Child Centres for Brain Stimulation
It has been found that educational facilities tend to be somewhat didactic in their approach. In a recent study conducted in Canada, headed by Dr Fraser Mustard, special child development and parental care centres were created. In these centres, it was found that the greatest successes were found when the children's parents were involved in the process. It was looked upon, not as being a didactic teaching process, but a process which cultivated play, and therefore, maximum stimulation of the young child's growing brain.

Dr Mustard has said, "One of the best markers as to how well a society is handling rapid change and globalisation, is what is happening to its young children. Because if you don't handle that properly, you are not going to have the quality of population that will be able to compete in the new economy." Dr Mustard recommended quality parenting and Early Child Development Centres that are both parent oriented and child oriented.

It has been said that this century will be the century of the brain, and that this millennium will be the millennium of the mind, and indeed, the growing brains of the newly born babies are the key to a nation's wealth and economic success.

The Carolina Abecedarian Project was designed to examine the effect of early child education and parental support on child development in socio-economically disadvantaged families. It began just weeks after the child's birth, with a full year centre based intervention, home visits and a teacher ratio of one to three.

At the end of the pre-school, the intervention group significantly outperformed the non-intervention group in terms of IQ.

The Ypsilanti/High Scope Study demonstrated that a high quality intervention programme with parent participation dramatically changed outcomes when the programme started at age 3. The intervention had tremendous positive effects when children reached young adulthood with respect to participation in labour force, decreased criminality and improved mental health.

It was found that with a combination of one facilitator to three to six children, frequent home visits and parental involvement, the results were extremely successful, particularly in lower social economic groups.

There is a marked association, from childhood, between socio-economic groups and the propensity to illness, illiteracy and delinquency (ref 4). Michael Rutter, the famous child psychologist, in his review of youth and anti-social behaviour, stated that, "signals indicating the more serious and persistent forms of anti-social behaviour can be detected as early as age three in the form of oppositional and hyperactive behaviour."

It has been found that even within the middle classes, a high degree of dysfunctionalism in the children still occurs. They may be dysfunctional in terms of their intelligence or in their ability to form connections with other children.