28/07/2025
🧠 The First 7 Years:
A Window into the Nervous System and Lifelong Learning
For Parents, Carers, and Curious Adults
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🌱 Why the First 7 Years Matter
From birth to around age 7, a child’s brain is in a highly absorbent state, like a sponge.
During this time, they learn directly through experience rather than logic.
They take in everything: tone of voice, emotional energy, facial expressions, and even tension in the room.
Children don’t just learn what you say. They learn who you are.
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💻 The Baby Brain = A Laptop
Imagine a baby’s brain like a brand-new laptop.
When we buy a laptop from the shop, it comes empty, with no software installed.
We choose what programmes to load, like Microsoft 365 or other apps.
It’s the same with a baby’s brain:
• The “software” is built by what they see, hear, feel, and experience.
• If the home is calm and loving, the baby downloads a programme of safety, connection, and trust.
• If the home is stressful, chaotic, or frightening, they may download a programme of alertness, anxiety, or shutdown.
The programmes we install in the first 7 years shape how we think, relate, and respond for years to come.
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🧠 Early Feelings Become Deep Beliefs
What a child feels and sees in the first 7 years forms the blueprint for their self-worth.
• A child who feels seen, soothed, and safe may grow up believing:
✅ I am loveable.
✅ I matter
✅ The world is safe enough
• A child who feels ignored, blamed, or unsafe may quietly internalise:
❌ I’m not good enough
❌ I must stay small to stay safe
❌ Love is unpredictable
These beliefs aren’t chosen; they’re absorbed. But they can be unlearned, healed, and rewritten later in life.
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🧘♀️ The Role of the Nervous System
A child’s nervous system is still developing, and it learns safety through co-regulation.
This means they borrow your calm. Or your stress.
• A calm adult helps wire the child for emotional regulation
• A stressed or unpredictable environment can wire them for hypervigilance or emotional shutdown
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💡 Trauma Isn’t Always What Happened
Trauma is not just an event; it’s what happens inside the body as a result.
When children feel alone with big feelings or unsafe in their environment, their nervous system may get stuck in a fight, flight, or freeze response.
Without support, these patterns can carry into adulthood as anxiety, reactivity, low self-worth, or people-pleasing.
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👀 Children Learn by Watching
“Children may not always listen to what you say,
but they never stop watching what you do.”
• If a parent breathes through stress instead of yelling, children learn that emotions can be handled.
• If a parent avoids emotions or shames them, children may learn to hide or disconnect from their own.
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🌞 What Can Parents and Carers Do?
You don’t have to be perfect, just present.
• Model self-regulation: Take a breath before reacting.
• Acknowledge emotions: “It’s okay to feel upset.”
• Repair after mistakes: “I’m sorry I shouted; I was feeling overwhelmed. You didn’t deserve that.”
• Create safety: Routines, boundaries, and kindness go a long way.
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💬 Therapist’s Note
As a parent or carer, you are the first teacher of how to handle the world.
Be kind to yourself. If you didn’t get this as a child, it’s never too late to relearn and offer it to your own inner child and to the next generation.
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Remember:
🛑 Pause.
🌬 Breathe.
👁 Stay present.
💛 You are shaping a nervous system, starting with your own.
