More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
John Medina
Read between
February 17 - March 15, 2020
We now know that open-ended activities are as important to a child’s neural growth as protein.
Not just any type of open-ended play will give you the extraordinary findings. The secret sauce is not unstructured, do-anything-you-want play.
the type of play that gives all the cognitive benefits is a type that focuses on impulse control and self-regulation
The type of play is called mature dramatic play, or MDP. To get the benefits in those bullet points, MDP has to be engaged in many hours a day.
The cascade of confirmatory research that followed these findings led directly to the Tools of the Mind program. It has a number of moving parts, but the three most relevant to our discussion involve planning play, direct instruction on pretending, and the type of environment in which the instruction takes place.
4. Praise effort, not IQ
What separates high performers from low performers is not some divine spark. It is, the most recent findings suggest, a much more boring—but ultimately more controllable—factor. All other things being equal, it is effort. Good old-fashioned neural elbow grease. Deliberate practice.
What you praise defines what your child perceives success to be.
Deferred imitation is an astonishing skill that develops rapidly. A 13-month-old child can remember an event a week after a single exposure.
The fact is, the amount of TV a child should watch before the age of 2 is zero.
The linkage used to be controversial (maybe aggressive people watch more TV than others?), but we now see that it’s an issue of our deferred-imitation abilities coupled with a loss of impulse control.
For each hour of TV watched daily by children under age 4, the risk increased 9 percent that they would engage in bullying behavior by the time they started school. This is poor emotional regulation at work.
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.
1. Keep the TV off before the child turns 2. I
2. After age 2, help your children choose the shows (and other screen-based exposures) they will experience.
3. Watch the chosen TV show with your children, interacting with the media and helping your children to 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.
Parents who start their kids out on a vigorous exercise schedule are more likely to have children for whom exercise becomes a steady, even lifelong, habit—up to 1½ times more likely, depending upon the study.
Encouraging an active lifestyle is one of the best gifts you can give your child.
They’re an element of hyper-parenting—another ingredient you want to limit in your smart-baby fertilizer.
No two brains develop at the same rate
Einstein, arguably as bright as they come, is rumored not to have spoken in complete sentences until he was 3. (His family had christened him “the dopey one!”)
Developmental psychologist David Elkind, now professor emeritus of child development at Tufts University, has divided overachieving moms and dads into categories. Four of them are: Gourmet parents. These parents are high achievers who want their kids to succeed as they did. College-degree parents. Your classic “hot-housers,” these parents are related to Gourmets but believe that the sooner academic training starts, the better. Outward-bound parents. Wanting to provide their kids with physical survival skills because the world is such a dangerous place, these parents are often involved in the
...more
1. Extreme expectations stunt higher-level thinking
2. Pressure can extinguish curiosity
Children are natural explorers. But if parents supply only rigid educational expectations, interest will be transformed into appeasement.
3. Continual anger or disappointment becomes toxic stress
Write this across your heart before your child comes into the world: Parenting is a not a race. Kids are not proxies for adult success. Competition can be inspiring, but brands of it can wire your child’s brain in a toxic way. Comparing your kids with your friends’ kids will not get them, or you, where you want to go.
happy baby: seeds brain rule Make new friends but keep the old
More research has since confirmed and extended these simple findings. In addition to satisfying relationships, other behaviors that predict happiness include: a steady dose of altruistic acts making lists of things for which you are grateful, which generates feelings of happiness in the short term cultivating a general “attitude of gratitude,” which generates feelings of happiness in the long term sharing novel experiences with a loved one deploying a ready “forgiveness reflex” when loved ones slight you If
This suggests something practical and relieving: Help your children get into a profession that can at least make around $50,000 a year.
They are also two of the most predictive for social competency: emotional regulation our old friend, empathy
We are most likely to maintain deep, long-term relationships with people who are nice.
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.
Because kids often express their emotions indirectly, you need to consider the environmental context before you attempt to decode your child’s behavior. If you are concluding that parents need to pay a lot of attention to the emotional landscapes of their kids to understand their behavior—all to get them properly socialized—you are 100 percent correct.
you realize that there are social contexts where certain behavior is appropriate and social contexts where it is not. People who do this well generally have lots of friends. If you want your kids to be happy, you will spend lots of time teaching them how and when this filtering should occur.
Along with the ability to regulate emotions, the ability to perceive the needs of another person and respond with empathy plays a huge role in your child’s social competence. Empathy makes good friends.
If your marriage has a three-to-one ratio of active-constructive versus toxic-conflict interactions, your relationship is nearly divorce-proof. The best marriages have a ratio of five to one.
Could happiness or sadness be genetic?
Parents have known for centuries that babies come to this world with an inborn temperament.
Many researchers think temperament provides the emotional and behavioral building blocks upon which personalities are constructed.
As these highly reactive children navigated through school, Kagan noticed, most were academically successful, even if they were a bucket of nerves. They made lots of friends. They were less likely to experiment with drugs, get pregnant, or drive recklessly.
As long as you play an active, loving role in shaping behavior, even the most emotionally finicky among us will grow up well.
How can a kid go through all that and turn out OK?
Three resiliency genes
Slow MAOA: Lessoning the pain of a trauma
of a gene called MAOA, which stands for monoamine oxidase A. There are two versions of this gene, one we’ll call “slow” and the other “fast.” If the child has the slow version, she is surprisingly immune to the debilitating effects of her childhood.
DRD4-7 : A guard against insecurity
A gene called DRD4, which stands for dopamine receptor D4, is deeply involved.
If children have a variation of this gene called DRD4-7, this insecurity never develops.
