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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
John Medina
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January 14 - January 19, 2019
The greatest pediatric brain-boosting technology in the world is probably a plain cardboard box, a fresh box of crayons, and two hours. The worst is probably your new flat-screen TV.
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.
Research tells us that parents must have clear rules and swift consequences for rule violations.
That communal need was so strong, and so critical to our survival, that researchers have given the phenomenon its own name: alloparenting. If as a parent you feel as though you can’t do it alone, that’s because you were never meant to.
No commercial product has ever been shown to do anything to improve the brain performance of a developing fetus.
Women who take folic acid around conception and during the first few weeks of pregnancy are 76 percent less likely to create a fetus with neural tube defects than those who don’t take the supplement. It is the first thing you can do to aid brain development.
Third-trimester babies change their swallowing patterns when mom eats something sweet: They gulp more. Flavorful compounds from a mother’s diet cross the placenta into the amniotic fluid, which babies in the third trimester swallow at the rate of a quart a day. The effect is so powerful that what you eat during the last stages of pregnancy can influence the food preferences of your baby.
The behaviors proven to aid and abet brain development in the womb—especially important in the second half of pregnancy—all follow the Goldilocks principle. We will look at four of these balancing acts: • weight • nutrition • stress • exercise
Is there any evidence you should pay attention to these cravings? Is the baby telegraphing its nutritional needs? The answer is no.
So you can see why only two supplements thus far have enough data behind them to support an influence on brain development in utero. One is the folic acid taken around conception. The other: omega-3 fatty acids.
The researchers determined that mothers who ate more fish starting in the second trimester had smarter babies than those who didn’t. By smarter, I mean that the babies performed better on cognitive tests that measure memory, recognition, and attention at six months post-birth.
The first target is the baby’s limbic system, an area profoundly involved in emotional regulation and memory. This region develops more slowly in the presence of excess hormone, one of the reasons we think baby cognition is damaged if mom is severely or chronically stressed.
Many women report that giving birth is both the most exhilarating experience of their lives and the most painful. Pushing, as you know, is usually the toughest part. 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. Not surprisingly, fit women perceive this stage as being far less painful.
Certain types of exercise actually buffer a pregnant woman against the negative influence of stress. Remember those toxic glucocorticoids, the ones that invade neural tissue and cause brain damage? Aerobic exercise elevates a molecule in your brain that can specifically block the toxic effects of those nasty glucocorticoids. This heroic molecule is termed brain-derived neurotrophic factor.
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.
Sustained exposure to hostility can erode a baby’s IQ and ability to handle stress, sometimes dramatically.
By the late 1980s and ’90s, investigations in 10 industrialized countries, including the United States, demonstrated that marital satisfaction for most men and women dropped after they had their first child—and continued to fall over the next 15 years. Things didn’t improve for most couples until the kids left home.
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. The inability to find safety through bonding, by a specific age in infancy, clearly caused immense stress to their systems. And that stress affected these children’s behavior years later. They may have been removed from the orphanages long ago, but they were never really free.
You don’t have to raise kids under death-camp conditions to see negative changes in baby brain development. All you need are parents who, on a regular basis, wake up wanting to throw emotional punches at each other. Marital conflict is fully capable of hurting a baby’s brain development. The effects begin early and, though there is some controversy about this, may echo clear into adulthood.
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.
If marital hostility continues, the children show all the unfortunate behavioral signs of long-term stress. They are at greater risk for anxiety disorders and depression. They catch colds more often, because stress cripples the immune system. They’re more antagonistic toward peers. They’re less able to focus attention or regulate their emotions. Such children have IQs almost 8 points lower than children being raised in stable homes. Predictably, they don’t complete high school as often as their peers and attain lower academic achievement when they do.
Fortunately, research shows that the amount of fighting couples do in front of their children is less damaging than the lack of reconciliation the kids observe.
When fighting, people believe they are perfectly unbiased, informed, and objective, while simultaneously thinking their opponents are hopelessly prejudiced, clueless, and subjective.
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.
Thousands of experiments confirm that babies learn about their environment through a series of increasingly self-corrected ideas. They experience sensory observations, make predictions about what they observe, design and deploy experiments capable of testing their predictions, evaluate their tests, and add that knowledge to a self-generated, growing database. The style is naturally aggressive, wonderfully flexible, and annoyingly persistent.
That’s why babies need human time in their earliest years. Not computer time. Not television time. Your baby’s brain needs interaction with you, in person, on a consistent basis.
