How Important Is Sensory Stimulation?

Regularly, when I have contact with kindergartens, childcare centres and early childhood specialists, I experience a gap between what children need and what is offered to them.

Parents want help and guidance from teachers, childcarers and other educational professionals. However, not everyone seems to have a profound understanding about what benefits children at which age.

Most professionals admit that over-stimulation can have unfavourable consequences, but when asked to explain the difference between stimulation, which benefits children, and over-stimulation, they regularly fall silent. In doubt, they will opt for stimulation anyway, especially if it is decorative and impressive. Dirty children playing in a sandpit and a baby sucking his toe, just don’t attract the same interest from parents as a two year old showing his drumming skills on stage.

As there seem to exist so much confusion around the question of when stimulation fosters a child’s development and when it is over-stimulation and abuse, I want to offer some rules.

The following guidelines are derived from my studies and will be very helpful for everyone working with little children. With these rules every activity and program can be measured and checked to determine if it will stimulate the senses and therefore the brain harmoniously, or whether it will over-stimulate and confuse.
It is especially important to check the environment we provide for children under the age of three, but most rules are relevant for older children too.


For a printed version send $5 (cheque or money order) to:
Hannah Eichler, 70 Dillons Hill Road, Glaziers Bay TAS 7109, Australia

Or add only $2 and order together with the Frederick Resource Material.


I give permission to use the following guidelines at childcare and teacher training facilities under the condition that the source is acknowledged: HannahAna Super Nanna


GUIDELINES TO EVALUETE SENSORY STIMULATION

By HannahAna Eichler

For stimulation to provide a meaningful learning experience and to enhance brain development there must be:

1. More than one sense-organ engaged.
2. Relevance and meaning in the experience.
3. Truthful reality reflection.
4. Possibility for later repetition of the same or something similar.
5. Age relevance, preferably child directed.
6. A familiar environment, experienced as safe by the child.

1) That only stimulation which engages more than one sense organ can have any value should be self evident, but situations where babies are senselessly over-stimulated by engaging just one sense are numerous. Some examples are found in ‘progressive’ playgroups, where babies are exposed to the sensations of different touch experiences from bubble-wrap to sand paper and ice-blocks, or in prams facing away from the person pushing, where the main impressions are all visual. As different as these experiences are, they trigger similar reactions: A single impulse is sent to the brain, but can’t find anything to hold on to ... and the brain goes --???? What!!-- All learning means connection of data. If a baby has only data from one sense organ, the electrical impulse sent to the brain searches in vain for supporting information to form a connection. If I give to you just a one word information, like Goethe, or Frankfurt or 28.8.1749, your mind too goes -- ???? What!! --, but if I say “Goethe was born in Frankfurt on the 28th of August 1749” you can form a connection between the words and the information has some meaning. However, if you can’t connect it to previously gained knowledge about Goethe being the most famous German poet, it has only little meaning, and if you don’t know and love at least one of his writings, it has no relevance to your life and you can’t be bothered to remember this information. How could you ever solve a riddle if you were given just one piece of information? Tell me what I am thinking right now : warm, second piece of information: bed, third: it is nearly 11pm. ( If you still don’t know what I am thinking right now, because you couldn’t make the connection, you must have been placed once too often on bubble-wrap as an infant.) In the preverbal phase of childhood, when the base for reality understanding is laid, it is the connection of different data, gained through the information from different sensory experiences supporting each other which form the connections between the neurones in the developing brain.

No second sensory information, no connection possible, no brain development.

2) An experience is relevant and has meaning for a child up to the age of four or five if it provides reality understanding.
If grownups travel to a foreign country, they are not interested in the biography of the local poet, who died 300 years ago, just after arrival. They need to know where the toilets are, where they can stay overnight, in which restaurant the food is good and affordable and the value of the foreign money. Only after they are familiar with this survival information does the biography of the poet become a treasured part of their travel adventure.
Children are ‘travellers to a foreign planet’ and orientation-time takes some years, not just days.
Colours, smells, forms and their meaning, the different qualities of sounds and the structure and meaning of language are all original survival information.
Dinosaurs have been dead for millions of years, elephants don’t live in Australia and written numbers and letters are irrelevant before children can count their toes and sound out words. However, the shape, smell, taste and names of foods, raw and cooked, where it comes from and how it grows is relevant and meaningful. The garden snail in the back yard is more relevant than pictures of monkeys and a toy cat has meaning if the real cat on the neighbour’s fence has been patted.
The immediate environment needs to be explored in depth first. This gives children the security and confidence to reach out for further exploration in accordance with their ever growing understanding.

