“Brain Rules for Baby” by John Medina 6/10

Introduction

• Myth: Continually telling your children they are smart will boost their confidence. Truth: They’ll become less willing to work on challenging problems. If you want your baby to get into a great college, praise his or her effort instead.
• Myth: Children somehow find their own happiness. Truth: The greatest predictor of happiness is having friends. How do you make and keep friends? By being good at deciphering nonverbal communication. Learning a musical instrument boosts the ability by 50 percent. Text messaging may destroy it.

pregnancy

• Don’t waste your money on products claiming to improve a preborn baby’s IQ, temperament, or personality. None of them have been proven to work.
• In the second half of pregnancy, babies begin to perceive and process a great deal of sensory information/sounds. They can even smell the perfume you wear.
• Four things proven to help baby’s brain
• 1. Gain just the right weight
  • Brain volume is related to birth weight, which means that, to a point, larger babies are smarter babies. The increase slows as the baby reaches 6.5 pounds: There is only 1 IQ point difference between a 6.5 – pounder and a 7.5 – pounder.
• 2. Eat just the right foods
  • Only two supplements have enough data to support an influence on brain development in utero: folic acid and omega – 3 fatty acids.
• 3. Avoid too much stress
  • If you are severely stressed during pregnancy, it can create irritable babies and lower IQs
• 4. Exercise just the right amount
  • Fit women have to push less fit mothers also tend to give birth to smarter babies than obese mothers
  • What is the proper balance? Four words: moderate, regular aerobic exercise.

relationship

• Hostility between parents can harm a newborn’s developing brain and nervous system
  • Sustained exposure to hostility can erode a baby’s IQ and ability to handle stress, sometimes dramatically. An infant’s need for caregiver stability is so strong, he will rewire his developing nervous system depending upon the turbulence he perceives.
  • Marital conflict is fully capable of hurting a baby’s brain development.
  • Babies in emotionally unstable homes are much less able to regulate their own emotions.
  • Parents who practice reconciling with each other after a fight, deliberately and explicitly, allow their children to model both how to fight fair and how to make-up.
• The four most common sources of marital turbulence are sleep loss, social isolation, unequal distribution of household workload, and depression.
  • Sleep loss alone can predict most of the increases in hostile interactions between new parents
• • Loneliness is experienced by as many as 80% of new parents.
• • Household duties increase three times as much for women as for men when baby comes home. The lack of contribution is so great that having a husband around actually creates an extra seven hours of work per week for women.
  • Depression: babies can mirror the mother’s depressive actions. These children become more insecure, socially inhibited, timid, and passive.

How to protect your relationship

• Start morning and afternoon inquiries – check-in twice ad ay (see how the day is progressing).
• Schedule sex regularly.  Try incorporating spontaneous sex and maintenance sex
• Regularly practice the empathy reflex. As your first response to any emotional situation, execute two simple steps:
  • 1. Describe the emotional changes you think you see
  • 2. Make a guess as where those emotional changes came from.
• Balance the workload
• In Gottman’s studies, if the wife felt she was being heard by her husband — to the point that he accepted her good influence on his behavior — the marriage was essentially divorce – proof.  If that empathy trafficking was absent, the marriage foundered. One of the reason empathy works so well is because it does not require a solution.  It only requires understanding.
• “Empathy not only matters; it is the foundation of effective parenting.”

smart baby: seeds

• There are aspects of your child’s intelligence about which you can do nothing; the genetic contribution is about 50 percent.
• IQ is related to several important childhood outcomes, but it is only one measure of intellectual ability.
• Intelligence has many ingredients, including self – control, creativity, communication skills, and a desire to explore.
• Five Ingredients of Intelligence
• 1. The desire to explore
• 2. Self-control
  • Executive function controls planning, foresight, problem solving, and goal setting. It engages many parts of the brain, including a short – term form of memory called working memory.
  • Executive function is a better predictor of academic success than IQ.
• 3. Creativity
  • Creativity has a few core components: the ability to perceive new relationships between old things, to conjure up ideas or things or whatever that do not currently exist.
• 4. Verbal communication
  • Foreign Languages: Need social interaction through a real live person to speak the language directly to the child. If the child’s brain detects this social interaction, its neurons will begin recording the second language, phonemes and all.
• 5. Interpreting nonverbal communication
  • Learning sign language may boost cognition by 50 percentKids with normal hearing took an American Sign Language class for nine months, in the first grade, then were administered a series of cognitive tests. Their attentional focus, spatial abilities, memory, and visual discrimination scores improved dramatically — by as much as 50 percent — compared with controls who had no formal instruction.
  • Babies need face time (help learn micro-expressions)
•  Innovators 5 DNA characteristics
• 1. An unusual ability to associate. They could see connections between concepts, problems, or questions not obvious to others.
• 2. An annoying habit of consistently asking “what if.” And “why not” and “how come you’re doing it this way.”
• 3. An unquenchable desire to tinker and experiment.
• 4. They were great at a specific kind of networking. Successful entrepreneurs were attracted to smart people whose educational backgrounds were very different from their own.
• 5. They closely observed the details of other people’s behaviors.

