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

by John Medina

If you want her to do well in math in her later years, the greatest thing you can do is to teach her impulse control in her early years

Myth: Continually telling your children they are smart will boost their confidence. Truth: They’ll become less willing to work on challenging problems (see “What happens when you say, ‘You’re so smart,’” page 138). If you want your baby to get into a great college, praise his or her effort instead.

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.

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.

Studies show that if you are not in shape, it takes you twice as long to transit through the “pushing phase” of labor than if you are fit.

It may sound strange to say, but a fit mom has a much better chance of having a smart baby—or at least one best able to mobilize his or her IQ—than an unfit mom.

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

Many couples will fight in front of their children but reconcile in private. This skews a child’s perceptions, even at early ages, for the child always sees the wounding but never the bandaging. Parents who practice bandaging each other after a fight, deliberately and explicitly, allow their children to model both how to fight fair and how to make up.

Regularly practice the empathy reflex. As your first response to any emotional situation, describe the emotional changes you think you see, and then make a guess as to their origins.

Researchers do believe that creativity has a few core components, however. These include the ability to perceive new relationships between old things, to conjure up ideas or things or whatever that do not currently exist.

Boys are 73 percent more likely than girls to die from accidents between birth and puberty, and they break rules more often.

Infants track these characteristics of language at an astonishingly early age. At birth, your baby can distinguish between the sounds of every language that has ever been invented.

Chomsky puts it this way: We are not born with the capacity to speak a specific language. We are born with the capacity to speak any language.

Human learning in its most native state is primarily a relational exercise. Intelligence is not developed in the electronic crucibles of cold, lifeless machines but in the arms of warm, loving people. You can literally rewire a child’s brain through exposure to relationships.

Kids with normal hearing took an American Sign Language class for nine months, in the first grade, then were administered a series of cognitive tests. Their attentional focus, spatial abilities, memory, and visual discrimination scores improved dramatically—by as much as 50 percent—compared with controls who had no formal instruction.

Today, when people have a difficult time reading the emotional information embedded in faces, we call it autism.

Intelligence has many ingredients, including self-control, creativity, communication skills, and a desire to explore.

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.

If you want a well-educated child, you must create an environment of safety.

And in a result that surprised just about everybody, studies around the world confirmed that breast-feeding, in short, makes babies smarter.

Breast-fed babies in America score on average 8 points higher than formula-fed kids when given cognitive tests, an effect still observable nearly a decade after the breast-feeding has stopped. They get better grades, too, especially in reading and writing.

Parentese is characterized by a high-pitched tone and a singsongy voice with stretched-out vowels. Though parents don’t always realize they do it, this kind of speech helps a baby’s brain learn language. Why? A speaker who has slowed down is much easier to understand, for one. Parentese also makes the sound of each vowel more distinct; this exaggeration allows your baby to hear words as distinct entities and discriminate better between them. The melodic tone helps infants separate sounds into contrasting categories. And the high pitch may assist infants in imitating the characteristics of speech.

Studies show that, compared with controls, kids allowed a specific type of open-ended playtime were: • More creative. On tests of divergent thinking (which measure alternative uses for familiar objects), they came up with more than three times as many creative options as did controls. • Better at language. The children’s use of language was more facile. They displayed a richer store of vocabulary and a more varied use of words. • Better at problem solving. This is fluid intelligence, one of the basic ingredients in the intelligence stew. • Less stressed. Children regularly exposed to such activity had half the anxiety levels of controls. This may help explain the problem-solving benefit, as problem-solving skills are notoriously sensitive to anxiety. • Better at memory. Play situations improved memory scores; for example, kids who pretended they were at the supermarket remembered twice as many words on a grocery list as controls. • More socially skilled. The social-buffering benefits of play are reflected in the crime statistics of inner-city kids. If low-income kids were exposed to play-oriented preschools in their earliest years, fewer than 10 percent had been arrested for a felony by age 23. For children exposed to instruction-oriented preschools, that figure was more than 33 percent.

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

Rather than praising him for being smart, they should have praised him for working hard. 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.

A 13-month-old child can remember an event a week after a single exposure. By the time she is almost a year and a half, she can imitate an event four months after a single exposure. The skill never leaves children, something the advertising industry has known for decades. The implications are powerful. If toddlers can embed into memory a complex series of events after one exposure, imagine what they can consume in hours spent online and watching TV.

For each hour of TV watched daily by children under age 4, the risk increased 9 percent that they would engage in bullying behavior by the time they started school.

omg..

TV also poisons attention spans and the ability to focus, a classic hallmark of executive function. For each additional hour of TV watched by a child under the age of 3, the likelihood of an attentional problem by age 7 increased by about 10 percent. So a preschooler who watches three hours of TV per day is 30 percent more likely to have attentional problems than a child who watches no TV.

not surprised

For every hour per day the children spent watching certain baby DVDs and videos, the infants understood an average of six to eight fewer words than infants who did not watch them.

Exercise—especially aerobic exercise—is fantastic for the brain, increasing executive function scores anywhere from 50 percent to 100 percent.

hyper-parents often pursue their child’s intellectual success at the expense of their child’s happiness.

What helps early learning: breast-feeding, talking to your children—a lot, guided play every day, and praising effort rather than intelligence. • What hurts early learning: overexposure to television (keep the TV off before age 2), a sedentary lifestyle, and limited face-to-face interaction. • Pressuring children to learn a subject before their brains are ready is only harmful.

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

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

By 6 months of age, a baby typically can experience surprise, disgust, happiness, sadness, anger, and fear.

To have empathy, your child must cultivate the ability to peer inside the psychological interiors of someone else, accurately comprehend that person’s behavioral reward and punishment systems, and then respond with kindness and understanding.

The single best predictor of happiness? Having friends. • Children who learn to regulate their emotions have deeper friendships than those who don’t.

Research shows that this labeling habit is a dominant behavior for all parents who raise happy children.

There’s another powerful way to fine-tune a child’s hearing for the emotional aspects of speech: musical training. Researchers in the Chicago area showed that musically experienced kids—those who studied any instrument for at least 10 years, starting before age 7—responded with greased-lightning speed to subtle variations in emotion-laden cues, such as a baby’s cry.

• They do not judge emotions. • They acknowledge the reflexive nature of emotions. • They know that behavior is a choice, even though an emotion is not. • They see a crisis as a teachable moment.

Almost half a century’s worth of research shows that “blowing off steam” usually increases aggression.

• Your infant needs you to watch, listen, and respond. • How you deal with your toddlers’ intense emotions is a huge factor in how happy your child will be as an adult. • Acknowledge, name, and empathize with emotions. Save judgment for any unacceptable behavior arising from emotions. • One parenting style is most likely to produce terrific kids: demanding and warm.

By age 4, a child will lie about once every two hours; by age 6, it’s once every 90 minutes.

• Clear, consistent rules and rewards • Swift punishment • Rules that are explained

When rules are administered by warm, accepting parents, moral seeds are more likely to take root. So you have crystal-clear rules, and you administer them in a certain manner. The next two steps involve what you do when the rules are followed. Every time your child follows the rules, you offer praise

Praising the absence of a bad behavior is just as important as praising the presence of a good one.

Parents who provide clear, consistent boundaries whose reasons are always explained generally produce moral kids.

The committee came out against corporeal punishment, finding evidence that spanking causes more behavioral problems than other types of punishment, producing more aggressive, more depressed, more anxious children with lower IQs.

• How parents handle rules is key: realistic, clear expectations; consistent, swift consequences for rule violations; and praise for good behavior.

The instant you decide to bring a child into the world, you give up absolute control over the rest of your life. Welcome to the world of parenting.