I knew something was wrong when my wife called my Seattle office the afternoon of Jan. 19, 1987. Rushing out of a computer-system demonstration for a client, I raced home to find her collapsed on the floor.

Our son wasn't due to be born for nine weeks. But, a few hours later, Benjamin was taken by cesarean section. Monitors detected he had been dying in the midst of a disintegrating placenta. Patti had lost so much blood that her life was in danger as well.

Although more than 14 years have passed, some memories remain vivid. I often reflect on the powerful impact my decisions, emotions, actions and inaction have on our children's lives.

When Benjamin was lying in an incubator for seven weeks to gain weight—he weighed as little as two pounds—I remember Patti driving to the Tacoma General intensive care unit every day to talk with— and touch—our tiny son.

I was busy with business at the time and thought it wasn't important for me to see Benjamin that often. I didn't need to reach through the openings in the incubator's side and feel his small stick-sized limbs as Patti felt compelled to do. After all, he seemed so peaceful resting there by himself, amazing me with his calm maturity for a person so tiny. He didn't really need me, I thought.

Three years later Benjamin was diagnosed with autism.

I was wrong. Benjamin had needed me more than I could have imagined. Most fathers—at least sometimes and often out of ignorance—neglect to take the opportunity to help, stimulate growth and nurture their children.

Benjamin's autism was a neurological disorder caused by a damaged brain that leaves a child unable to process information normally. I would learn that much of his recovery depended on me.

Early stimulation is critical

Our tiny son had gone from hypoactivity (being underactive) for the first 12 months to hyperactivity and explosiveness for the next two years. We spent our days and nights listening to this screaming, ever-moving child, a Jekyll and Hyde for whom we finally had a label for a condition we didn't understand.

Science in the last decade has discovered that touch can be crucial to young children with autism. Parental attention in the forms of talking, smiling, singing, feeding and touching makes a significant difference to brain-damaged children.

We now know that these parental activities are vitally important for all young children. If we don't touch our infants in the manifold ways parents should relate to them—through their bodies, eyes, ears, emotions and intellects—children are profoundly affected in ways that mark them for the rest of their lives.

Why is this so?

It is because this kind of interaction of parents with children builds the brain structures necessary for their further development. Brain research reveals the physical processes of constructing a personality through development of the child's central nervous system.

Mechanically, children are virtual learning machines. They are constantly learning beings made in the image of their parents. But, to thrive as well as survive, children need constant stimulus led by competent parents.

The learning brain

What is most important in a child's development? Is it his genetic makeup, or is it his life experiences in interacting with parents, siblings, teachers and surroundings?

This question summarizes the naturevs.-nurture debate. People have argued it for 2,000 years, but research proves that the either-or approach is fruitless. Nature and nurturing are both important.

Until the last generation, scientists thought the brain was hardwired, with all its circuits intact in early childhood, with little change possible during the remainder of a person's life.

Each child is born with 100 billion neurons (nerve cells) in the brain, the total number of which does not grow significantly for the rest of our lives.

For years researchers thought basic brain development stopped after early childhood. Now we know that the brain's wiring only begins at birth. Most of the adult's conscious functions of logical thinking, goalsetting, writing, planning and communicating are the result of neuron connections— called synapses—which develop throughout childhood. It is these connections that are created by learning and responsible for additional learning.

In a real sense, properly rearing children is the process of nurturing young brains to maturity, of correctly wiring the neural circuitry that will determine the child's personality for the rest of his life. The actions and attitudes of parents exert a powerful force on the brain development of their children throughout childhood, regardless of their genetic makeup.

The incredible learning machine

At birth what appears to be a long and slow process of learning begins, but every day brings the brain a spectacular array of experiences to interpret, record and respond to. Billions of bits of information must be processed and stored every hour of every day of young lives.

Brain development occurs throughout life, but the rate in childhood is much faster than it will be later. Young brains are more flexible because most of their connections are new.

Consider how marvelous are the unfathomable basic structures of the human brain.

The human brain is unbelievably complex. In addition to the 100 billion neurons, the brain contains one trillion other cells that play roles other than computing messages.

Neurons hold the keys of communication and learning. Each has a long extension, somewhat like a tree trunk, called an axon. The axon transmits basic messages to other neurons. From infancy to adulthood, each neuron grows elaborate tangles of side branches called dendrites. Each neuron develops up to 100,000 dendrites. Dendrites receive information from other neurons. Through sending and receiving messages, neurons both teach and learn from other neurons.