3) Meaningfulness and relevance relies on truthful representations.
A plastic toy telephone is confusing enough, but a plastic telephone with a face causes real puzzlement. The action of talking on the phone could be truthfully replayed with a wooden cooking spoon or a slipper. A cooking spoon does not pretend to be something it is not and has a meaningful role in the child’s surroundings. A plastic telephone has no purposeful function and was created by a toy factory with the only aim to make money. Fluent reality understanding, gained from true representations of the physical world, needs to be the base on which distortions and fantasies can be measured later on and understood as ‘non reality’.

4) All learning is made permanent through practice and repetition.
Only if the same and/or similar sensory information is experienced repeatedly will the connections between the neurones stay permanent.
As brain research has shown connections which are not used will dissolve.
When and where was Goethe born? (If you have read it the first and only time just before under point one and still know, disregard what I just said and stimulate little children with something new every hour.)
Excellence comes with practice and repetition.

5) The age of a child determines to a great extent what has relevance and meaning. Until children are fully grounded in reality understanding, which takes between three and four years, abstractions and invented fantastic images are beyond their grasp.
In individual conversation with a child, his gaze and movements generally show where his attention and interest is right now. Whenever an adult follows these indications and re-enforces the experience by putting it into words, or by pointing out connections, adequate stimulation is assured. An example could be: A child crawls towards a ball. The adult could make a comment like: ‘You like to play with the red ball.’ Or, after the child has reached, squeezed and licked the ball, she can give one, or two new play ideas, like hiding it or kicking it in a special way. Then the child is left to his own devices for more repetitive experiences.
When learning is initiated by the interest of the child it will be appropriate and have a more profound impact. Abstractions and fantasies will then not enter his world prematurely.

6) I bet you don’t want to learn what Goethe liked to eat for breakfast if your kitchen is on fire. Safety has priority to everything else.
Only in a safe, loving environment can children give energy and attention to sensory experiences and new learning.

Children experience stimulation as confusion and over-stimulation when:
1) Only one sense, mostly the sense of sight, is stimulated.
2) Having fun replaces meaning.
3) Adult humour, irony and distortion make finding truth impossible.
4) Many new and unrelated experiences hinder fluency and excellence.
5) Adult preferences and parent’s ambitions ignore the impulses coming from the child.
6) Unfamiliarity and/or a competitive atmosphere cause stress.

1) I can think of only one sensory experience, namely listening to soft music, which does not need additional information from other senses to be complete and digestible.
Already the sound of language, as from a radio, is confusion causing irritation to the delicate senses of little children.
However, the sense organ we wrong the most in our society is the eye. The sense of sight is violated whenever exposed to the screen which freezes the eyes in a staring motion and, as mentioned before, when children are strapped into prams which face them away from the person pushing. Adequate visual stimulation would mean giving children lots of time to explore the details of natural objects and to enrich their experiences by making sure that as many additional senses as logical are part of their explorations. Especially touch and movement need to be engaged. The eyes learn to see three dimensions and distance by decoding information gained through tactile experiences and through movement.
Countless obstacles children have to deal with these days would be eliminated if parents and educators would remember just this one rule.
Stimulation of sight without additional information from other senses is over-stimulation and interferes with healthy development.

