As I noted above, the first day of kindergarten is an important marker for our educational bureaucracies—that’s the day, in most states, when “early childhood” officially comes to an end and the public becomes legally responsible for every child’s education and skill development. And yet, in reality, nothing particularly consequential changes in a child’s developmental journey on that first day of kindergarten. He is still the same kid, buffeted by the same social, environmental, and psychological forces that have guided his progress through his first five years. Children change, of course, as they grow. The executive-function abilities that are so critical in early childhood deepen and evolve into a more complex collection of habits, mindsets, and character strengths. But that growth happens throughout childhood, sometimes gradually, sometimes in sudden spurts, on a schedule that has little to do with the formal academic timetable.
Still, for most children the first day of kindergarten marks an important shift in the environment that influences and shapes their growth. From that day forward, most children spend more of their waking hours in the care of their teachers than in the care of their parents. This shift has two important implications. First, in a practical sense, it means that if we want to intervene in the environments of disadvantaged children, we will probably find more effective leverage, after age five, if we focus our attention on their school rather than their home. Second, developmentally, it means that children who have been growing up in adverse environments filled with stress now have a new arena in which those stresses can manifest themselves and multiply.
For children who grow up without significant experiences of adversity, the skill-development process leading up to kindergarten generally works the way it’s supposed to: Calm, consistent, responsive interactions in infancy with parents and other caregivers create neural connections that lay the foundation for a healthy array of attention and concentration skills. Just as early stress sends signals to the developing nervous system to maintain constant vigilance and prepare for a lifetime of trouble, early warmth and responsiveness send the opposite message: You’re safe. Life is going to be fine. Let down your guard; the people around you will protect you and provide for you. Be curious about the world; it’s full of fascinating surprises. These signals trigger adaptations in children’s brains that allow them to slow down and consider problems and decisions more carefully, to focus their attention for longer periods, and to more willingly trade immediate gratification for promises of long-term benefits.
Those abilities, even though we don’t always think of them as academic in nature, are enormously helpful in achieving academic success in kindergarten and beyond. And if you don’t have the mental tendencies that a stable, responsive early childhood tends to produce, the transition to kindergarten is likely to be significantly more fraught, and the challenge of learning the many things we ask kindergarten students to master can be overwhelming. Which means that neurocognitive dysfunctions can quickly become academic dysfunctions. Students don’t learn to read on time because it is harder for them to concentrate on the words on the page. They don’t learn the basics of number sense because they are too distracted by the emotions and anxieties overloading their nervous systems. As academic material becomes more complicated, they fall behind. As they fall behind, they feel worse about themselves and worse about school. That creates more stress, which often feeds into behavior problems, which leads, in the classroom, to stigmatization and punishment, which keeps their stress levels elevated, which makes it still harder to concentrate—and so on, and so on, throughout elementary school.
Perhaps because these emotional and psychological capacities have their roots in early childhood, many K-12 educators assume that they are the responsibility of parents and early-childhood educators. Which means that when children arrive in kindergarten without these foundational skills, there are often few resources in place to help kids develop them, and school administrators are often at a loss to know how to help.
Fast-forward a few years, to the moment when those students arrive in middle or high school, and these executive-function challenges are now, in the eyes of many teachers and administrators, seen as problems of “attitude” or motivation. But Jack Shonkoff, the director of Harvard’s Center on the Developing Child, points out that that perception misses some important context. “If you haven’t in your early years been growing up in an environment of responsive relationships that has buffered you from excessive stress activation, then if, in tenth-grade math class, you’re not showing grit and motivation, it may not be a matter of you just not sucking it up enough,” Shonkoff told me. “A lot of it has to do with problems of focusing attention, working memory, and cognitive flexibility. And you may not have developed those capacities because of what happened to you early on in your life.”
A 2016 paper produced by a New York-based nonprofit called Turnaround for Children labeled these early capacities “building blocks for learning.” According to the Turnaround paper, which was written by a consultant named Brooke Stafford-Brizard, high-level noncognitive skills like resilience, curiosity, and academic tenacity are very difficult for a child to obtain without first developing a foundation of executive functions, a capacity for self-awareness, and relationship skills. And those skills, in turn, stand atop an infrastructure of qualities built in the first years of life, qualities like secure attachment, the ability to manage stress, and self-regulation.
“When educators neither prioritize these skills and mindsets nor integrate them with academic development, students are left without tools for engagement or a language for learning,” Stafford-Brizard writes. Without those skills, she adds, “they can’t process the vast amount of instruction that comes their way each day, and it becomes daunting if not impossible to stay on track. This is the achievement gap.”
The building-blocks model is, at present, mostly a theoretical framework, but it gives educators and anyone else concerned with child development a different and valuable lens through which to consider the problems of disadvantaged kids in the classroom. We want students in middle school and high school to be able to persevere, to be resilient, to be tenacious when faced with obstacles—but we don’t often stop to consider the deep roots of those skills, the steps that every child must take, developmentally, to get there.
Over the course of the next few sections, I’m going to pull back from describing specific interventions and instead examine more deeply this process that Shonkoff and Stafford-Brizard describe. How exactly do the neurobiological adaptations that result from an adverse early childhood evolve into the social and academic struggles that so many disadvantaged students experience in school? How do most schools deal with those students? And what alternative approaches might produce better results?