Why are the first three years of life so important? Guidelines to prepare your baby to learn 2026

Learning problems are increasingly common in children. This is something that worries parents, and the desire to avoid possible educational difficulties in the future has become a goal for many. The good news is that with the appropriate guidelines we can prepare our baby to develop all those brain functions necessary to achieve successful learning.

How the nervous system develops

When we are born, the nervous system is immature, it requires going through a long and complex process that lasts until adulthood in order to awaken all the useful brain skills necessary for survival. Within this fascinating process, early childhood, particularly the first 3 years of life, play a fundamental role.

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Why are the first 3 years of life so important? If we think about the way in which a newborn baby relates to a 3-year-old child, we can find notable differences. A one-week-old baby meets his basic needs: food and sleep (related to the most primitive area of ​​the brain: the brainstem). However, a 3-year-old child walks, runs, jumps, speaks, communicates, thinks and reasons (actions controlled by the highest area of ​​the nervous system: the cerebral cortex).

Every act we perform is supported by a neural network in our brain, so in this period of childhood, thousands of neural connections are being formed, millenized and strengthened.

The main advances of your brain, according to your age

Let's take a tour of this process. During the first year the baby has one primary objective: to defy gravity. Does your child throw a toy on the floor a thousand times? From the high chair he spends his time testing how his spoon falls and you pick it up? He's not kidding you! To do this, different movement patterns emerge that cause the activation of brain areas related to motor control.

In the second year of life comes the explosion of language, which although it has begun in the previous year with communicative crying, guttural sounds and babbling, it is not until the age of 2 that it flourishes. This helps the development of the cerebral cortex.

All of this prepares our brain so that cognition, the reasoning by which abstractions can be produced, awakens in the third year. Children can be seen using the most sophisticated symbolic play and calling themselves with the pronoun “I”. These functions are directed by the frontal lobe, the upper part of the brain, uniquely developed in humans. Therefore, all the most basic aspects of development are the basis of cognition and thinking.

The great milestones that mark your brain

Neuroevolutionary movements are those patterns that emerge throughout the first year of life in a natural and sequential way.

In this way, from head control, the child prepares to turn from face up to face down, and thus achieve the prone position. This will provide strength in the upper and lower limbs and predisposes you to be able to voluntarily move your body in space for the first time: what is called drag.

Subsequently, crawling represents a new milestone, the support of your body on four points of support. In addition, crawling prepares the baby to reach a sitting position. It is an especially important stage since exploratory behaviors begin, manual grasping develops and the senses perfect: sight, hearing and touch.

Next, you will move to a posture similar to that of a bear or a macaque, where the motor demands are greater. All of this predisposes the child to finally, around one year of age, reach the posture only developed by human beings: standing.

This very natural journey, since we are genetically programmed to live it, must be carefully respected. And why is this? Because of the neurological connections they generate, propelling and providing support for subsequent functions such as language and thought.

Impact on learning

How the child learns to function in the environment is as important as the way the environment enters him, that is, how he perceives the different stimuli through the senses. As we have already mentioned, motor development influences the development of the senses.

The way a child listens and sees marks the learning processes, particularly reading and writing. At the auditory level, the auditory pathway has had to be correctly developed to be able to encode each sound of the language and relate it to a letter of the alphabet. Likewise, vision is affected by the control of the muscles that surround the eyes and influences how they direct their eyesight and process visual stimuli.

Many children with problems in reading and writing acquisition have difficulties at this level, caused by deficiencies in their sensorimotor development.

On the other hand, we have to take into account the very important role that fine motor skills have. Fine motor skills at a manual level influence writing; we can find children with problems when writing, poor handwriting or with a lot of fatigue. In addition, fine control has an oral dimension, in how the muscles of the mouth are controlled to produce each sound of the tongue. It is common to find children who confuse sounds or cannot say some.

Thanks also to motor development and cross development patterns such as crawling, we achieve interhemispheric connection, that is, the right and left hemisphere are connected. This favors the maturity of all brain functions, in addition to helping to create laterality. The hemispheric interrelation in a basic condition for language, reading and writing.

From home….What can you do?

From home we must provide the most harmonious and pleasant environment so that motor development arises naturally.

In this way, the most advisable thing is to be able to provide our baby with a barrier-free environment, where movement is the protagonist.

Up to 5 months of age we can place the baby on his back, stimulate his senses through toys that are attractive and attract his attention. Stimulation should be on both sides of the body and in the midline.

From 5-6 months and when they begin to turn, it is important to position them face down. The stage begins in which the baby must spend time on the floor. To do this, we can use comfortable mats and toys that they like again in order to encourage attention and movement.

Until one year of life we ​​must instill this period in the soil. We can use obstacles such as balls, psychomotor modules, squares, crawling tunnels, ramps, etc. Materials that cause the child to develop motor skills.

The toys provided must induce a tactile, visual or auditory sensory experience.

Avoid all toys that artificially induce movements and cause the child to skip neuromotor stages.

Likewise, prevent babies from spending excessive time in hammocks or in closed parks that restrict free and exploratory movement.

The clothes we dress the baby in can stop him from moving. It should be comfortable and soft clothing. It is also extremely important that they spend time barefoot, in order to develop the sole of the foot.

Everyone on the ground!

Taking these small clues into account, it is easy to stimulate learning from a very young age.

It is essential to increase our security and not have excessive fear of letting our baby develop freely.

It is important to be aware of how all this helps build the foundations of an organized nervous system prepared for learning.  If our future mental abilities are based fundamentally on psychomotor skills, let's get down on the ground with our children and live this unique experience together.

Article prepared by Belén de Toro Mingo is a child and adolescent neuropsychologist, specialist in brain damage, integration of primitive reflexes, sensory stimulation and neuromotor skills, at Psicoluciones Pozuelo

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