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

by John Medina

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.

Young children may not be aware of the emotions they are experiencing. They may not yet understand the socially correct way to communicate them. The result is that your little one may act out in anger when he is actually sad, or she may just become grumpy for no apparent reason. Sometimes a single event will induce a mixture of emotions.

Parents have known for centuries that babies come to this world with an inborn temperament. Scientist Jerome Kagan, who studied Baby 19, was the first to prove it. Human temperament is a complex, multidimensional concept—a child’s characteristic way of responding emotionally and behaviorally to external events. These responses are fairly fixed and innate; you can observe them in your baby soon after he or she is born.

Studies like Kagan’s make conclusions about tendencies, not destinies. The data do not forecast what these children will become so much as they predict what they will NOT become. Highly reactive infants will not grow up to be exuberant, outgoing, bubbly, or bold. The older daughter will never become the younger daughter.

The gene 5-HTT, a serotonin transporter gene, may partially explain the difference. As the name suggests, the protein encoded by this gene acts like a semitruck, transporting the neurotransmitter serotonin to various regions of the brain. It comes in two forms, which I’ll term “long” and “short” variants. If you have the long form of this gene, you are in good shape. Your stress reactions, depending upon the severity and duration of the trauma, are in the “typical” range. Your risk for suicide is low and your chance at recovery high. If you have the short form of this gene, your risk for negative reactions, such as depression and longer recovery times, in the face of trauma is high. Interestingly, patients with this short variation also have difficulty regulating their emotions and don’t socialize very well.

How Rachel responds to Tyler’s intense emotions profoundly matters to his future happiness. In fact, her response is one of the greatest predictors of how he will turn out as a young man. It affects his ability to empathize with people and thus maintain friendships—big factors in human happiness. It will even affect his grade-point average.

Research shows that this labeling habit is a dominant behavior for all parents who raise happy children. Kids who are exposed to this parenting behavior on a regular basis become better at self-soothing, are more able to focus on tasks, and have more successful peer relationships.

Verbal and nonverbal communication are like two interlocking neurological systems. Infants’ brains haven’t yet connected these systems very well. Their bodies can feel fear, disgust, and joy way before their brains can talk about them. This means that children will experience the physiological characteristics of emotional responses before they know what those responses are. That’s why large feelings are often scary for little people; tantrums often self-feed because of this fear. That’s not a sustainable gap. Kids will need to find out what’s going on with their big feelings, however scary they seem at first. They need to connect these two neurological systems. Researchers believe that learning to label emotions provides the linkage. The earlier this bridge gets constructed, the more likely you are to see self-soothing behaviors, along with a large raft of other benefits.

They have four attitudes toward emotions (yes, their meta-emotions): • 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.

Empathy reflexes and the coaching strategies that surround them are the only behaviors known consistently to defuse intense emotional situations over the short term—and reduce their frequency over the long term.

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

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

When warm, accepting parents set clear and reasonable standards for their kids, then offer them praise for behaving well, children present strong evidence of an internalized moral construct, usually by age 4 or 5.

It must be punishment. The punishment should be firm. This does NOT mean child abuse. But it also doesn’t mean a watered-down version of the consequences. The aversive stimulus must, in fact, be aversive to be effective. • It must be consistent. The punishment must be administered consistently—every time the rule is broken.

Let your yes be yes and your no be no. Consistency must be there not only from one day to the next but from one caregiver to the next. Mom and Dad and Nanny and stepparents and grandparents and in-laws all need to be on the same page regarding both the household rules and the consequences for disobeying them. Punishments are obnoxious by definition—everyone wants to escape them—and kids are unbelievably talented at discovering loopholes. You can’t give them the opportunity to play one caregiver against another if you want them to have a moral backbone.

The closer the punishment is to the point of infraction, the faster the learning becomes.

Parke was able to show that compliance rates soar when some kind of cognitive rationale is given to a child. The rationale consists of explaining why the rule—and its consequences—exist. (Works well with adults, too.) You can use this after a rule has been broken, too.

They need to eat about every two to three hours, some much more often. Consistent with this notion, infant sleep patterns have been shown initially to closely follow feeding patterns: the amount of time it takes babies to consume food, digest food, metabolize food, and then become hungry again.

