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

by John Medina

Since most professionals do not advocate any sleep interventions until after 6 months of age, object permanence may not be an issue by the time you have to decide whether you are in the NAP or CIO corner of the ring.

The little attachment work that has been done suggests that kids turn out just fine whether you co-sleep with them or practice some form of crying it out.

Can I stick with it? One of the most consistent research findings about CIO, besides the fact that it works, is that CIO is very hard on parents.

Since you have picked up this book with the idea that you wanted clear science to guide your decisions, CIO methodologies have been the ones most rigorously tested.

The protocol is especially useful if you have a child still struggling with sleep issues at the half-year mark. It is based on everything we have talked about in these previous paragraphs.

John Medina’s plan: Test before you invest Step 1. Choose a side before baby comes into the world

Step 2. Start with a modified NAP style

Whether you also co-sleep during the night and wear a sling during the day depends on what you decided in Step 1. If you have decided that needs and wants are the same thing for the first year, engage the NAP model full tilt. Share both your shoulder and your bed.

Step 3. At 3 months old, record your baby’s sleep habits

For the first three months, you are practicing on-demand parenting, but that doesn’t have to be your permanent reaction. For the next three months, make notes about the changes you see in your baby, and get ready to adapt.

Step 4. At 6 months old, make a decision

Sleep interventions are mostly useless until baby’s brain is ready. If you try to intervene before that time, you may end up fighting biological forces over which you have very little control.

At the six-month mark, go down one of two paths: A) Take Sears seriously

If you and your baby have settled into sleep habits that fit your lifestyle and family needs well, fully embrace the Sears methodology. This might be an easy transition, for you have been doing a modified version of his on-demand counsel for the past six months. Sears explains what to do in greater detail in The Baby Book: Everything You Need to Know about Y...

Take Ferber seriously If you and your baby have settled into a sleep pattern that does not fit your lifestyle and family needs well, it is time for a change—especially if you have decided that baby’s wants and needs are not necessarily the same thing. Consider one of the CIO methodologies, either camping out or the graduated extinction. (As stated earlier, researcher...

So ask your pediatrician to rule out any physical problem before you implement a CIO strategy.

by the seventh day you see no improvement, or things have gotten substantially worse, you are supposed to stop the program and consider alternative solutions. The book with the most detailed protocol is Ferber’s book Solve Your Child’s Sleep Problems. Buy it, read it, and get started on your journey.

Step 5. Deploy, evaluate,...

Continue to write down what you are doing and how baby is reacting so that you can remember what is occurring (the first thing to go w...

If your baby is still not sleeping through the night, change strategies. There are many dialects of NAP styles, and many CIO styles, too. Consider this adaptation to change normal.

It is the largest lesson of Parenting 101: The instant you decide to bring a child into the world, you give up absolute control over the rest of your life.

This skill, Theory of Mind, is the first step to empathy. It is a consistent willingness to turn down the volume of one’s own priorities and experiences in favor of hearing another’s.

In the Smart chapters, we discovered that it takes years of high-quality face time and practice with interpersonal interaction to build a child’s ability to decode faces and other nonverbal cues.

Open-ended learning environments—with plenty of interactive, imaginative play—help provide the face time that develops these skills. Television, video games, and text messages, by definition, do not.

What you should pay attention to are your child’s emotions.

The mother chose in that instant to pay close attention to her son’s emotions. She penetrated her son’s psychological space and empathized with him—that’s the first theme—but what she chose to focus on once she got there was his emotional life. She empathized with his obvious feelings of rejection. Mom did not try to hide them, neutralize them, or throw stones at them. This consistent choice separates the superstar parents from the rest.

Be willing to enter into your child’s world on a regular basis and to empathize with what your child is feeling.

If you also create a set of rules and enforce them with consistency and warmth, you have virtually everything you need to start your parenting journey.

There may be as many different types of playrooms as there are families, but every one of them should have the following design element: lots of choices. A place for drawing. A place for painting. Musical instruments. A wardrobe hanging with costumes. Blocks. Picture books. Tubes and gears. Anything where a child can be safely let loose, joyously free to explore whatever catches her fancy.

A full description of the Tools program is available here: www.mscd.edu/extendedcampus/toolsofthemind

Say, “Wow, you really worked hard” Get into the habit of rewarding the intellectual exertion your child puts into a given task rather than his or her native intellectual resources.

Help your child make friends of the same age Learning to make friends takes years of practice. Kids consistently exposed to the delightful rough-and-tumble of other children get experience with personalities who are as innocent as they are, as selfish as they are, as desirous of peer interactions as they are. So arrange plenty of playdates. Let your children interact with multiple age groups, too, and a variety of people. But pay attention to how much your child can handle at one time. Social experiences must be tailored to individual temperaments.

John Gottman’s book Raising an Emotionally Intelligent Child: The Heart of Parenting.

If your children are surrounded by people who can talk about feelings, they will be able to verbalize their feelings, too—invaluable to you when they reach puberty.

“C” stands for Clarity. The rules are clear, reasonable, and unambiguous.

“A” stands for Accepting. The rules are delivered in a consistently warm and accepting environment.

“P” stands for Praise. Every time a child follows a rule, reinforce the behavior. This includes praising the absence of a behavior, such as when a child doesn’t yell in a restaurant.

Explain verbally to your children the reasons for your rules. This allows kids to generalize the lessons to other situations, which leads to moral internalization.