Humans are born with billions of neurons that need connecting – and how those synapses develop helps determine how our brains will work. There is ample evidence that a loving, nurturing environment in infancy and early childhood provides the most fertile ground for brain development.
Isabelle Hau, executive director of the Stanford Accelerator for Learning, explains why a well-loved baby or child simply learns better than a neglected one, and how our contracting social circles endanger our kids.
Plus… the mystery of why average IQs rose for decades, until recently. Are technology and isolation affecting our intelligence?
Phil Stieg: Today, our guest is Isabelle Hau, a visionary leader transforming the future of learning for children. As the executive director of the Stanford Accelerator for Learning, she collaborates with scholars, educators, and innovators to create cutting-edge learning solutions. Today, we’ll learn how nurturing early relationships, fostering relational intelligence, rethinking education, and balancing technology’s impact can transform the way we support children’s development and lifelong success.
Isabelle, thank you so much for being with us today.
Isabelle Hau: Well, thank you, Dr. Steig, for having me on this great podcast.
Phil Stieg: I really enjoyed reading your book, “Love to Learn” . I’m curious for you to explain to us why you believe early loving relationships are so foundational to brain development, emotional resilience, and lifelong success.
Isabelle Hau: Yes. We are all born as infants, as billionaires. We have billions of neurons when we are all born. Yet those neurons need connections. They need to have in the brain what is called synaptic connections. And those synaptic connections are nourished through social interactions. So we, as human beings, need those human connections to learn and to thrive.
Phil Stieg: In your book, you talk about this serve and return interaction and how this shapes a child’s capacity for learning and emotional well-being. Can you explain that to me? What is that, serve and return?
Isabelle Hau: So serve and return is, if you think about a tennis match, it’s very much of this ball going back and forth. Same for relationship between an adult and a little one, is this exchange of a sight, exchange of a touch. It’s essentially this interaction between two humans. Generally, it refers to a baby and an adult, but it could also be between two adults or two babies, two little ones. This is signaling the importance of relationship for brain development.
Phil Stieg: So I want to be perfectly clear then, when you’re talking about these relationships, is it familial within the family so that when a child is in, let’s face it, in schools nowadays, there’s cliques, and they become very abusive and difficult with each other. But if the child has a warm, nurturing family environment, they can cope with that better. Is that the message?
Isabelle Hau: Yeah. So the message is that the more strong relationship we will have in our lives, the more cognitive and social emotional development there is, which is really interesting. These nurturing relationships can come from certainly family member, as you point out. So it could be a mother, a dad, it could be a grandparent, an auntie, an uncle, familial or connections. But it could also be any other adult. It could be a sport coach, music coach. It could also be a friend, a peer. So It can come from a variety of other human beings. It doesn’t need to be a parent, which I think is also a very hopeful message for a foster child or when there’s more complicated family relationships.
Phil Stieg: So building on that, I found your personal story interesting because I don’t want to steal your thunder. Tell us about your background and then how you became successful because of your environment.
Isabelle Hau: I was born in Southern I’m in the rural France, a beautiful area. When I was in my youngest period of life, I was late at everything. I was I was a late walker. I was a late talker. Late everything, essentially. And that led my parents to have me take one of those psychological tests at around age three. And the test results essentially said that I had low academic aptitude, which for any parent is not exactly what you want to see at age three, because it meant that my ability to thrive, and to be successful in life would be maybe more limited.
Anyway, they were largely undeterred. They gave me a lot of support, continued to love me dearly. They enrolled me in an early childcare, initially, and then a beautiful preschool, where I was surrounded by incredible educators, which I believe made a huge difference in my life.
I ended up graduating from Harvard University and now working at Stanford University. Anyway, all this low academic aptitude is largely in the past. But It’s really interesting and it led me to a lot of reflections on, okay, what led a child who was at risk of developmental delays like I was to then thrive? I really strongly believe that these early years are so formative, which is why I’m so passionate about this topic.
Phil Stieg: So what comes first? Is it the human essence that we are a social society that interacts, or is it that the nurturing environment creates that neuronal development and thereby we are socially interactive?
Isabelle Hau: So of course, this is a long-standing debate between nurture and nature, which I believe actually has been largely settled. I think we need both. It’s really a combination of the two. The element of nurturing is absolutely critical for the brain to really develop properly, especially in the early years.
Phil Stieg: As I was reading through Love to Learn you emphasize that this nurturing is extremely important in the 3-5 age range. Number one, do you believe that to be true? But then also, I want to give hope to people if you’re beyond the 3-5 age range.
