Brain Rules for Baby: how to raise a smart and happy child from zero to five

by John Medina

You know by now that the brain’s chief interest is safety. When rules are not administered in safety, the brain jettisons any behavioral notion except one: escaping the threat. When rules are administered by warm, accepting parents, moral seeds are more likely to take root.

Scientists (and good parents) discovered long ago that 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 a good one.

When warm, accepting parents set clear and reasonable standards for their kids, then offer them praise for behaving well, children present strong evidence of an internalized moral construct, usually by age 4 or 5.

Letting them make mistakes: Punishment by application

Research shows that children internalize behaviors best when they are allowed to make their own mistakes and feel the consequences.

Taking away the toys: Punishment by removal

Either type of punishment, under proper conditions, can produce powerful, enduring changes in behavior.

It must be punishment. The punishment should be firm.

The aversive stimulus must, in fact, be aversive to be effective.

It must be consistent. The punishment must be administered consistently—every time the rule is broken.

Consistency must be there not only from one day to the next but from one caregiver to the next.

Mom and Dad and Nanny and stepparents and grandparents and in-laws all need to be on the same page regarding both the household rules and the consequences for disobeying them.

You can’t give them the opportunity to play one caregiver against another if you want them to have a moral backbone.

It must be swift. If

The closer the punishment is to the point of infraction, the faster the learning becomes.

It must be emotionally safe.

When kids feel secure even in the raw presence of parental correction, punishment ha...

This evolutionary need for safety is so powerful, the presence of rules themselves often communicates safety to children. “Oh, they actually care about me” is how the child (at almost any age in childhood) v...

Rules that are explained

Without rationale “Don’t touch the dog, or you’ll get a time-out.” With rationale “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.”

Aaron will make an internal attribution for this uneasiness. Examples might include: “I’d feel awful if Jimmy failed his test,” “I wouldn’t like it if he did that to me,” “I am better than that,” and so on. Your child’s internal attribution originates from whatever rationale you supplied during the correction.

No such thing as one-size-fits-all

The temperament of the child turns out to be a major factor. For toddlers possessed of a fearless and impulsive outlook on life, inductive discipline can be too weak. Kids with a more fearful temperament may react catastrophically to the sharp correctives their fearless siblings shrug off. They need to be handled much more gently.

do know that inductive parenting takes effort. Hitting a kid does not. In my opinion, hitting is a lazy form of parenting.

Parents whose rules issue from warm acceptance and whose rationales are consistently explained end up being perceived as reasonable and fair, rather than as capricious and dictatorial.

sleepy baby brain rule Test before you invest

After the fourth sleep-deprived night in a row, you may begin to crave sleep like an exhausted swimmer craves oxygen.

The variables predicting successful sleep consolidation in pediatric populations are so numerous, we haven’t even finished cataloging them.

That’s why there are so many books on the subject: everybody is currently guessing.

Instead of gradual cycles of descent and ascent, newborns have only two speeds, christened by sleep researcher Richard Ferber as “active sleep” and “quiet sleep.”

Some researchers think the altered waking/sleeping patterns initially concentrate on getting a consistent food supply. Newborns’ task is Herculean. They need to eat about every two to three hours, some much more often.

Baby may sleep, but only after the tank has been topped off.

Some babies are energized by food, in which case they are not ready to sleep after a midnight snack; they are ready to play, cry, or otherwise demand attention.

When babies first start nodding off, unlike adults, they immediately enter into active sleep. For most newborns, this active state lasts 20 or 30 minutes. Then the quiet sleep mode, similar to adult NREM sleep, kicks in. Baby’s breathing becomes deeper and more rhythmic. Baby’s eyes stop moving. Limbs go limp. They are not very easily aroused. This means you can probably put them in the crib without fear of waking them.

up. I am convinced that some infants sleep through the night fairly early in life because they are born capable of reentering their active/quiet sleep cycle without much need to consult Mom and Dad. Some have problems for months because they can’t.

Once you detect signs of sleep, don’t disrupt the process. If you are holding baby, continue to hold baby. Pay attention to how long it takes her to reach quiet sleep. Give it an extra 10 minutes as an insurance policy, and then place baby in the crib.

With most newborns, you don’t see strong evidence of something approaching a socially acceptable circadian rhythm (as measured by melatonin production) for almost three months, and nothing approaching sanity—defined as getting five straight hours of sleep—for almost six months.

It is not unusual for an infant to wake up three times a night for the first six months of his life.

Bedtime routines

Sleep experts agree that one thing helps babies make this transition: having a consistent bedtime routine.

Which side wins? At this point in sleep research, neither. NAP styles are not well studied (tough to do because parents implement them in such variable ways), and they are undergirded by attachment theory, a concept that’s in flux. CIO styles have been shown to get kids to sleep through the night more quickly, but science hasn’t weighed in on whether that’s best for baby or just more convenient for our modern culture. In the end, it’s up to you to decide what feels right, based on your baby.

Graduated extinction has undergone the most scientific scrutiny of all the styles. Overwhelmingly, the evidence shows that it works—if you define “works” as getting the child to quit crying during the night so that everyone can sleep through the night.

That’s why consistency is considered non-optional if you go down the CIO road. The fastest way to keep your child clinging to his cries at night is to make sure your attentive rewarding behavior is unpredictable.

NAP says: Make “comfort visits”

A team of researchers from the United Kingdom specifically focused on whether this approach helps infants establish sleep consolidation. The results were not reassuring. The more a parent “rescued” their infant at night, the more sleep problems the infant displayed over time. The infants displayed a marked reduction in the capacity to return independently to sleep after arousal, for example. “Comfort visits” also had consequences for childhood sleep far past the first year, other researchers discovered. Actively “rescued” children at 18 months old still had problems getting a solid night’s rest (now defined as six uninterrupted hours). Things were not substantially better when the children reached their second year of life. Excessive interference at night appeared to be a gift that kept on giving, but it was not the gift the parent wanted.

A number of laboratories studying this have uncovered a surprising finding: nocturnal breast-feeding is negatively associated with a stable sleep cycle.

When it comes to 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.

When such technology was used to evaluate infant brain activity during bed sharing, researchers uncovered why their sleep was more unsettled. Baby’s sojourns through the “quiet phase” of sleep was shorter than for infants who were not co-sleeping. They also woke up more often during that phase than their independently sleeping controls, so even the quality of the quiet phase they got was disturbed.

We used to think object permanence was not established until after baby’s first birthday. There is now convincing evidence for its formation in the first eight months of life, and maybe even the first three or four months of life.