Fifty-three specialized chemicals, called neurotransmitters, transmit electrical messages across the synapses. Each synapse has at least 10 strengths. The number of configurations, arrangements and patterns of the neurons, dendrites and synapses in one brain is at least 10 to the trillionth power—a number greater than all the atoms in the universe!

Learning is the process of the creation, growth, strengthening and weakening of these connections. Every experience either builds or weakens dendrites and connections in one or more parts of the brain.

God designed and made these connections available to us so we can learn, wonder, ponder, understand and plan. You are using millions of them as you read this article.

In A User's Guide to the Brain, Harvard Medical School's professor of psychiatry John Ratey writes that, "happily, this dynamic complexity is actually the solution to many people's fears that our nature is genetically ‘hard-wired.'

"The brain is so complex, and so plastic, that it is virtually impossible, except in the broadest fashion, to predict how a given factor will influence its state. Genes do contain direction for much of the brain's initial development, yet they have no absolute power to determine how the brain will respond" (2001, p. 11).

What does all this mean? To put it simply, a child's brain is an inner universe with the potential to learn, be taught and change throughout life. Childhood is a critically important time when the connections in the child's brain are being established and strengthened for the first time.

An independent person in the making

One more factor influences how the young brain will become wired. The brain is the seat, the home, of the whole little human being who is more than just the sum of neurochemicals firing across cells in some mechanical way.

Each child has an independent will. He is a bundle of wants, needs and desires to grow, experience and know. Basic tendencies are preprogrammed genetically. But the kinds of choices a child makes are shaped by an interaction of the child's will and the environment, especially the environment shaped by parents. Parental style and choices become critical issues in creating a child who is generally cooperative and pleasant or one who is predominantly aggressive and mean.

Parents can achieve their best outcome in rearing their children when they understand that their child has a continuous need for care, love and respect as a small person with an independent will—just like his father and mother.

The environment is not the only factor besides genes at work in brain development. The independent will of the child—based on the genetic heritage from his parents and other ancestors—also drives the brain's development. A child will develop best when parents guide him to be self-motivated and to desire to experience constructive behavior, attitudes and thoughts. A parent also must provide guidance, direction and protection from harmful influences.

Positive parents

With each smile from his mother and father, every redirection when he gets in a fight with siblings, and each time a parent allows or doesn't allow him to be exposed to sexually offensive or violent television, a child's brain modifies some of its tangle of 100 trillion constantly changing connections. Through this process a child learns the choices he can make in reacting to these challenges the next time they arise.

But it takes a committed, mature adult to know how to shape the child's will to be positive rather than negative, to be obedient and cooperative instead of defiant and disobedient, to be outgoing toward others and not self-obsessed and self-absorbed. The tantrum-throwing terror in the supermarket is often the result of parents who don't know how to help their children be better behaved and not the manifestation of the supposedly inherently evil nature of a child.

Harvard's Ratey says that "everything we do affects everything that follows . . . Genetics are important, but not determinative, and the kinds of exercise, sleep, diet, friends, and activities we choose, as well as the goals we set for ourselves, have perhaps equal power to change our lives" (p. 12).

Brain research shows that each child's brain is shaped—or "parented," you might say—by its interaction with its environment. Such interaction is largely controlled by the quality and quantity of parental interaction. There is nothing static about it; the process continues throughout a human being's life.

In the 21st century some of the ancient wisdom regarding the basics of rearing children has come full circle and is being recognized as the best our modern age can offer.

The foundation that reveals how parents should rear and nurture their children is found in the Bible. God designed children to succeed under the guidance of competent parents. The guiding principle is expressed simply yet powerfully in Proverbs 22:6: "Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it."

Training of the caliber expressed in Scripture comes from one huge but simple requirement for successful parents: leadership throughout the child's youth, from infancy to adulthood.

Continuously involved leadership

Research shows that, from the first hours after birth, infants'eyes follow the shapes of the mother and father, associating them with their voices, warmth, care and nourishment. As soon as a child's eyes can focus well enough to perceive the smile of his mother, he begins to imitate and mirror the movements of her facial muscles, lips and laugh lines.

