Early Childhood Mental Health VA

09/14/2026

New research reveals that while infants' brains process musical structure as early as three months old, their bodies take much longer to catch up. Structured physical movement to music doesn't emerge until closer to their first birthday.

09/11/2026

Building a Preverbal Social Foundation for Communication explores how providers can support social communication before spoken language develops and recognize the social foundations that come before words.

A great resource for thinking about what communication looks like before words.

Explore this VEIPD resource: https://youtu.be/jcX6hlrYrsc

09/10/2026

Rich experiences—from play to the arts and relationships—fundamentally shape a young child’s development.

08/08/2026

Neural Nugget: Between 0–3 years old, a child’s brain forms over 1 million neural connections per second. This time in life is the most pivotal, and also the most vulnerable for brain development. Early experiences shape cognitive development in early childhood.

We’ve made the science of baby brain development accessible for all. The Baby Brain Map is your interactive guide to early brain science. Start exploring now and help lay the foundation for healthy growth: https://bit.ly/4w3j4jg

08/03/2026

Learning Through Play
The LEGO Foundation’s Learning Through Play online resources provide a number of research studies showing how play lays the foundation for brain development and supports children’s learning in domains such as language and literacy, social emotional skills and math. Multiple resources are also available in Spanish

Play is how children thrive. In our paper 'Learning Through Play: a review of the evidence' we look at the science behind the power of play - showing how it helps children pick up the skills to take on the 21st century

07/28/2026

How Does Trauma Impact Emerging Self-Regulation in Young Children?
One critical area of development emerging in early childhood is self-regulation. Self-regulation has been described in terms of behavior, cognition, and emotion regulation, which are key to school readiness, academic success, behavioral regulation, attention regulation, and other cognitive, behavioral, and emotional processes. This well-documented article discusses the development of self-regulation and some factors that can shape that process.

Early childhood experiences and exposures set the foundation for long-term outcomes across multiple domains of influence

07/27/2026

Early Intervention (EI) Improves Childhood Academic Outcomes
A first-of-its-kind study has found that early intervention services — including occupational, physical, and speech therapies, among others — improve children’s test scores, even years later. The study, Early Intervention Developmental Programming and Childhood Academic Outcomes, conducted jointly by researchers at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health and the New York City Health Department, showed that children who received services between birth and age 3 outperformed peers of similar age on third-grade reading and math tests. These findings suggest that an EI program may offer tangible academic benefits for children with moderate to severe developmental delays or disabilities.

This cohort study assesses the association between receipt of early intervention services via the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act and subsequent academic achievement among children in New York City who have developmental delays or disabilities.

07/20/2026

5 Easy Tips to Encourage a Toddler’s Communication Development
This blog post, written by a speech-language pathologist and parent, offers ideas to encourage and help language and speech development for toddlers.

NAPA offers world-renowned speech therapy for toddlers. In this blog, we share 5 tips to help with speech development. Learn more!

07/15/2026

Babies May Share Adults' Sense of Beauty
Humans tend to be captured by things around them that they perceive as pleasurable and aesthetically pleasing. This "sense of beauty" has been widely studied extensively, and recent findings suggest that humans develop a basic sense of beauty in the earliest stages of life and that this sense gradually develops over time.

Humans tend to be captured by things around them that they perceive as pleasurable and aesthetically pleasing. This "sense of beauty" has been widely studied extensively, mostly in experiments that involved adult participants.