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by
John Medina
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February 17 - March 15, 2020
Research tells us that parents must have clear rules and swift consequences for rule violations.
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One of the chief complaints new parents have in the transition to parenthood is the great isolation they feel from their social circle.
If as a parent you feel as though you can’t do it alone, that’s because you were never meant to.
If you understand that the brain has a deep need for relating to others, and that the brain is interested foremost in survival, the information in this book—the things that best develop your baby’s brain—will make sense.
Balance Here’s something you can try at home if you are eight months pregnant or if you have a baby younger than 5 months old. If the infant has already arrived, place him on his back. Then gently lift up both of his legs, or both of his arms, and let them drop back to the bed of their own weight. His arms will usually fling out from the sides of his body, thumbs flexed, palms up, with a startled look on his face. This is called the Moro reflex.
The absence of a good solid Moro can be a sign of a neurological disorder. Infants need to be able to do it within five months of birth. It is time limited, though; its persistence beyond five months is also a sign of a neurological disorder.
This is called flavor programming, and you can do it soon after your baby is born, too. Lactating mothers who eat green beans and peaches while nursing produce weaned toddlers with the same preferences.
1. Gain just the right weight You’re pregnant, so you need to eat more food. And if you don’t overdo it, you will grow a smarter baby.
2. Eat just the right foods
So you can see why only two supplements thus far have enough data behind them to support an influence on brain development in utero. One is the folic acid taken around conception. The other: omega-3 fatty acids. Omega-3s are a critical component of the membranes that make up a neuron; without it, neurons don’t function very well.
3. Avoid too much stress
Maternal stress can profoundly influence prenatal development.
Moderate stress in small amounts, the type most women feel in a typical pregnancy, actually appears to be good for infants.
It may sound strange to say, but a fit mom has a much better chance of having a smart baby—or at least one best able to mobilize his or her IQ—than an unfit mom.
Obstetricians recommends 30 minutes or more of moderate exercise per day.
relationship brain rule Start with empathy
Once a kid comes into the world, the calculus of daily living coughs up new equations.
It’s rarely talked about, but it’s a fact: Couples’ hostile interactions sharply increase in baby’s first year.
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.
In 1957, he published a paper showing that 83 percent of married couples experienced more turbulence in their relationships with the birth of a baby—some couples severely so.
Marital quality, which peaks in the last trimester of a first pregnancy, decreases anywhere from 40 percent to 67 percent in the infant’s first year.
We know four of the most important sources of marital conflict in the transition to parenthood: sleep loss, social isolation, unequal workload, and depression.
one of the biggest predictors of marital bliss appears to be the agreement to have kids in the first place.
planning status and pre-pregnancy marital satisfaction generally protect marriages from these declines.”
Babies are completely at the mercy of the people who brought them into the world. This understanding has a behavioral blast radius in infants that obscures every other behavioral priority they have.
If the infant is marinated in safety—an emotionally stable home—the system will cook up beautifully. If not, normal stress-coping processes fail.
Infants younger than 6 months old can usually detect that something is wrong. They can experience physiological changes—such as increases in blood pressure, heart rate, and stress hormones—just like adults.
the wounding but never the bandaging. Parents who practice bandaging 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 biggest reasons you’ll fight
I’ll call them the Four Grapes of Wrath. They are: sleep loss social isolation unequal workload depression
1. Sleep loss
It is hard to overestimate the effect that sleep loss exerts over couples in the transition to parenthood.
Write this across your heart: Babies have no sleep schedule when they are born.
A predictable schedule may not make itself visible for half a year, maybe longer, though most babies show some kind of organizing pattern by 3 months old.
Even after a year, 50 percent still require some form of nighttime parental intervention.
moms and dads may go for weeks on end with only half the hours of sleep per night they need. That’s not healthy for their bodies. Not for their marriages, either.
Sleep-deprived people become irritable—far more irritable—than people who are not. Subjects saddled with sleep debt typically suffer a 91 percent loss in their ability to regulate strong emotions compared with controls.
2. Social isolation
Social isolation is the lonely result of the energy crisis that faces most new parents.
Loneliness, painful and ubiquitous, is experienced by as many as 80 percent of new parents.
Outside of their spouses, typical new parents have less than 90 minutes per day of contact time with another adult. A whopping 34 percent spend their entire days in isolation.
Belonging to multiple social groups is a critical buffer. But those relationships are most likely
“Every time we get overly busy with work and family, the first thing we do is let go of friendships with other women. We push them right to the back burner. That’s really a mistake because women are such a source of strength to each other.”
3. Unequal workload
The lack of contribution is so great that having a husband around actually creates an extra seven hours of work per week for women.
This imbalance in workload—along with financial conflicts, which may be related—is one of the most frequently cited sources of marital conflict.
4. Depression
About half of all new mothers experience a transient postpartum sadness that vanishes within a few days.
another 10 percent to 20 percent of mothers experience something much deeper and infinitely more troubling. These women are dogged by feelings of deepening despair, sorrow, and worthlessness, even if their marriages are doing well. Such painful, bewildering feelings last for weeks and months.
Women experiencing overwhelming anxiety, moodiness, or sadness require intervention.
