months to hyperactive and explosive for the next two years. Days and nights were spent listening to this screaming, ever-moving child, a Jekyll and Hyde for whom we finally had a label for a condition we didn’t understand. Science in the last decade has discovered that stimulating touch can be crucial to young children with autism. Parental attention in talking, smiling, singing, feeding and touching will make a significant difference to brain-damaged children. We now know that these traits of excellent parenting are vitally important for all young children. If we don’t touch our infants in the manifold ways parents should relate to their children—through their bodies, eyes, ears, emotions and intellects—children are profoundly affected in ways that mark them for the remainder of their lives.

Why is this so?

It is because this kind of interaction of parents with children builds the brain structures necessary for all their further development. Brain research reveals the physical processes of building a personality through development of the child’s central nervous system.

Mechanically, children are virtually learning machines. They are continuously learning beings made in the image of their parents. However, to not only survive but thrive, children need constant stimulus led by a competent parent.

The learning brain

What is the most important factor in child development? Is it his genetic makeup, or is it his life experiences in interacting with parents, siblings, teachers and surroundings?

This question summarizes the nature vs. nurture debate. People have argued about it for 2,000 years, but research has proved that the either-or approach is fruitless. Nature and nurturing are both important.

Until the last generation, scientists thought that the brain was virtually hardwired with circuits in early childhood, with little change possible during the remainder of the person’s lifetime. Each child is born with 100 billion neurons, the total number of nerve cells in the brain. This area does not grow significantly for the rest of our lives. For years researchers thought that basic brain development stopped after early childhood.

Now we know that the human brain’s wiring is only beginning at birth. Most of the adult’s conscious functions of logical thinking, goal setting, writing, planning and communicating are the result of connections between the neurons, called synapses, which develop throughout childhood. It is these connections that are responsible for learning.

In a real sense, parenting is the process of nurturing young brains to maturity, of correctly wiring the neural circuitry that will determine the child’s personality throughout life. The actions and attitudes of parents exert a powerful force on the brain development of their children throughout childhood, regardless of their genetic makeup.

The incredible learning machine

At birth, what appears to be a long and slow process of learning begins, but every day brings the brain a spectacular array of experiences to interpret, record and respond to. Billions of bits of information have to be processed and stored every hour of every day of young lives. Brain development occurs throughout life, but the rate in childhood is much faster than it will be later. Young brains are more flexible, because most of their connections are new.

Consider how marvelous the basic structures of the human brain are. The numbers are unfathomable. The human brain is perhaps the most complex object in the universe. In addition to the 100 billion neurons, the brain contains one trillion other cells that have roles other than computing messages. Neurons hold the keys of communication and learning. Each neuron has a long extension, somewhat like a tree trunk, called an axon. The axon transmits the basic messages to other neurons. From infancy to adulthood each neuron grows elaborate tangles of side branches called dendrites. Each neuron develops up to 100,000 dendrites. Dendrites receive information from other neurons. Through sending and receiving messages, neurons both teach and learn from other neurons.

Fifty-three specialized chemicals, called neurotransmitters, transmit electrical messages across the synapses. Each synapse has at least 10 different strengths. The number of different configurations, arrangements and patterns of these neurons, dendrites and synapses in one brain is at least 10 to the trillionth power—a number greater than all the atoms in the universe!

Learning is the process of the creation, growth, strengthening and weakening of these connections. Every experience either builds or weakens dendrites and connections in one or more parts of the brain.

God designed and made them available to us so we can learn, wonder, ponder, understand and plan. You are using millions of them as you read this article right now!

In A User’s Guide to the Brain, Harvard Medical School’s professor of psychiatry John Ratey, writes that “happily, this dynamic complexity is actually the solution to many people’s fears that our nature is genetically ‘hard-wired.’

“The brain is so complex, and so plastic, that it is virtually impossible, except in the broadest fashion, to predict how a given factor will influence its state. Genes do contain direction for much of the brain’s initial development, yet they have no absolute power to determine how the brain will respond” (2001, p. 11).

What does all this mean? To put it simply, a child’s brain is a three-pound inner universe with the potential to learn, be taught and change throughout life. Childhood is a critically important time when all the connections are being established and strengthened for the first time.

An independent person in the making One more factor influences how the young brain will become wired. The brain is the seat and home of the whole little person who is more than just the sum of neurochemicals firing across cells in some mechanical way. Each child has an independent will. He or she is a bundle of wants, needs and desires to grow, experience and know. All of our basic desires are preprogrammed genetically. But, the kinds of choices a child makes are shaped by an interaction of the child’s will and the environment—especially the environment shaped by parents. Parental style and choices in patterns of parenting become critical issues in creating a compliant, pleasant child or an aggressive, mean one.

Parents can achieve their best outcome in rearing their children when they understand that their child has continuous needs for care, love and respect as a small person with an independent will—just like his or her parent.

The environment is not the only factor beside genes at work in brain development. The independent will of the child also drives the brain’s development. A child will develop best when parents guide the child to have an intrinsic self-motivation and desire to do and experience right and constructive behaviors, attitudes and thoughts. A parent therefore must provide guidance, direction and protection from harmful influences.

Parenting for the positive

With each smile from Mom or Dad when a child wakes up, every redirection when the child gets in a fight with siblings, and each time a parent turns off sexually offensive or violent television, a child’s brain is modifying some of its interconnected tangle of 100 trillion constantly changing connections. Through this process a child learns other choices he can make as to how to react the next time these challenges arise. But it takes a committed mature adult to know how to shape the child’s will to be positive instead of negative, to be obedient and cooperative instead of defiant and disobedient, to be outgoing toward others instead of self-obsessed and self-absorbed. The tantrum-throwing terror in the supermarket is often the result of parents who don’t know how to help their children be better behaved and not the manifestation of the supposedly inherently evil nature of a child.