Isabelle Hau: Yeah. And I would say even, so 3-5, absolutely. But I would even say birth 2-5 or when life starts. The very, very early years of life are the most critical in this foundation period of someone’s life. This being said, as you point out, we learn throughout life, including in our oldest years, we continue learning. So learning starts at birth, if not earlier in the womb, and continues throughout life.
Phil Stieg: But a person who doesn’t necessarily grow up in a nurturing environment… I mean, we’ve seen how many success stories about people that grow up in terrible environments and they somehow turn it around to become leaders in our society. What’s the basis of that? Internally, they felt nurtured or loved by somebody?
Isabelle Hau: Yes, so two things. One is this interesting setting for research called the Romanian Orphanages, which I cover extensively in the book, where essentially we had a very sad period of history under a communist regime in Romania, where thousands, hundreds of thousands actually are estimated to have been left in orphanages without love, without nurturing relationships. The good thing about this really sad historical moment is that it led to meaningful and really interesting research on the brain, which concretely Concludes that essentially someone who is born without loving, nurturing, caring, safe relationships in the early years has a smaller brain in size and less powerful brain. And the more the children are staying in those orphanages, the more impact there is on the brain. So the other very hopeful piece out of another body of research in those settings is that a child, if adopted before age two in a loving and nurturing family, can actually recover most of their cognitive and social-emotional abilities. But this seems to be a critical period in the earliest years of life, where there is a lot of transformation in the brain. And so this period is so critical from a nurturing standpoint.
Phil Stieg: But in order to provide hope for individuals, I personally believe that, yes, you want to be in a nurturing environment from day one. That being said, it’s not a lost cause taking somebody from, the Romanian orphanages, putting them in a loving environment, even at the age of 10. Is that true?
Isabelle Hau: Absolutely. And thank you for pointing this. And I would also add to that that someone also can become a loving parent themselves and learn to become a loving parent.
Phil Stieg: From that environment, coming from that environment.
Isabelle Hau: Exactly, coming from that environment. But certainly the science is also really clear on this that you can have a strong, nurturing relationship throughout life that will make a meaningful difference at any age. And you can absolutely learn to be loved and learn to love throughout life. So thank you for that very, very important clarification, because while the early years matters the most, it’s a lifelong endeavor to love and be loved.
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Narrator: In science fiction, computers and robots appear to use artificial intelligence to reason as humans do. While today’s AI has a long way to go before it can behave like a person, scientists at MIT are finding that AI can shape human behavior. It can even help people forge stronger connections with each other.
Way back in the early 1960s, MIT programmer Joseph Weizenbaum developed a program that allowed a machine to “talk” to humans. Weizenbaum named his program ELIZA after the character in the musical My Fair Lady who was “programmed” to behave like an aristocrat. An early type of chatbot, ELIZA simulated conversations in the style of a psychotherapist.
ELIZA
“Is something troubling you?”
User
I’m just not very happy these days.
ELIZA
“Can you elaborate on that?”
User
Well, my family is driving me crazy
ELIZA
“Tell me more about your family”
User
They are so rough on me some days I just don’t want to go out of the house.
ELIZA
“Oh, I see. Does that have anything to do your mother?”
Narrator: ELIZA’s conversational abilities were limited. However, Weizenbaum was surprised to see that people who used ELIZA quickly became emotionally attached to the program, treating it like it had a personality. Weizenbaum wrote that even his secretary, who had watched him create ELIZA, conversed with the program as though it were a person.
ELIZA was never meant to be used for actual therapy. But today, scientists are investigating therapeutic uses for AI by exploring the emotional connections that people form with responsive machines. Studies have shown that children as young as five years old treat social robots as more than simple machines, and can form long-term relationships with them.
By combining AI with robotics, scientists are developing robots that promote social learning and support emotional and mental well-being. MIT’s Personal Robots Group creates robots that use AI to interact with children and adults in ways that improve users’ social abilities over time and strengthen social bonds. The MIT group’s robots help users manage their emotional health; understand the world through interactive storytelling; and develop empathetic reasoning.
One type of robot worked with refugee children, using AI to engage the children in conversations that boosted learning, supported emotional resilience and addressed challenges of cultural integration.
Social robots can also provide companionship for people who are isolated, and those interactions may have unexpected benefits. In one recent project, the MIT group found that adults who used companion robots demonstrated more empathy and “significantly higher compassionate love towards humanity.”Perhaps with proper guidance from scientists, AI might be able to teach us a thing or two about what it means to be human.
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Phil Stieg: I was very happy to read about one other thing that you feel strongly about, is this whole concept of a relational crisis in the world as we see the world today. Please describe your thoughts, opinions, and findings about the societal trends that are going on now in terms of inhibiting relationships and how that’s going to affect our children’s mental health and learning.
