Waterstones Children’s Laureate Frank Cottrell-Boyce reflects after visiting the University of East London’s Baby Lab to see what happens to a baby’s brain when their parent reads them a story
Frank Cottrell-Boyce
I’ve been using that phrase “the apparatus of happiness” in all my Laureate speeches. But recently, I saw the apparatus itself.
We visited Professor Sam Wass at the Baby Development Lab in Stratford, East London. Sam has been measuring and monitoring what happens to babies’ brains when they’re read to by the people who care for them.
He talked to us about how overwhelming the world is for babies. How they’re bombarded with new information and experiences. But when you sit down and read to your baby, all that slows down and the baby gets a chance to settle, to learn, to make sense of the world.
Then he introduced us to some young mothers and their children, gave them these rubber caps studded with electrodes and a spaghetti of wiring, hooked them up to the monitors, and we were off.
The mums read to their babies, and we could see it all – everything we talked about – on the screen. It was beautiful. We saw the baby’s brain activity tune into the activity of its mother, slow down, and synchronise. There it all was – a moment of happiness being inscribed in the child’s synapses.
This wasn’t a cultural thing or an educational thing. This was biological. We saw two minds enter a kind of communion around the story.
What we’re talking about when we talk about these quiet, shared moments is not just something that improves your child’s educational attainment or life chances. It’s something that’s essential to development. These are the moments where they begin to make sense of life.
Obviously, it doesn’t only happen with books, but shared reading is a great marker and enhancer of these moments. We all love to spend time with our babies, but it’s hard to know how to communicate with someone who can’t talk. Dear Zoo gives you the script.
This session has given me so much to think about. I’m going back to have a longer, more relaxed conversation with Sam in January. In the meantime, it made me reflect on some things…
Frank Cottrell-Boyce is the Waterstones Children’s Laureate for 2024–26. The role of Children’s Laureate is awarded once every two years to an eminent writer or illustrator of children’s books to celebrate outstanding achievement in their field.
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