Were we smarter as babies?

It seems intuitive to just lift your body weight into the air for half of a second, but try explaining to a toddler how to jump.

I was recently interacting with a young boy who was about twelve months old, and his father explained that he still hadn’t learned how to jump. I never thought of it as something you need to learn how to do, but it makes sense. We’re not born with the ability to walk or write either, but it is, in fact something we have to learn. After that though, we never really think about everything else we as toddlers had to learn.

This got me thinking. Very young children have to teach themselves EVERYTHING. From how to grab onto something, to how to speak, write, walk, run, chew, and jump. Is it possible that a baby is better at adaptation than an adult? We learn so much more in the first years of our life than I think we will ever learn in the following years combined.

I decided to do a little research on this and figured out that my hypothesis was correct! According to the Children's Bureau,

"One of the most critical stages of development and learning is from birth to five years old."

Wouldn't it be wonderful if we could harness our incredible adaptability that we had as toddlers and use it to take us further as adults?