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. Brain research tells us there are also several toxins: pushing your child to perform tasks his brain is not developmentally ready to take on; stressing your child to the point of a psychological state termed “learned helplessness”; and, for the under-2 set, television.
The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that all mothers breast-feed exclusively for the first six months of their babies’ lives, continue breast-feeding as their kids start taking on solids, and wean them after a year.
The more parents talk to their children, even in the earliest moments of life, the better their kids’ linguistic abilities become and the faster that improvement is achieved. The gold standard is 2,100 words per hour. The variety of the words spoken (nouns, verbs, and adjectives used, along with the length and complexity of phrases and sentences) is nearly as important as the number of words spoken. So is the amount of positive feedback. You can reinforce language skills through interaction: looking at your infant; imitating his vocalizations, laughter, and facial expressions; rewarding her
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Talking to children early in life raises their IQs, too, even after controlling for important variables such as income. By age 3, kids who were talked to regularly by their parents (called the talkative group) had IQ scores 1½ times higher than those kids whose parents talked to them the least (called the taciturn group). This increase in IQ is thought to be responsible for the talkative group’s uptick in grades.
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.
Educational psychologist William Fowler trained a group of parents to talk to their children in a particular fashion, following some of the guidelines mentioned above. The children spoke their first words between 7 and 9 months of age, some even speaking sentences at 10 months. They had conquered most of the basic rules of grammar by age 2, while kids in the control group achieved a similar mastery around age 4. Longer-term studies showed that the kids did very well in school, including in math and science.
But many parents are so preoccupied with their young child’s future that they transform every step of the journey into a type of product development, recoiling at open-ended anything.
No, the type of play that gives all the cognitive benefits is a type that focuses on impulse control and self-regulation
He predicted that the ability of the under-5 crowd to engage in imaginative activities was going to be a better gauge of academic success than any other activity—including quantitative and verbal competencies. The reason, Vygotsky believed, was that such engagement allowed children to learn how to regulate their social behaviors.
What separates high performers from low performers is not some divine spark. It is, the most recent findings suggest, a much more boring—but ultimately more controllable—factor. All other things being equal, it is effort. Good old-fashioned neural elbow grease. Deliberate practice. From a psychological perspective, effort is in part the willingness to focus one’s attention and then sustain that focus. Effort also involves impulse control and a persistent ability to delay gratification.
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.
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. This is poor emotional regulation at work.
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.
Pediatricians should urge parents to avoid television viewing for children under the age of 2 years. Although certain television programs may be promoted to this age group, research on early brain development shows that babies and toddlers have a critical need for direct interactions with parents and other significant caregivers
The products didn’t work at all. They had no positive effect on the vocabularies of the target audience, infants 17 to 24 months. Some did actual harm. 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.
Keep the TV off before the child turns 2.
After age 2, help your children choose the shows (and other screen-based exposures) they will experience. Pay special attention to any media that allow intelligent interaction. 3. Watch the chosen TV show with your children, interacting with the media and helping your children to analyze and think critically about what they just experienced.
Exercise—especially aerobic exercise—is fantastic for the brain, increasing executive function scores anywhere from 50 percent to 100 percent. This is true across the life span, from young children to members of the golden-parachute crowd. Strengthening exercises, though there are many other reasons to do them, do not give you these numbers.
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.
Children are natural explorers. But if parents supply only rigid educational expectations, interest will be transformed into appeasement. Children will stop asking potent questions like “Am I curious about this?” and start asking, “What will satisfy the powers that be?” Exploratory behavior is not rewarded, so it is soon disregarded.
There’s another harm when parents press their children to perform tasks their little brains aren’t yet capable of executing. 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. This loss of control is toxic. It can create a psychological state called learned helplessness, which can physically damage a child’s brain. The child learns he can’t control the negative stimuli (the parent’s anger or disappointment) coming at him or the situations that cause it.
Write this across your heart before your child comes into the world: Parenting is not a race. Kids are not proxies for adult success. Competition can be inspiring, but brands of it can wire your child’s brain in a toxic way. Comparing your kids with your friends’ kids will not get them, or you, where you want to go.
People who make more than $5 million a year are not appreciably happier than those who make $100,000 a year, the Journal of Happiness Studies found. Money increases happiness only when it lifts people out of poverty to about $50,000 a year in income. Past that, wealth and happiness part ways.