With most newborns, you don’t see strong evidence of something approaching a socially acceptable circadian rhythm (as measured by melatonin production) for almost three months, and nothing approaching sanity—defined as getting five straight hours of sleep—for almost six months.

Infants’ efforts result in the eventual establishment of a sleep cycle. Authentic NREM sleep as part of a normal awake/asleep cycle has been detected in babies as young as 6 months old. But it does take a while to sync up. It is not unusual for an infant to wake up three times a night for the first six months of his life. He may still wake up once or twice a night before his first birthday, and may wake up once a night until his second.

Sleep experts agree that one thing helps babies make this transition: having a consistent bedtime routine. This starts with choosing a time for bedtime, sometime around 6 months old.

CIO can properly be described as a continuum between “unmodified extinction,” in which the parent refuses to respond regardless of how long the crying continues (researchers don’t recommend this), and “camping out” or “fading,” in which the parent is close but spends less and less time by the child’s crib providing assurance. In the middle of the continuum, we find “graduated extinction.” The parent does respond to the child’s nighttime cries, but on a strict schedule. The amount of time a child is allowed to cry gradually lengthens. The delays are deliberately timed and incremental, hence the term “graduated.”

Graduated extinction has undergone the most scientific scrutiny of all the styles. Overwhelmingly, the evidence shows that it works—if you define “works” as getting the child to quit crying during the night so that everyone can sleep through the night. And it works surprisingly quickly, typically within a week.

That’s why consistency is considered non-optional if you go down the CIO road. The fastest way to keep your child clinging to his cries at night is to make sure your attentive rewarding behavior is unpredictable. Go in sometimes. Don’t go in at other times.

The results were not reassuring. The more a parent “rescued” their infant at night, the more sleep problems the infant displayed over time. The infants displayed a marked reduction in the capacity to return independently to sleep after arousal, for example.

When it comes to co-sleeping, studies have found that co-sleeping babies cry less. However, studies also have found that both parent and infant sleep more poorly, with more interruptions per unit of time for each.

We used to think object permanence was not established until after baby’s first birthday. There is now convincing evidence for its formation in the first eight months of life, and maybe even the first three or four months of life. Since most professionals do not advocate any sleep interventions until after 6 months of age, object permanence may not be an issue by the time you have to decide whether you are in the NAP or CIO corner of the ring.

Note that I am asking you to wait six months before you judge. Why? The answer is biological. Sleep interventions are mostly useless until baby’s brain is ready. If you try to intervene before that time, you may end up fighting biological forces over which you have very little control.

it is quite normal for newborns to awaken many times during the night. Sometimes, however, the arousals occur (or continue past the newborn stage) because of a medical condition. Problems range from acid reflux to lactose intolerance to undetected infections. Babies can even suffer from obstructive sleep apnea. So ask your pediatrician to rule out any physical problem before you implement a CIO strategy. Graduated extinction should be deployed only if baby is crying because he wants attention. If by the seventh day you see no improvement, or things have gotten substantially worse, you are supposed to stop the program and consider alternative solutions.

Be willing to enter into your child’s world on a regular basis and to empathize with what your child is feeling.

There may be as many different types of playrooms as there are families, but every one of them should have the following design element: lots of choices. A place for drawing. A place for painting. Musical instruments. A wardrobe hanging with costumes. Blocks. Picture books. Tubes and gears. Anything where a child can be safely let loose, joyously free to explore whatever catches her fancy.

“F” stands for firm. The punishment must mean something. It has to be firm and aversive to be effective. “I” stands for immediate. The closer the punishment is delivered to the point of infraction, the more effective it is. “R” stands for reliable. The punishment must be consistently applied whenever the noxious behavior is displayed. Inconsistently applied rules are confusing and lead to uneven moral development. “S” stands for safe. The rules must be supplied in an atmosphere of emotional safety. Children have a hard time internalizing moral behavior under conditions of constant threat. “T” stands for tolerant. Actually, this is a call for patience, something we addressed only obliquely. Children rarely internalize rules on the first try and sometimes not on the 10th.