The mother or father orchestrates a great symphony of connections, feelings, inferences and meanings that builds a new person who is, to a remarkable degree, in the parent's own image. At birth the parent leads the external stimulation of the brain, a process responsible for 80 percent of the developing personality through the formation of trillions of synaptic connections. Each of these sensations builds the superstructure of circuitry for the subsequent development of the child's brain.

The parent is a leader who shapes the development of his child. Children are natural followers, built to imitate their parents. Without the appropriate leadership from parents, children do not develop socially and often are too aggressive and lack self-control.

In April, news sources reported the largest study ever in the United States on the behavior of young children in day-care facilities compared with the conduct of children who stayed at home with their mothers. In the study more than 1,100 children in 10 cities were rated by parents, day-care providers and others. The results are startling.

Children in day care, researchers found, are three times more likely to experience behavioral problems than those who stay at home with Mom. Young children in day care also were reported to be unhappier.

"As time [the duration of daily day care] goes up, so do behavior problems," said Jay Belsky, an investigator conducting the study. Dr. Belsky noted that, if children spend more than 30 hours a week in child care, they generally are "more demanding, more noncompliant, and they are more aggressive." He added: "They scored higher on things like [getting] in lots of fights, cruelty, bullying, meanness, as well as talking too much [and] demand[ing that his needs] must be met immediately."

We shouldn't be surprised.

Mothers know best

Natural mothers dedicated to staying at home to offer optimal nurturing for their children provide more continuous emotional warmth and support for their young children than do day-care providers with no familial attachment to children who come and go under their care.

A mother's warmth and support are registered in the neural connections in a child's brain. So is a child's less-optimal day-care experience. An at-home parent provides more continuous focused involvement throughout the day than can a day-care provider, who typically provides for many more children, all of whom are strangers to the child.

As every mother knows who has had to get a young child out of bed early, the child can be emotionally traumatized when dropped off in day care as the parent goes off to work. Even the mother is often sad at having to endure a struggle with the unhappy child who doesn't want to be separated from his mother. A sad child plus a sad mother, repeated well over a thousand times in early childhood, is hardly the best formula for proper brain development.

Parents are not effective leaders unless they are grounded in strong principles that make them proper role models. The process of successfully rearing children requires many skills, many of which they need before bearing children but are not acquired until one becomes a parent.

One might become an Olympic athlete, climb Mount Everest or think he has the greatest job in the world, but proper parenting requires as much or more leadership as these activities. Bringing up children can be as just as rewarding and thrilling an experience.

But, like these heroic and athletic endeavors, being a parent involves enduring some tough times. Leaders must make course corrections and never give up. Successful parents constantly develop their skills to rise to the next level. They are committed and involved.

The same principles that lead to success in life apply to successful parenting. Parents always have an impact. Even though parents may not realize it, children are always learning by the action, attention, respect—or disrespect, inaction and inattention—of their parents.

As much as we would like to mystify children's behavior, the quality of parents and their child-rearing efforts are largely responsible for the nature of every child. Much of the negative behavior of youths is the result of parents who do not control negative influences, do not know how to simultaneously love, nurture and discipline and do not understand the spiritual needs of children.

We need to remember that every brain has a parent. If not the natural parent, some other influence will dramatically affect every child's brain and character.

Help from heaven

After Patti and I discovered our son Benjamin was autistic, we struggled to reverse the damage he had suffered before birth. Taking cues from health-care professionals, I became Benjamin's speech therapist and helper—tickling, wrestling and holding him and taking him to Little League baseball games and on camping trips and mountain climbs. Patti did the same. Benjamin received sensory and motor therapy, school intervention and care and love from many.

But Benjamin's neural wiring problems exposed mine. I had to admit I wasn't wired as the ideal parent from birth. I often hit the wall of frustration. I was not prepared to handle the intensity of working with an autistic child. But, once you are a parent, there is no turning back.

I realized then, as I still realize, that I couldn't do it alone. I was often forced to go to God on my knees to ask for help from the heavenly throne of grace. After all, God is the greatest parent, the ultimate authority, the one who wrote the book. The Bible is the book about parenting. God, who is infinitely good, has given parents priceless guidance and instruction.

Benjamin is 14. After his rocky start, he has a good brain. He is doing well in middle school, has many friends, talks about things like any other 14-year-old, swims all over the state as part of the school-district swim team, is studying second-year Spanish and has forgiven me for the times I didn't know what I was doing.

His wiring will be fine in the end.

But I have learned an important lesson. Like every parent's, my wiring is still under construction. GN