Nathan Wallis is kind of a rock star in the parenting education world. 

Tickets to his speaking events sell out as fast as Taylor Swift stadium dates, and his fans are no less ardent than dedicated Swifties. Why? Because Nathan explains complex neuroscience to us common people in a way we can appreciate, and it makes everything about our kids fall into place.

In the last few decades, neuroscience and our understanding of child development have come on in leaps and bounds. In fact, ‘We learned more about the brain in the 1990s than we had in the entire 300 years preceding,’ Nathan says. As a result, we now have the research and the clinical studies to confirm what some experts suspected all along: Genetics aren’t everything, and the data a human’s brain gathers from its environment in the first 1000 days of its life will interact with their genes to inform much of how that person turns out. For example, did you know that we can determine how much money your baby will earn as a thirty-two-year-old, just by knowing how many words were spoken to them by the primary caregiver before the age of twelve months?

Information like this is pure gold. When we know how ‘typical’ brains develop, we know more about what they need to thrive, and what gets in the way of them developing as they could. Or rather, Nathan knows! He’s the one who wades through all the medical journals and research papers and scientific studies to break all this info down and translate it into plain English for those of us in the parenting trenches. It’s this work that has seen Nathan appointed as an Advisor to the New Zealand government’s Ministry for Education and Expert Advisor to the Ministry for Vulnerable Children. With a little less fanfare but no less appreciation, we also recruited Nathan to the ParentTV team and his videos continue to be among our most discussed. For our new ParentTV book, Parents, this is the one thing you need to know, Nathan wrote a chapter called Love grows brains: how the first 1000 days of  your baby’s life can nearly dictate their future. Honestly? Learning about this stuff changed our lives and our kids’ lives.

Notable quotable:

If someone gave me $50,000 to spend at some point in my child’s  life with the goal of getting them as highly qualified as possible, I wouldn’t enrol them at a fancy private school or get tutors to help with maths and science or chess. I’d spend it in their first 1000 days. That’s when you’d get the best return on investment.

Nathan Wallis

We recommend this top video from Nathan:

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