Brain Rules for Baby: How to Raise a Smart and Happy Child from Zero to Five

by John Medina

Every brain is literally wired differently. No two kids are going to react to the same situation in an identical manner. So there is no such thing as one-size-fits-all parenting advice. Because of this individuality, I appeal to you to get to know your children. That means spending a lot of time with them. Knowing how they behave and how their behaviors change over time is the only way to discover what will and will not work in raising them.

“It just jumped out at me!” Brott exclaimed to his mother. Brott had been at the podium of a symphony orchestra, conducting a piece of music for the first time, when the cellist began to play. He instantly knew he’d heard this piece before. This was no casual reminder of some similar but forgotten work: Brott could predict exactly what musical phrase was coming next. He could anticipate the flow of the entire work during the course of the rehearsal; he knew how to conduct it even when he lost his place in the score. Freaking out, he called his mother, a professional cellist. She asked for the name of the piece of music, then burst out laughing. It was the piece she had been rehearsing when she was pregnant with him. The cello was up against her late-pregnancy mid-abdomen, a structure filled with sound-conducting fluids, fully capable of relaying musical information to her unborn son. His developing brain was sensitive enough to record the musical memories. “All the scores I knew by sight were the ones she had played while she was pregnant with me,” Brott later said in an interview. Incredible stuff for an organ not even 0 years old.

Eating a balanced meal, with a heavy emphasis on fruits and vegetables, is probably still the best advice for pregnant women.

Household duties increase three times as much for women as for men when baby comes home. The lack of contribution is so great that having a husband around actually creates an extra seven hours of work per week for women. That’s not true the other way around. A wife saves her husband about an hour of housework per week.

“Making a decision to have a child—it’s momentous. It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body.”

Research shows that 70 percent of marital conflicts are not resolvable; the disagreement remains. As long as the participants learn to live with their differences—one of the biggest challenges in marriage—this is not necessarily bad news. 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. That’s extremely important to recognize. If there is wiggle room for negotiation only 30 percent of the time, empathy becomes the premier exercise in any couple’s conflict-management workout. That’s probably why its absence is such a powerful predictor of divorce.