2) Kids having fun as the only reason for an activity can, and will, backfire.
For meaningful learning to take place a child needs to enjoy what she is doing, but fun and joy are two different emotions.
Most children think it is fun to rip green apples from a tree and throw them at each other, or to see a clown throwing a cream-cake into the face of another clown.
Joy, however, is a feeling of deep satisfaction, the reward we get for having accomplished a task, learned something new or are a valued member of a social group.
Planting a tree and seeing apples grow from blossoms to golden ripe fruit, knowing how to make a crispy, delicious apple cake and sharing it with friends, that’s joy. Children who are deprived of the simple joys of meaningful experiences can get addicted to fun consumption. As fun only lasts for the moment and wants different and increased fun immediately, many adults have started to respond to this demand by offering non-stop entertainment; touching an ice-block, face-painting, going places. An example how endless joy can be changed into short lived fun by the action of an uninformed educator is the wide spread habit of changing the eternal experience ‘water’ into the excitement of coloured water by adding food colours.
If fun is the only reason for an action, it is senseless.
Fun is fun sometimes. There is nothing wrong with enjoying the sensation of an ice-block if it is an exception, but if having fun becomes a replacement for meaningful joy, we confuse and empty the souls of our children.
How much more meaningful would playing with ice be if it was made by putting out a bucket of water on a cold winters night, or discovered when helping defrost the freezer, or when taking a drink out of the ice-box at a barbecue.
I remember some boys having lots of fun using such ice to put down each other’s neck, and they didn’t need any professional to initiate it. Just as in the olden days, when part of the fun was that you were not supposed to do it.
Providing constant fun activities without connection to a meaningful whole is over-stimulation.


3) At least ninety percent of all toys given to little children are obstacles on their way to gaining understanding. They are distorted images of things they have not yet experienced in reality. Most movies, children’s programs and computer games designed for the little ones ignore children’s limited life experience. Adults have the capacity to extract the meaning from distortions, because they are able to connect previously gained knowledge with new experiences. Most adults have played with real ladybirds as children. For them, every representation with wings and dots on it is classified ladybird. If these representations can talk, or kick a ball, it is funny for them because the adult knows that a real ladybird cannot do this. However, for little children in the process of language acquisition, the first thing named is the owner of the name. If the fluffy red thing with the musical clock in its tummy is called “ladybird”, only the experience of a real ladybird some years later will set things right. The natural order of learning, reality first, distortions later, has been reversed. As children all around us show us, most of them are able to work things out the reversed way most of the time. But as an increasing number of children are showered with increased distortions at an increased pace, more and more children will be unable to leave the place of confusion and show their lack of reality understanding in all kinds of ‘disorders’. The educators of the future need to learn to spot in which area a child is over- or under-stimulated and to offer remedial reality learning.
All distortions, especially irony and sarcasm are hurtful for little children. Adult concepts over-stimulate.


4) Childcarers and early childhood teachers are obliged to make programs and teach something new every day. What would parents and childcare directors think if the notice board showed ‘cutting and gluing’ for three weeks? Confrontation with too many tasks and new ideas without the time to practice and digest ends up as nothing being learned properly. 3x3 (things done in one morning) does not = 9, but probably =0. Whereas just 3 things done for three weeks, are three things learned for a lifetime. A story or poem learned, loved and digested stays stored in ones cells and can come up from the depth of ones soul twenty years later (triggered by an image, a smell or their own children). Five different stories every week are like the imprint of a bird’s foot on the sand, they will no leave any trace.
Every one-off stimulation without the possibility of being practised or repeated is over-stimulation.

5) Every time an adult has a personal agenda, over-stimulation is likely to happen. Ambitious and fearful parents who want to give their child a head-start tend to over-stimulate. Educators, who offer services to provide for these parental demands, more often than not over-stimulate. Most services offering early swimming, early music, early reading and so on over-stimulate. Only very view aim to teach parents how to do the right thing at the right time (like Steiner play groups or Sound Beginning). Too often the wrong thing is taught at the wrong time.
If the developmental stage of a child is ignored and he is pushed towards experiences which are irrelevant for his present way of being, over-stimulation is at work.

6) Sometimes early training centres fail to deliver what they promise, not only because of what they teach, but also because the surroundings are inappropriate. Only the familiar feels safe. Children who are taken to new places to learn special skills may need more time to familiarise and get used to all the other children than the course lasts. The new may cause stress, which is not good for any learning.
Unless it is the child’s decision to participate, stimulation outside of the safety of familiarity, especially when provided by people who do not belong to the close circle of family and friends, is over-stimulation.

Where is my evidence?

The evidence is in you. I have written in such a way that you will see the evidence in front of your eyes, provided that you are willing to observe, to think and to feel. You may even ask yourself, like Berend Koenig the author of the book Warum fuehlen wir so ungern? did, after reading my book:
Why didn’t we have these ideas ourselves, long ago?
HannahAna Eichle