Said to begin around 5 or 6, when toddlerhood has ended and even
the most protractedly breast-fed children have been weaned, and
to end when the teen years commence, middle childhood certainly
lacks the physical flamboyance of the epochs fore and aft: no
gotcha cuteness of babydom, no secondary sexual billboards of
pubescence. Yet as new findings from neuroscience, evolutionary
biology, paleontology and anthropology make clear, middle
childhood is anything but a bland placeholder. To the contrary,
it is a time of great cognitive creativity and ambition, when
the brain has pretty much reached its adult size and can focus
on threading together its private intranet service — on forging,
organizing, amplifying and annotating the tens of billions of
synaptic connections that allow brain cells and brain domains to
communicate. Search this blog More from M. G. Saldivar Filter
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