smart baby: soil

• What helps early learning: breast – feeding, talking to your children — a lot, guided play every day, and praising effort rather than intelligence.
• What hurts early learning: overexposure to television (keep the TV off before age 2), a sedentary lifestyle, and limited face – to – face interaction.
• Pressuring children to learn a subject before their brains are ready is only harmful.
• There are four nutrients you will want in your behavioral formula, adjusting them as your baby gets older: breast – feeding, talking to your baby, guided play, and praising effort rather than accomplishment.
• The brain is interested in surviving. Every ability in our intellectual tool kit was engineered to escape extinction. Learning exists only to serve the requirements of this primal goal.
  • If you want a well – educated child, you must create an environment of safety.
• Four brain boosters
• 1. Breast – feed for a year
• 2. Talk to your baby — a lot
  • The more parents talk to their children, even in the earliest moments of life, the better their kids’ linguistic abilities become and the faster that improvement is achieved.
  • You can reinforce language skills through interaction: looking at your infant; imitating his vocalizations, laughter, and facial expressions; rewarding her language attempts with heightened attention.
• 3. Guided Play
  • Kids allowed a specific type of open – ended playtime were:
    • More creative.Better at language.Better at problem solving.Less stressed.Better at memory.More socially skilled.
  • Design your place space for creativity: Legos, sandboxes, jigsaw puzzles, building blocks, dress up clothes, crafts, boxes, and space for interaction with other kids. These data flatly state that emotional regulation — reining in impulses — predicts better cognitive performance. That’s a bombshell of an idea.

4. Praise effort, not IQ

• What separates high performers from low performers is deliberate practice.
• Kids praised for effort complete 50 percent more hard math problems than kids praised for intelligence
• What happens when you say, “You’re so smart”
  • First, your child begins to perceive mistakes as failures. Because you told her that success was due to some static ability over which she had no control, she starts to think of failure (such as a bad grade) as a static thing, too — now perceived as a lack of ability. Successes are thought of as gifts rather than the governable product of effort.
  • Second, perhaps as a reaction to the first, she becomes more concerned with looking smart than with actually learning something.
  • Third, she becomes less willing to confront the reasons behind any deficiencies, less willing to make an effort. Such kids have a difficult time admitting
• What to say instead: “You really worked hard”
  • “I’m so proud of you. You must have studied a lot.” This appeals to controllable effort. It’s called “growth mindset” praise.

• The fact is the amount of TV a child should watch before the age of 2 is zero.
• TV also poisons attention spans and the ability to focus, a classic hallmark of executive function. For each additional hour of TV watched by a child under the age of 3, the likelihood of an attentional problem by age 7 increased by about 10 percent.
• After age 5, some television shows improve brain performance (e.g. interactive types).
  • Recommendations: Help your children choose the shows they will experience (favor intelligent interaction). Watch the show with your children and help your children analyze and think critically about what they just experienced.
• Exercise — especially aerobic exercise — is fantastic for the brain, increasing executive function scores anywhere from 50 percent to 100 percent.
• Fit kids score higher on executive function tests than sedentary controls, and those scores remain as long as the exercise does. The best results accrue, by the way, if you do the exercises with your children.
• Hyper – parenting can actually hurt your child’s intellectual development in several ways:
• Extreme expectations stunt higher – level thinking
• Pressure can extinguish curiosity
• Continual anger or disappointment becomes toxic stress
  • Pushy parents often become disappointed, displeased, or angry when their kids don’t perform.
  • Can create a psychological state called learned helplessness, which can physically damage a child’s brain. The child learns he can’t control the negative stimuli (the parent’s anger or disappointment) coming at him or the situations that cause it. Think of a third – grade boy who comes home from school every night to a drunken dad, who then beats him up. The little guy has to have a home, but it is awful to have a home. He will get the message that there is no way out, and eventually he will not try to escape, even if a way later presents itself. That’s why it is called learned helplessness.

happy baby: seeds

• The single best predictor of happiness? Having friends
• Other behaviors that predict happiness
  • Steady dose of altruistic acts
  • Making lists of things for which you are grateful
  • Sharing novel experiences with a loved one
  • Deploying a ready “forgiveness reflex” when loved ones slight you
• Two of the most predictive for social competency/make friends:
  • emotional regulation: Individuals who are thoughtful, kind, sensitive, outward focused, accommodating, and forgiving have deeper, more lasting friendships, and lower divorce rates than people who are moody, impulsive, rude, self-centered, inflexible, and vindictive.
  • Empathy: if your marriage has a 3:1 ratio of active-constructive versus toxic-conflict interactions, your relationship is nearly divorce-proof. The best marriages have a ratio of 5:1.
• Jerome Kagan noticed highly reactive children (introverts) were more academically successful, made lots of friends, and were less likely to experiment with drugs, get pregnant, or drive recklessly.
• Children who grow up without parental support, or children who have cold and distant parents, often feel deeply insecure and act out in an effort to gain attention.

happy baby: soil

• Your infant needs you to watch, listen, and respond.
  • “Interaction synchrony.” Attentive, patient interactivity actually helps your baby’s neural architecture develop in a positive way, tilting her toward emotional stability.
  • Kids who don’t experience synchronous interaction don’t grow up to be as happy and exhibit more than twice the emotional conflict in their interpersonal lives as do securely attached infants. They show less empathy and tend to be more irritable. They also get the poorest grades.
• How you deal with the emotional lives of your children has the greatest predictive power over your baby’s future happiness: your ability to detect, react to, promote, and provide instruction about emotional regulation.

