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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
John Medina
Started reading
May 22, 2025
infants have their parents’ behaviors in their sights virtually from the moment they come into this world.
1966,
Nicolae Ceausescu
pediatric Auschwitz.”
If the children were adopted before the fourth month of life, they acted like every other happy kid you know. If they were adopted after the eighth month of life, they acted like gang members.
Marital conflict is fully capable of hurting a baby’s brain development.
Infants younger than 6 months old can usually detect that something is wrong.
Babies in emotionally unstable homes are much less able to positively respond to new stimuli, calm themselves, and recover from stress—in short, regulate their own emotions.
infants younger than 8 months who are taken from severely traumatized homes and placed in empathic, nurturing environments can show improvements in their stress-hormone regulation in as little as 10 weeks.
Children from divorced households are 25 percent more likely to abuse drugs by the time they are 14.
Reconcile in front of your kids
The four biggest reasons you’ll fight
sleep loss • social isolation • unequal workload • depression
Sleep-deprived people
typically suffer a 91 percent loss in their ability to regulate strong emotions compared with controls.
Loneliness, painful and ubiquitous, is experienced by as many as 80 percent of new parents. After the birth of a child, couples have only about one-third as much time alone together as they had when they were childless.
“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.”
A typical stay-at-home mom works 94.4 hours per week.
This may explain why, in the vast majority of cases, the increase in hostile interactions usually starts with the woman and spreads to the man.
postpartum depression also will debilitate the lively, interactive bonds that are supposed to develop between parent and child in the earliest months. Instead, the baby begins mirroring the mother’s depressive actions. It’s called reciprocal withdrawal. These children become more insecure, socially inhibited, timid, and passive
Couples who know about the Four Grapes of Wrath and who begin preparing in advance are much less likely to trample on them once baby comes home.
“Children have never been good at listening to their parents, but they have never failed to imitate them.”
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. Say a guy arrives late for a date. He is likely to ascribe his tardiness to external factors (being caught in traffic). She is likely to ascribe his tardiness to being a careless person (not taking traffic into account).
Defining empathy
Affect detection.
detect a change in the emotional disposition of someone else.
Imaginative transposition.
“tries on” the perceived feelings as if they were clothes, then observes how he would react given similar circumstances.
Boundary formation.
realizes at all times that the emotion is happening to the other person, never to the observer.
One of the reasons empathy works so well is because it does not require a solution. It requires only understanding.
“Empathy not only matters; it is the foundation of effective parenting.”
“empathy reflex”
Describe the emotional changes you think you see. 2. Make a guess as to where those emotional changes came from.
system. • The four most common sources of marital turbulence are: sleep loss, social isolation, unequal distribution of household workload, and depression. Awareness of these allows couples to create a buffer against them.
Problem solving and sensory processing do not look the same in any two brains.
A baby IQ test
In one test, preverbal infants are allowed to feel an object hidden from their view in a box. If the infants can then correctly identify the object by sight
called cross-modal transfer—they will score higher on later IQ tests than infants who can’t. In another test, measuring something researchers call visual recognition memory, infants are set in front of a checkerboard square. This is an oversimplification, but the longer the infants stare, the higher their IQ is likely to be. Sound unlikely? These measurements, taken between 2 and 8 months of age, correctly predicted IQ scores at age 18!
Take 1000 and add 40 to it. Now add another 1000. Now add 30. And another 1000. Now add 20. Now add another 1000. Now add 10. What is the total? Did you say 5,000? If so, you’re in good company. Research shows that 98 percent of people who tackle this question get that answer. But it is wrong. The correct answer is 4,100.
IQ is malleable. IQ has been shown to vary over one’s life span,
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 involves the ability to improvise, based in part on the ability to recall and recombine specific parts of the database. This capacity for reasoning and problem solving is termed “fluid intelligence.”
the potent combination of memorization and extemporization conferred on us two survival-rich behaviors: the ability to learn rapidly from our mistakes and the ability...
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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
The desire to explore
Visionaries had in common five characteristics,
An unusual ability to associate.
An annoying habit of consistently asking “what if.” And “why not” and “how come you’re doing it this way.”
An unquenchable desire to tinker and experiment.