Harvard’s Mr. Ratey says, “we do have free will, in a sense, for everything we do affects everything that follows... Genetics are important, but not determinative, and the kinds of exercise, sleep, diet, friends, and activities we choose, as well as the goals we set for ourselves, have perhaps equal power to change our lives” (p. 12).

In a real sense, all this research on the brain means that each child’s brain is shaped—or “parented,” you might say—by its interaction with its environment. That interaction is largely controlled by the quality and quantity of parental interaction. There is nothing static about it. The process continues until adulthood. In our 21st-century lifestyle, some of the ancient wisdom regarding the basics of parenting have come full circle to be recognized as today’s best practices—as if common sense is now surprising.

The foundation of great parenting is described and directed in the Bible. God designed children to succeed under the guidance of competent parents. The principle is expressed so simply, yet so powerfully, in Proverbs 22:6: “Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it.”

Training of that caliber comes from one huge but simple requirement to successful parenting: leadership throughout the child’s youth, from infancy to adulthood.

Continuously involved leadership

Research shows that from the first hours after birth, infants’ eyes follow the shape of the mother and father, associating them with their voices, warmth, care and nourishment. As soon as a child’s eyes develop enough focus to perceive the smile of its mother, it begins to imitate and mirror the movements of her facial muscles, lips and laugh lines.

The parent orchestrates a great symphony of connections, feelings, inferences and meanings which builds a new person in her or his own image. At birth, the parent leads the external stimulation of the brain, a process responsible for 80 percent of the developing personality through the formation of trillions of synaptic connections. Each of these sensations builds the superstructure of circuitry for all subsequent development of the child’s brain.

A parent is a leader who shapes the development of the child. Children are natural followers. They are built to imitate their parents. Without the appropriate leadership from parents, children do not develop well socially and often are more aggressive with poor self-control.

In April 2001, results were reported on the largest study ever in the United States on the behavior of young children in day care compared with children who stayed at home with their mothers. In the study, more than 1,100 children in 10 cities were rated by parents, day care providers and others. The results are startling. Children in day care, researchers found, are three times more likely to have behavioral problems than those who stay at home with mom. Young children in day care also were reported to be more sad and unhappy.

“As time [the child is in day care] goes up, so do behavior problems,” said Dr. Jay Belsky, a major investigator conducting the study. Dr. Belsky said if children spend more than 30 hours a week in child care, they generally are “more demanding, more noncompliant, and they are more aggressive.” He added, “They scored higher on things like [getting] in lots of fights, cruelty, bullying, meanness, as well as talking too much [and] demand[ing that his needs] must be met immediately.”

We shouldn’t be surprised.

Mothers are best

Natural mothers dedicated to staying at home provide more continuous emotional warmth and support for their young children. This warmth and support, in turn, is registered in the neural connections of the brain. An at-home parent provides more continuous focused involvement throughout the day than a day-care provider who typically provides for many more children, all of whom are strangers to the child.

As every parent knows who has had to get a young child out of bed early, the child can be emotionally traumatized when dropped off in day care as the parent goes off to work. Even the parent is often sad at having to endure a struggle with the unhappy child who doesn’t want to be separated from mom. Sad child plus sad mom thousands of mornings in childhood leads to brains of a different quality. A parent is not an effective leader unless grounded in strong principles and role models. The process of successful parenting requires a great number of skills, many of which are not acquired until one actually becomes a parent. One might become an Olympic athlete, climb Mount Everest or claim the greatest job in the world, but parenting requires as much or more leadership as these activities. It can be just as rewarding and thrilling an experience.

But, like those endeavors, parenting involves enduring some tough times. Leaders must make the necessary course corrections and never give up. Successful parents constantly develop their skills to rise to the next level. They are committed and involved. The same principles that lead to success in life apply to successful parenting.

Parents always have an impact. Even though one may not perceive it, children are always learning by the action, attention, respect, disrespect, inaction and inattention of their parents.

As much as we would like to mystify children’s behavior today, the quality of parenting is largely responsible for the nature of every child. Much of the negative behavior of youths is the result of parents who do not control negative influences, do not know how to love, nurture and discipline at the same time, and do not understand the spiritual needs of children.

We need to remember that every brain has a parent. If not the natural parent, some other influence will dramatically affect every child’s brain and character.

Parenting help from heaven

After Patti and I discovered our son Benjamin was autistic, we struggled to reverse the damage done before birth. Taking cues from outstanding professionals, I became his speech therapist and helper, tickling, wrestling and holding him, taking him to Little League baseball and on camping trips and climbing up mountains. Patti did the same. He received sensory and motor therapy, school intervention, love and care from many. But Benjamin’s neural wiring problems exposed mine. I had to admit I wasn’t wired as the ideal parent from birth. I often hit the wall of frustration. I was not prepared in life to handle the intensity of parenting. But once you are a parent, there is no turning back. I realized then, as I still do, that I couldn’t do it alone. I was often forced to go to God on my knees to get parenting help from heaven. After all, God is the greatest parent, the ultimate authority, the one who wrote the book. The Bible is a book about parenting and for parents, given by a God who is infinitely good.

Benjamin is now 16. After that rocky start, he now has a good brain. He is doing well in middle school, has many friends, talks about things like any other 16-year-old, swims all over the state as part of the school district swim team, is taking Spanish and has forgiven me of the times I didn’t know what I was doing.

His wiring will be fine in the end.

But I have learned something important. Like every parent’s, my wiring is still under construction.