Isabelle Hau: Yeah. So that’s really what led me to write this book. So thank you for the great question. I’m deeply concerned about what’s happening for our children. When I read things like 20 % of our children do not have a friend or have too few friends. Or when I read that 80% of babies do not have a strong emotional connection with their mom. I mean, those are meaningful, meaningful stats.
The reality of our societies right now is that the circles of relationships are contracting for a variety of reasons around our young children. Our families are smaller. We, adults, are more isolated. They are less family friends around us. Little ones, as a result, have less of the vibrant communities around us. Grandparents, also tend to live a little bit further away than they used to be as generations ago. Then there are other things that also impact relationships, such as a meaningful decrease in play. Young children play outdoors about 50% less than their parents did. And play is how we form friendships. So as a result of playing less, we have less friends.
So for technology, of course, is another huge factor. It’s not the only one, but it’s also another big one in that contracting trend around us. We are being more and more isolated by technology. And there is one aspect that I am particularly concerned about, which is less spoken about. We speak a lot about screen time for kids and the negative effect of screen time, but we speak less about the importance of also addressing screen time for parents. What is referred to by some of my colleagues as Technoference.
Phil Stieg: Techno…?
Isabelle Hau: Technoference.
Phil Stieg: Technoference, yeah.
Isabelle Hau: So, the concept is simply when any one of us actually is checking our devices 144 times a day. There are 144 opportunities on a daily basis, if you are with a young child, to be interrupted. Those interruptions are signaling to the young child that the device is more important than they are. So a young child is essentially thinking, Oh, well, that adult across from me maybe doesn’t have the “serve and return” behaviors that we as humans are expecting, and certainly babies or infants or little ones are expecting in a natural setting. All of those have profound effects, of course, on our ability to relate and on our societies.
Phil Stieg: You also talked about the double-edged nature of technology and the education of our children. How is it a double-edged sword? I think we all understand that it can distract us, but how can it be used positively?
Isabelle Hau: I strongly believe that we actually have two different types of tech. We have what I call junk tech, and then we have relational tech. I’m much more interested, of course, about relational tech as a way to augment our human connections. So, for example, a solution like LDR. AI, that’s a technology platform that allows an older adult to connect with a young child, potentially even across borders, is yielding amazing, beautiful relationships. And that’s an example to me of a tool that augments our human relationships.
Phil Stieg: In your book you talk about a teacher being a relationship builder. Can you explain what “relational hubs” are in terms of the educational programs in America?
Isabelle Hau: Relations hubs are the new form of schools that I would like to see in our future. They are the modern version of a school where kids thrive surrounded by many types of adults. And those could be teachers, family members, but also potentially pediatricians or mental health providers or other people that surround our children.
I think that at the core of what I’m advocating is for teachers to do what they love to do, which is to relate with the little ones. This is why they come to this profession. If anything, what I’m hearing from so many teachers is that they don’t have enough time in their day or week or school year for this fostering of relationships because they have so many other administrative activities or other things that take away from those relationships.
Phil Stieg: Listen, this is common sense. Parents love their children, create a nurturing environment that children are going to be emotionally stable, and hopefully with that, they would love learning. Is there data that suggests that children that are exposed to this relationship intelligence environment, that their test scores are actually better than people that don’t live in that environment?
Isabelle Hau: There are data on the number of strong relationships driving better academic performance and better social-emotional learning outcomes. There are also a lot of data on prosocial behaviors in the early years being one of the greatest predictor of academic outcomes.
Phil Stieg: Given the fact that we live in a world where IQ is the most important metric seemingly, can you make any comments about what the trends are currently in IQ?
Isabelle Hau: For the longest time since IQ was invented about 200 years ago, IQ has been going up. And there is even a term for this, which has been called the FLEEN effect, where every decade, IQ in humans has been going up, except for the past few years. So in the past few years, there have been a number of research now across multiple countries that have all concluded the same thing, which is IQ is declining. So that’s not scientifically not really proven yet, but I am concerned that there may be a tie between this decline in IQ and this contracting social relationships that are starting so early and are increasing isolation as a species.
Phil Stieg: I guess the real question then is, is IQ really the relevant factor or is it relational intelligence that’s the important factor?
Isabelle Hau: I love that question, and I would love, obviously, to see more focus on relational intelligence going forward, which may actually help also improve our IQ. But certainly a greater focus on we as human beings being such social animals, how can we make this very obvious point of relationships matter to our education systems?
Phil Stieg: Isabella Howe, thank you so much for being with us today. —-It’s important that we all learn how to take a deep breath and actually talk and have a relationship with one another and not a machine. Thank you so much for being with us today.
Isabelle Hau: Thank you, Dr. Steig, for having me on the podcast. A great conversation. Really enjoy every moment.