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The new book from Teri Farrari
Tomorrow's Child Starts Today
£12.00
How to Prepare Your Child for an Uncertain Future
The years between birth and seven shape more than any that follow — and most parents are never told what their child is truly capable of during them.
Tomorrow's Child Starts Today brings together thirty years of work as a developmental psychologist, natural health practitioner and founder of a group of holistic early learning schools. It sets out what the science actually shows about the young brain, and turns it into things you can do in ordinary family life — no special equipment, no drilling, no pressure.
Written for parents, grandparents, teachers, childminders and anyone preparing for a new baby.
Paperback and e-book. UK and worldwide orders printed and despatched from the UK; US orders printed by our US printer.
Who this book is for
For everyone who shapes a child's first seven years — the years that matter most.
The Why
The world your child is growing into is more uncertain than the one you grew up in. Right now, preparing them for the future isn't just about reading, writing and maths.
Tomorrow's child will need to be confident, resilient and adaptable — with a curiosity and thirst for knowledge that will enable them to survive and thrive in an increasingly unpredictable world.
Yet most parents are doing far less to prepare their young child than they realise — not because they don't care, but because they've never been told the full truth of what babies and pre-school children are truly capable of. And so the most powerful learning opportunities of a whole lifetime slip by.
The Truth
For decades, psychologists and neuroscientists have shown just how extraordinary a young child's brain is — how much it absorbs, how fast it learns, and how much of a child's whole future is shaped in the earliest years — from birth to seven, and particularly from birth to five.
The science is here and it is staggering.
You already know babies are clever — that little minds soak up the world like a sponge. But almost no parent is told just how far that really goes.
In these first years, a child's brain forms more than a million new connections every second — a pace it will never reach again.
A young child's mind is more open and receptive than an adult's could ever be, absorbing the world effortlessly in a way adults can only reach after years of deep meditation.
Your baby is doing it every waking moment.
The Facts
Here's what the science shows — and why it should concern every parent:
Yet almost none of this science reaches the people who guide new parents — not your health visitor, not most preschools, not the well-meaning advice handed to you at every turn.
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The Gap
There is a vast gap between what the research proves and what parents are ever told — and no institution has any real incentive to close it.
You see it everywhere. A baby out for a walk, wide awake and drinking in the world — and a parent beside them, lost in their phone, unaware that this is one of the richest moments for learning there is.
The assumption is that because a baby can't yet talk, there's little point talking to them. But nothing could be further from the truth. Those early exchanges — naming what they see, wondering aloud together — are precisely how a young mind is built.
And when those early moments are missed, it shows.
Many children are quietly being dumbed down. Young children are natural questioners, brimming with curiosity — the research shows they ask an average of 26 questions an hour. Yet by the age of ten or eleven, that has dropped to almost nothing.
Somewhere along the way, that natural curiosity is allowed to fade.
None of this is inevitable — and these early years are exactly when you can set your child on a different path.
The Solution
No one is coming to fix this. Which means the single biggest advantage you can give your child isn't more screen apps, or so-called early-learning toys with the same cute ding-a-ling noises and flashy colours. It's a parent who knows what's really going on — and knows what to do with it.
The science is clear. The potential is huge. The reality is that many children are being held back unnecessarily during the years that matter most.
This book is the wake-up call — and the practical guide — that changes that.
Whether you're just starting out with a new baby or already deep in the toddler and pre-school years, this book will show you what your child can really do, and how to build the confidence, resilience, adaptability and love of learning that will carry them through — whatever the future holds.
Ready to begin?
How Tomorrow's Child Starts Today can help you
This isn't a book of rigid rules or a one-size-fits-all programme. It's the understanding, insight and easy-to-action ideas that let you approach these years with confidence — woven into ordinary family life, not added on top of it. Here's what you'll take from it:
Ready to begin?
About the author
Teri Farrari is a developmental psychologist, natural health practitioner and early years consultant with more than thirty years' experience working with young children and their families. She founded and ran her own innovative Holistic Early Learning Schools, and her work has been featured on BBC News, Sky Television and in The Sunday Times, the Daily Mail and Parents magazine.
The Potential
I saw how the scientific research played out in real time, every day in my early learning schools — with babies and young children from three months to five years.
