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

by John Medina

If you want your baby to get into a great college, praise his or her effort instead.

Truth: The greatest predictor of happiness is having friends. How do you make and keep friends? By being good at deciphering nonverbal communication. (See “Helping your child make friends,” page 165.) Learning a musical instrument (see page 207) boosts the ability by 50 percent. Text messaging (see page 149) may destroy it.

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.

Two styles indeed. This argues for 100 percent cooperation between father and mother about how their children will be raised.

Researchers now think it could make the baby smarter, too. One study, yet to be replicated, looked at children whose mothers suffered from major nausea and vomiting during pregnancy. When the children reached school age, 21 percent scored

130 or more points on a standard IQ test, a level considered gifted. If their mothers had no morning sickness, only 7 percent of kids did that well. The researchers have a theory—still to be proved—about why. Two hormones that stimulate a woman to vomit may also act like neural fertilizer for the developing brain. The more vomiting, the more fertilizer; hence, the greater effect on IQ.

Emma’s husband was obsessed with soccer, particularly the Manchester United team, also called the Reds. This condition was made worse with the introduction of a child. Emma actually cited it as grounds for the divorce. Her husband responded, “I have to admit that nine times out of 10, I would rather watch the Reds than have sex, but that’s no disrespect to Emma.”

There is hope. We know four of the most important sources of marital conflict in the transition to parenthood: sleep loss, social isolation, unequal workload, and depression.

Those are just two examples illustrating that infants come equipped with an amazing array of cognitive abilities—and are blessed with many intellectual gadgets capable of extending those abilities.

Yes, your children are constantly observing you. They are profoundly influenced by what they record. And that can quickly turn from funny to serious, especially when mommy and daddy start fighting.

“Children have never been good at listening to their parents, but they have never failed to imitate them.”

When you first encounter somebody’s “hot” feelings, execute two simple steps: 1. Describe the emotional changes you think you see. 2. Make a guess as to where those emotional changes came from.

These parents may or may not get their kid into Harvard, but they will not get their kid into a custody battle. They enjoy the highest probability for raising smart, happy, morally aware kids.

Thomas Stoltz Harvey,

Like Mom’s stew, 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.”

Many ingredients make up the human intelligence stew, and I’d like to describe five that I think you 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

There is a type of risk taking that does, however, and the research community calls it “functional impulsivity.”

Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking.

These flashes are called micro-expressions, facial gestures that last a fraction of a second but tend to reveal our truest feelings in response to rapid-fire questioning.

There are four nutrients you will want in your behavioral formula, adjusting them as your baby gets older: breast-feeding, talking to your baby, guided play, and praising effort rather than accomplishment.

We do not survive so that we can learn. We learn so that we can survive.

Effort also involves impulse control and a persistent ability to delay gratification. Sounds like executive function, spiced with a few unique ingredients.

Kids praised for effort complete 50 percent more hard math problems than kids praised for intelligence.

First, your child begins to perceive mistakes as failures. Because you told her that success was due to some static ability over which she had no control, she starts to think of failure (such as a bad grade) as a static thing, too—now perceived as a lack of ability. Successes are thought of as gifts rather than the governable product of effort.

Second, perhaps as a reaction to the first, she becomes more concerned with looking smart than with actually learning something.

Third, she becomes less willing to confront the reasons behind any deficiencies, less willing to make an effort. Such kids have a difficult time admitting errors. There is simply too much at stake for failure.

On the successful completion of a test, they should not have said, “I’m so proud of you. You’re such a bright kid.” That appeals to a fixed, uncontrollable intellectual trait. It’s called “fixed mindset” praise. His parents should have said, “I’m so proud of you. You must have studied a lot.” This appeals to controllable effort. It’s called “growth mindset” praise.

This ability to reproduce a behavior, after witnessing it only once, is called deferred imitation. Deferred imitation is an astonishing skill that develops rapidly. A 13-month-old child can remember an event a week after a single exposure.

They easily form new connections and break off existing ones, a property known as neuroplasticity.

with four phases of cognitive development in kids, which he called sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, and formal operational.

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 military and law enforcement. • Prodigy parents. Financially successful and deeply suspicious about the education system, these parents want to guard their kids against the negative effects of schooling.

Children are extraordinarily reactive to parental expectations, aching to please and fulfill when little; aching to resist and rebel when older.

If little kids sense a parent wants them to accomplish some intellectual feat for which their brains are not yet ready, they are inexorably forced into a corner. This coerces the brain to revert to “lower-level” thinking strategies, creating counterfeit habits that may have to be unlearned later.

Pushy parents often become disappointed, displeased, or angry when their kids don’t perform—reactions children can detect at an astonishingly young age and want desperately to avoid.

“The only thing that really matters in life [is] your relationships to other people.”

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

These findings about the importance of human relationships—in all their messy glory—greatly simplify our question about how to raise happy kids. You will need to teach your children how to socialize effectively—how to make friends, how to keep friends—if you want them to be happy.

In the textbook definition, emotions are simply the activation of neurological circuits that prioritize our perceptual world into two categories: things we should pay attention to and things we can safely ignore. Feelings are the subjective psychological experiences that emerge from this activation.

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.

Mirror neurons may also be profoundly involved in both the ability to interpret nonverbal cues, particularly facial expressions, and the ability to understand someone else’s intentions. This second talent falls under an umbrella of skills called Theory of Mind,

David Lykken, a behavioral geneticist at the University of Minnesota. Some children’s set points are programmed to high; they are naturally happy regardless of the circumstances life throws at them. Some children’s set points are programmed to low. They are by nature depressive, regardless of the circumstances life throws at them. Everybody else is in the middle.

And if your infant is highly reactive? She might seem hard to parent, but there’s a silver lining. As these highly reactive children navigated through school, Kagan noticed, most were academically successful, even if they were a bucket of nerves.

Attentive, patient interactivity actually helps your baby’s neural architecture develop in a positive way, tilting her toward emotional stability. The brain of a baby who doesn’t experience synchronous interaction can develop very differently.

Did certain parenting skills correlate so strongly with the hoped-for outcomes that they could predict how any kid turned out?

For our purposes, the chicken is your child’s emotional life. The spices, six of them, are your parenting behaviors. When parents properly spice this chicken on a regular basis, they increase their probability of raising a happy kid. Emotions must be central Parents face many issues on a daily basis in the raising of kids, but not all of them affect how their children turn out. There is one that does. How you deal with the emotional lives of your children—

The critical issue is your behavior when your children’s emotions become intense (Gottman would say “hot”) enough to push you out of your comfort zone.

Responsiveness. This is the degree to which parents respond to their kids with support, warmth, and acceptance. Warm parents mostly communicate their affection for their kids. Hostile parents mostly communicate their rejection of their kids.

Responsive plus demanding. The best of the lot. These parents are demanding, but they care a great deal about their kids. They explain their rules and encourage their children to state their reactions to them. They encourage high levels of independence, yet see that children comply with family values. These parents tend to have terrific communication skills with their children.

A meta-emotion is how you feel about feelings (“meta” literally means ascending, or looking from above). Some people welcome emotional experiences, considering them an important and enriching part of life’s journey. Others think that emotions make people weak and embarrassed and that emotions should be suppressed. Some people think a few emotions are OK, like joy and happiness, but some should stay on a behavioral no-fly list; anger, sadness, and fear are popular choices.