More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
John Medina
Read between
February 17 - March 15, 2020
The good news
What you will take away from the experience will not be how hard having a baby was but how vulnerable to it you became.
How to protect your relationship
James Baldwin’s quote: “Children have never been good at listening to their parents, but they have never failed to imitate them.”
As long as you are willing to put in some effort, babies are not some terminal disease from which no marriage safely recovers.
In 1972, sociologists Richard Nisbett and Edward Jones hypothesized that perceptual asymmetry lay at the heart of most conflicts.
People view their own behaviors as originating from situations beyond their control, but they view other people’s behaviors as originating from inherent personality traits.
We are amazingly blind to the limits of extrospective information.
Introspective knowledge clashing with extrospective information is the Big Bang of most human conflicts.
Choosing to empathize—at its heart it is simply a choice—is so powerful, it can change the developing nervous systems of infants whose parents regularly practice it.
Growing and robust research literature describes empathy, defining it with three key ingredients:
Affect detection. First, a person must detect a change in the emotional disposition of someone else. In the behavioral sciences, “affect” means the external expression of an emotion or mood, generally associated with an idea or an action.
Imaginative transposition. Once a person detects an emotional change, he transposes what he observes onto his own psychological interiors. He “tries on” the perceived feelings as if they were clothes, then observes how he would react given similar circumstances.
Boundary formation. The person who is empathizing realizes at all times that the emotion is happening to the other person, never to the observer.
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.
But differences must be grasped, even if no problems are solved. One of the reasons empathy works so well is because it does not require a solution. It requires only understanding.
Gottman, among other researchers, discovered a similar effect in child rearing. He has said, “Empathy not only matters; it is the foundation of effective parenting.”
When you first encounter somebody’s “hot” feelings, execute two simple steps: 1. Describe the emotional changes you think you see. 2. Make a guess as to where those emotional changes came from.
An ounce of prevention Couples who have solid relationships defined by empathy and who prepare for the transition to parenthood avoid the worst of the Four Grapes of Wrath. Such preparation creates the best domestic ecology for the child’s healthy brain development.
smart baby: seeds brain rule Feeling safe enables learning
human intelligence has two essential components, both fundamentally linked to our evolutionary need to survive. The first is the ability to record information. This is sometimes called “crystallized intelligence.” It involves the various memory systems of the brain, which combine to create a richly structured database.
The second component is the capacity to adapt that information to unique situations.
This capacity for reasoning and problem solving is termed “fluid intelligence.”
Many ingredients make up the human intelligence stew, and I’d like to describe five that I think you would do well to consider as you contemplate your child’s intellectual gifts. They are: The desire to explore Self-control Creativity Verbal communication Interpreting nonverbal communication
“You can summarize all of the skills we’ve noted in one word: ‘inquisitiveness.’ I spent 20 years studying great global leaders, and that was the big common denominator.”
you, as a parent, can encourage your child’s natural desire to explore—starting with understanding how inquisitiveness contributes to your child’s intellectual success.
Executive function controls planning, foresight, problem solving, and goal setting.
Mischel and his many colleagues discovered that a child’s executive function is a critical component of intellectual prowess.
Executive function relies on a child’s ability to filter out distracting (in this case, tempting) thoughts, which is critical in environments that are oversaturated with sensory stimuli and myriad on-demand choices.
Successful entrepreneurs were attracted to smart people whose educational backgrounds were very different from their own.
behaviors. The entrepreneurs were natural experts in the art of interpreting extrospective cues: gestures and facial expressions.
Want your baby to grow up to be a successful innovator? Make sure she has nonverbal skills down cold—and an inquisitiveness to match.
Intelligence has many ingredients, including self-control, creativity, communication skills, and a desire to explore.
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.
Brain research tells us there are also several toxins: pushing your child to perform tasks his brain is not developmentally ready to take on; stressing your child to the point of a psychological state termed “learned helplessness”; and, for the under-2 set, television.
the profound need to strike a balance between intellectual freedom and w...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
This overarching goal predicts many things, and here’s the most important: If you want a well-educated child, you must create an environment of safety.
Four brain boosters
1. Breast-feed for a year
Breast milk is the nutritional equivalent of a magic bullet for a developing baby.
The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that all mothers breast-feed exclusively for the first six months of their babies’ lives, continue breast-feeding as their kids start taking on solids, and wean them after a year.
2. Talk to your baby—a lot
Speak to your children as often as you can. It is one of the most well-established findings in all of the developmental literature.
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.
“Now we’re going to change your diaper.” “Look at the beautiful tree!” “What is that?” You can count steps out loud as you walk up a staircase. Just get in the habit of talking.
Though parents don’t always realize they do it, this kind of speech helps a baby’s brain learn language.
Parentese also makes the sound of each vowel more distinct; this exaggeration allows your baby to hear words as distinct entities and discriminate better between them.
3. Hurray for play!
From 1981 to 1997, the amount of free time parents gave their kids shrank by about a quarter.