Our science teacher — a university lecturer who introduced our three- and four-year-olds to a wide range of science topics — discovered, to his considerable astonishment, that these curious and enthusiastic little ones were able to grasp complex scientific concepts as fast as the undergraduate medical students he taught at a leading London teaching hospital — and often faster.
He took to testing his university lecture notes on our little children, and told his students, with great delight, that they'd better keep up with our three-year-olds.
And no — this wasn't hothousing. Not flashcards, not drilling, not pushy pressure. Quite the opposite. It was simply what naturally curious children do for the sheer fun of it — when what's around them is genuinely worth being curious about.
And here's the part almost no one bothers to explain — we're told children need a “stimulating, enriching environment,” but rarely does anyone truly define what that actually means.
So let me explain with a story.
The parents who didn't know what their baby was telling them
I once spent time with a family whose baby had just begun crawling and pulling himself up — bright, alert, reaching out for anything new that caught his eye. The adults loved him dearly, but without realising it were giving him almost nothing he actually wanted. They carried him about in silence — no narration, no conversation — then sat him down with the same few brightly coloured bricks he'd seen day after day, and couldn't understand why he'd lost all interest in them.
That baby understood something the grown-ups didn't: the same small, predictable world, repeated, is not stimulation. A genuinely stimulating environment is one where a child meets real things — new words, new sounds, textures, things that move and surprise and stretch them just beyond what they already know. All the while, their brain is firing off connections, making sense of the world faster than you can.
So what happens when this doesn't happen? They get bored — really bored — but haven't yet the language to tell you. They don't want more of the same; they want more of everything: to explore, to learn, to discover. Their brain was primed for exactly that from before they were even born.
This is what almost no one is telling parents. And it is what this book is about.
Discover now
The child who thrives tomorrow is being given the tools for the future, today
By the time your child is an adult, the world will look nothing like it does now. Nobody can predict it. But we do know the kind of person who will thrive in it: curious, confident, resilient, adaptable, emotionally intelligent, physically robust — and able to meet it all with good humour, because as history shows us, one of the keys to survival is the ability to laugh through adversity.
Those qualities aren't built at university, or even at school. Their foundation is laid in the years between birth and seven — the most powerful learning years of an entire lifetime, when the brain forms connections at a pace it will never match again. These early years become the springboard from which all the vital skills they will need for life evolve and flourish.
This book isn't about the future your child will face. It's about the child who will face it — and how these earliest years quietly decide everything that follows.
Give your child the start they deserve
The years between birth and seven — and their immense opportunities — will never come again in the same way. What you do with them shapes everything that follows. Tomorrow's Child Starts Today shows you how to give your child the best possible head start: how to nurture some of the most important skills they will ever need — not just reading and maths, but the confidence, resilience, adaptability, curiosity and love of learning that will stay with them for a lifetime, no matter what the future holds.
Start now
Not sure yet? Start with a free extract
I'll send you a free extract from Tomorrow's Child Starts Today — so you can get some insight into my holistic approach, the scientific research behind it, and the many years of personal experience it draws on — and decide for yourself.
References
The research referred to on this page is drawn from the reference list of Tomorrow's Child Starts Today. Sources cited here include:
- Truzzi, A. et al., Trinity College Dublin (2026). Babies organise what they see into distinct categories far earlier than previously believed. Nature Neuroscience.
- Brannon, E.M. and Starr, A., Duke Institute for Brain Sciences (2013). Number sense in infancy predicts mathematical abilities in childhood. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 110(45), 18116–18120.
- Engel, S. (2011). Children's need to know: Curiosity in schools. Harvard Educational Review, 81(4), 625–645. (Williams College — young children ask an average of 26 questions an hour, dropping to almost nothing by age 10–11.)
- Seery, M.D., Holman, E.A. and Silver, R.C. (2010). Whatever does not kill us: Cumulative lifetime adversity, vulnerability and resilience. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 99(6), 1025–1041.
- Compas, B.E. et al. (2014). Coping and emotion regulation from childhood to early adulthood. Australian Journal of Psychology, 66(2), 71–81.
Full references for all research discussed in the book appear in the reference section of Tomorrow's Child Starts Today.