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

by John Medina

One of the chief complaints new parents have in the transition to parenthood is the great isolation they feel from their social circle. To their relatives, baby is often a stranger. To their friends,

One of the earliest senses to come on line is touch. Embryos about 1 month old can sense touch to their noses and lips. The ability spreads quickly, and nearly the entire surface of the skin is sensitive to touch by 12 weeks of age.

Maternal stress can profoundly influence prenatal development.

If you are severely stressed during pregnancy, it can: • change the temperament of your child. Infants become more irritable, less consolable. • lower your baby’s IQ. The average decline is about 8 points in certain mental and motor inventories measured in a baby’s first year of life. Using David Wechsler’s 1944 schema, that spread can be the difference between “average IQ” and “bright normal.” • inhibit your baby’s future motor skills, attentional states, and ability to concentrate—differences still observable at age 6. • damage your baby’s stress-response system. • shrink the size of your baby’s brain.

The key issue, regardless of your background, is a loss of control.

the emotional ecology into which a baby is born can profoundly influence how his or her nervous system develops.

Infants younger than 6 months old can usually detect that something is wrong. They can experience physiological changes—such as increases in blood pressure, heart rate, and stress hormones—just like adults.

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. Even their little legs sometimes won’t develop properly, as stress hormones can interfere with bone mineralization.

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.

What you will take away from the experience will not be how hard having a baby was but how vulnerable to it you became.

People view their own behaviors as originating from situations beyond their control, but they view other people’s behaviors as originating from inherent personality traits.

1. Describe the emotional changes you think you see. 2. Make a guess as to where those emotional changes came from.

The first is the ability to record information. This is sometimes called “crystallized intelligence.”

“Innovator’s DNA.” Here are the first three: • An unusual ability to associate. They could see connections between concepts, problems, or questions not obvious to others. • An annoying habit of consistently asking “what if.” And “why not” and “how come you’re doing it this way.” These visionaries scoured out the limits of the status quo, poking it, prodding it, shooting upward to the 40,000-foot view of something to see if it made any sense and then plummeting back to earth with suggestions. • An unquenchable desire to tinker and experiment. The entrepreneurs might land on an idea, but their first inclination would be to tear it apart, even if it was self-generated. They displayed an incessant need to test things: to find the ceiling of things, the basement of things, the surface area, the tolerance, the perimeters of ideas—theirs, yours, mine, anybody’s.

Executive function is a better predictor of academic success than IQ.

Executive function relies on a child’s ability to filter out distracting (in this case, tempting) thoughts, which is critical in environments that are oversaturated with sensory stimuli and myriad on-demand choices.

comes from “common value signals” (measures of neural activity) generated by a specific area of the brain behind your forehead. It is called—brain jargon alert—the ventromedial prefrontal cortex.

Researchers uncovered two separate neural processing systems that manage functional impulsivity. One governs low-risk, or “cold,” decision-making behaviors; the other governs high-risk, or “hot,” decision-making behaviors.

Human learning in its most native state is primarily a relational exercise.

We now know that infants do not gain a more sophisticated vocabulary until their fine-motor finger control improves. That’s a remarkable finding. Gestures are “windows into thought processes,”

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

At every precious point, Dad would encourage Teddy to try hard. Then harder. Then hardest.

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.

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.

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

Breast milk is the nutritional equivalent of a magic bullet for a developing baby. It has important salts and even more important vitamins. Its immune-friendly properties prevent ear, respiratory, and gastrointestinal infections. And in a result that surprised just about everybody, studies around the world confirmed that breast-feeding, in short, makes babies smarter.

Talk to your baby—a lot

Speak to your children as often as you can. It is one of the most well-established findings in all of the developmental literature.

The variety and number of words matter. • Talking increases IQ.

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 language attempts with heightened attention. Children whose parents talked positively, richly, and regularly to them knew twice as many words as those whose parents talked to them the least.

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.

kids allowed a specific type of open-ended playtime were: • More creative.

Better at language. The children’s use of language was more facile.

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.

Better at memory. Play situations improved memory scores;

More socially skilled. The social-buffering benefits of play are reflected in the crime statistics of inner-city kids.

the type of play that gives all the cognitive benefits is a type that focuses on impulse control and self-regulation

The type of play is called mature dramatic play, or MDP. To get the benefits in those bullet points, MDP has to be engaged in many hours a day.

technique called “make-believe play practice.” The kids receive direct, open-ended instruction about the mechanics of pretending! Here’s a sentence from the training manual: “I’m pretending my baby is crying. Is yours? What should we say?”

From a psychological perspective, effort is in part the willingness to focus one’s attention and then sustain that focus.

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

More than 30 years of study show that children raised in growth-mindset homes consistently outscore their fixed-mindset peers in academic achievement.

‘I have friends on both sides of the issue, and I like to stand with my friends.’

This ability to reproduce a behavior, after witnessing it only once, is called deferred imitation.

connection between hostile peer interactions and the amount of kids’ exposure to television.

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.

Just having the TV on while no one is watching—secondhand exposure—seemed to do damage, too, possibly because of distraction.

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 (e.g., child care providers) for healthy brain growth and the development of appropriate social, emotional, and cognitive skills.

Some television shows improve brain performance at this age. Not surprisingly, these shows tend to be the interactive types (Dora the Explorer, good; Barney & Friends, bad, according to certain studies).