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

by John Medina

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.

This is the biggest but simplest take away from the whole book.

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.

Keeping the TV off is hard with newborns. Often they just want to be held or fed and there isn't much else for you to do. Reading is hard because your hands are occupied. Babies can be boring.

“You never want a serious crisis to go to waste” is an attitude as common in these households as it is in certain political circles. The problem the child is having may seem ridiculously small to the parents, not something that should take up precious time. But these parents realize they don’t need to like the problem to solve it. They regularly replace the words “potential catastrophe” with “potential lesson,” which puts a very different spin on what a catastrophe is.

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