6 Key Parenting Tips:

1. A demanding but warm parenting style
   • These parents are demanding, but they care a great deal about their kids. They explain their rules and encourage their children to state their reactions to them. They encourage high levels of independence, yet see that children comply with family values. These parents tend to have terrific communication skills with their children.
2. Comfort with your own emotions
   • You have to be comfortable with your emotions in order to make your kids comfortable with theirs.
3. Tracking your child’s emotions
   • Balanced emotional surveillance –parents know when their kids were happy, sad, fearful, or joyful, often without asking).  They can forecast their reactions to almost any situation and didn’t pay too much attention (feeling smothered).
4. Verbalizing emotions
   • Labeling emotions calms big feelings.  E.g. “We have a word for this feeling. It’s …”
   • Practice verbalizing your feelings – be a great role model for your children.
5. Running toward emotions
   • Parents do not judge emotions.
   • Parents acknowledge the emotions.
   • Parents know that behavior is a choice, even though an emotion is not. (e.g. parents have a list of approved/disapproved actions, not emotions – can be mad, but not hit).
   • Parents see a crisis as a teachable moment.
6. Two tons of empathy
   • Describe the emotion you think you see and make a guess as to where it came from
   • The more empathy your child sees, the more socially competent he’ll become, and the happier he’ll be.
7. Acknowledge, name, and empathize with emotions. Save judgment for any unacceptable behavior arising from emotions.

moral baby

• Your child has an innate sense of right and wrong.
• In the brain, regions that process emotions and regions that guide decision making work together to mediate moral awareness. Lose emotions and you lose decision making.
• How parents handle rules is key: 1. realistic, clear expectations; consistent, 2. swift consequences for rule violations; and 3. Praise good behavior
• Children are most likely to internalize moral behavior if parents explain why a rule and its consequences exist.

1. Clear Expectations (CAP):
   • Clarity: Create physical chart with rules and expectations written right on it.
   • Accepting: Don’t yell at your kids. Need calm and measured response to get behavior change.
   • Praise: You can increase the frequency of a desired behavior if you reinforce the behavior. Praising the absence of a bad behavior is just as important as praising the presence of good one.

2. Swift punishment

• How do we correct any behavior we don’t like — and get the child to internalize the change? Discipline.
• Punishment by application – Letting them make mistakes (play in snow without socks and shoes)
• Punishment by removal – Taking away the toys

Four Effective Guidelines to Punishment

1. It must be punishment.  Punishment should be firm.  This does NOT mean child abuse.
2. It must be consistent. The punishment must be administered consistently — every time the rule is broken. (e.g. every time you put your hand on a hot stove, you get burned)
3. It must be swift: The closer the punishment is to the point of infraction, the faster the learning becomes.
4. It must be emotionally safe. The punishment must be administered in the warm atmosphere of emotional safety. If the kids don’t feel safe, the previous three ingredients are useless. They may even be harmful.

3. Rules that are explained

• Parents who provide clear, consistent boundaries whose reasons are always explained generally produce moral kids.
• E.g: “Don’t touch the dog, or you’ll get a time – out. The dog has a bad temper, and I don’t want you to get bitten.”
• Spanking causes more behavioral problems than other types of punishment, producing more aggressive, more depressed, more anxious children with lower IQs.

sleepy baby

• Having a consistent bedtime routine around 6 months improves baby sleep
• Create a series of predictable bedtime rituals. These rituals can be almost anything, from singing favorite lullabies to turning all the lights in the house down low.
• Nighttime Attachment Parenting (NAP) or Crying It Out (CIO) has pros and cons. 
• When it comes to NAP/co – sleeping, studies have found that co – sleeping babies cry less. However, studies also have found that both parent and infant sleep more poorly, with more interruptions per unit of time for each.

Conclusion

• The first theme is empathy. Empathy is enabled by the ability to understand someone else’s motivations and behaviors, as this little girl did:
• The answer is the second central theme of this book. What you should pay attention to are your child’s emotions.
  • We talked about how strong emotional regulation actually improves a child’s academic performance.
  • That’s because it improves executive – function behaviors such as impulse control and planning for the future, which in turn affects grades.
  • Emotional regulation also predicts a child’s future happiness, a notion developed in the Happy chapters.
  • Be willing to enter into your child’s world on a regular basis and to empathize with what your child is feeling.

practical tips

• Reading for Game Time— digital games are off – limits except for one condition. Children can “buy” a certain amount time from the time spent reading an actual book. Every hour spent reading could purchase a certain amount of game time.
• Instruments, singing, whatever — make music a consistent part of your child’s experience. Long – term musical exposure has been shown to greatly aid a child’s perception of others’ emotions.