The Benefits of Long Childhood

From the review of"Why Youth Is Not Wasted on the Young: Immaturity in Human Development" by David F. Bjorklund in 'The American Scientist':
"Bjorklund's message is that human development takes as long as it does for good reasons and that experiences should be introduced only when children are cognitively ready for them. Early education should foster a love of learning, which will pay dividends in the long run, rather than a fear of falling behind, which increases stress and decreases motivation. He acknowledges that schooling is necessary for success in the modern world and that direct instruction is sometimes useful. But as much as possible, he believes, we should let children enjoy childhood. We should even seek to maintain some "immature" qualities, such as curiosity and playfulness, into adulthood. As Aldous Huxley observed, "The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age, which means never losing your enthusiasm."
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Why Youth Is Not Wasted on the Young is that rare sort of science book that will be interesting to researchers as well as to laypeople and readers from other fields."

A recent report(via Evo. Psychology Discussion group):
"Their studies revealed that the ability to combine sensory information doesn’t develop in children until about the age of eight. Prior to that, integration of visual and touch-derived spatial information (also known as haptic information) is far from optimal, they reported, with either vision or touch dominating totally even in conditions where the dominant sense is far less precise than the other. However, they found no evidence that either vision or touch acts as a “gold standard,” always dominating the other.....
Nardini’s group made a similar discovery while studying the navigating skills of children versus adults. Navigation depends both on attending to visual landmarks and on keeping track of one’s own movement (self-motion), they explained.

In their study, children and adults attempted to return an object to its original place in an arena, using visual landmarks only, non-visual self-motion information only, or both.

Adults—but not four- to five-year-olds or seven- to eight-year-olds—got better at the task when both information sources were available, they found. ...
It might also explain how adults manage to improve on all sorts of tasks over time, he added. “It demonstrates how adults build on their perceptual abilities not just by improving individual senses, but also by getting better at integration.” "