'Serve and return' critical to child development


  • October 27, 2015
  • /   Reggie Dogan
  • /   education

Credit: Sacred Heart Hospital.

When I played tennis for fun and in competition, the return of serve was one of my best weapons.

I gave as much attention to that important part of my game in daily practice as I did groundstrokes.

Little did I know that the serve and return were as critical in a tennis match as in the development of children.

So, what does returning a tennis ball have to do with raising a child?

Not one thing in the technical sense, but one of the most essential experiences in shaping the foundation of the developing brain is “serve and return” interaction between children and significant adults in their lives.

Young children naturally reach out for interaction through babbling, facial expressions and gestures.

And adults respond with the same kind of vocalizing and gesturing back at them.

This back-and-forth process is fundamental to the wiring of the brain, especially in a child’s earliest years.

While I wasn’t aware of the child development term until recently, I naturally used the technique early and often as part of being an engaged and attentive parent.

The term “serve and return” was tossed ( pun intended) around a lot last week at the First 1000 Day Florida Summit in West Palm Beach.

More than 700 practitioners, policymakers, researchers, home visitors and other early childhood staff attended the three-day conference to learn more about why the first 1,000 days are so critical in the development of children.

{{business_name}}>Hundreds of childcare providers

Hundreds of childcare providers, policymakers and educators attend three-day First 1000 Day Florida Summit to learn new ways help young children develop during the first years of their lives.

The summit offered a wide range of workshops, panel discussions and plenary sessions, focusing on issues related to a child’s first 1,000 days.

In recent years attention has increasingly focused on the most critical period of life — the first 1,000 days from pregnancy to the third birthday. It is considered a critical window of life that sets in motion a person’s intellectual development and lifelong health.

Among the goals of the Studer Community Institute is to improve the community’s quality of life, and providing quality education is an important part of it.

Early education is key to preparing children for kindergarten and helping them along the way to high school graduation and beyond.

Studies increasingly show from birth to age 3 are critical times for child development and learning.

Serve and return is a vital part of communicating and interacting with your infant, even if your infant is still smaller than a tennis racket.

Alain Glen, a supervisor for Nurse-Family Partnership Alliance in Miami-Dade and a summit panelist on engaging families, said that serve and return is a crucial and powerful interaction with babies on both a practical and biological level.

Glen said the brain is wired to expect responsiveness. When serve and return is absent or withdrawn from babies, their heart rate, blood level and blood sugar level rise.

“They feel threatened,” Glen said. “The ideal of serve and return is to use it or lose it.”

Use or lose it means that a child can suffer from developmental deficiency, he said.

To put it simply, brain development depends on activity. Electrical activity in every circuit — sensory, motor, emotional, cognitive — shapes the way the circuit fits together.

Like computer circuits, neural circuits process information through the flow of electricity. Unlike computer circuits, however, the circuits in our brains are not fixed structures.

Everything we do — whether it is learning to walk, riding a bike, reading a book, writing a blog post — activates certain neural circuits and leaves other inactive.

Those that are consistently turned on over time will get stronger, while those that are rarely energized will weaken and may eventually go away.

The elimination of unused neural circuits, also referred to as “pruning,” may seem like a bad thing, but it generally is not.

Basically it streamlines children’s neural processing, making the remaining circuits work faster and efficiently. Without pruning, children wouldn’t have the brain space to learn to walk, talk or even see correctly.

Serve and return interactions start simple enough and become increasingly complex over time. As your infant grows, he or she will engage in more specific “serve” interactions that develop particular areas of the brain.

A good example is when a child points at an object (serve) and the parent responds with the name of the object (return), the child then makes the mental connection between the object and the sound.

Through this process, your child is developing the language and literacy areas of his or her brain.

To be sure, social interaction is the most important kind of stimulation a young child needs for healthy and expresses what serving and returning is all about.

If, for example, your baby serves up an opportunity for attention with baby talk, as a parent you should return that serve in a direct and meaningful way by ensuring that your baby can see your smiling face or touch your hands to show the baby that they have your attention.

These interactions play a critical role in strengthening brain connections between all of the different areas of the baby’s brain — helping them develop the emotional and cognitive skills they need later in life.

When it comes to emotional development, serve and return interactions can help children develop confidence, cope with stress, form friendships, develop compassion and perform better in school.

“Third-grade reading level is a predictor of high school graduation,” Glen pointed out. “By age 3, a child will have developed more connections than stars in our galaxy.”

{{business_name}}James Dean helps his daughter second grader Rudy Dean make a bird feeder during family literacy night at Lincoln Park Primary School in Pensacola, Fl. Thursday, April 23, 2015. (Michael Spooneybarger/ Pensacola Today)

James Dean helps his daughter second grader Rudy Dean make a bird feeder during family literacy night at Lincoln Park Primary School in Pensacola, Fl. Thursday, April 23, 2015. (Michael Spooneybarger/ Pensacola Today)

When parents and caregivers are sensitive and responsive to the needs and the signals served by a baby, the return creates a nurturing and supportive environment that is enriching with cognitive interactions.

Improving the serve and return helped me play better and win more on the tennis court.

Parents who understand and pay close attention to serve and return with their babies help the little ones become winners in school and in the game of life.

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