The Power of Early Relationships -- What the Experts Say

The Us Time brand and its flagship product “The K.T. Cat Activity Set” are based on the science of early brain development. Research shows that a young child’s brain growth is dependent on the nurturing of parents and other adults in their lives. 

“Human connections create neural connections.”
          --Daniel Siegel, M.D., UCLA’s Center for Culture, Brain and Development

“What babies and toddlers need most is adults. We’re programmed, as human beings, to learn through interpersonal relationships.”
         --Matthew Melmed, Executive Director of Zero to Three

“Nurturing by parents in the early years has a decisive and long-lasting impact on how people develop, their capacity to learn, their behaviour and ability to regulate their emotions and their risks for disease in later life.”
         -- The Ontario Early Years Study

“Human intelligence itself is constructed out of the warm back-and-forth signaling between child and parent, beginning at birth”
         --Stanley Greenspan, M.D.
            Child Psychiatrist and former director, Clinical Infant Development Program
            The U.S. National Institute of Mental Health

  “Brain development is not a solo pursuit but a rich and complex flowering that occurs only in the hothouse of human relationships.”                                   
         -- Melissa Fay Greene, New York Times Magazine, Oct. 19, 2008

“Whether or not a child arrives at school on the first day of kindergarten “ready to learn” depends greatly on how much her parents—and her preschool teachers—have given her the kind of care that amounts to a “Heart Start,” the emotional equivalent of the Head Start programs.”
          –Daniel Goleman, Emotional Intelligence