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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
John Medina
Read between
June 2 - August 9, 2023
1. Keep the TV off before the child turns 2. I know this is tough to hear for parents who need a break. If you can’t turn it off—if you haven’t created those social networks that can allow you a rest—at least limit your child’s exposure to TV.
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.
Childhood obesity is three times more prevalent in gamers than in non-gamers.
Fit kids score higher on executive function tests than sedentary controls, and those scores remain as long as the exercise does. The best results accrue, by the way, if you do the exercises with your children.
This leads to the odd condition, as the slumber party illustrates, that even when we’re together, we’re often far apart. Unless all of their digital interactions involve a video camera, kids won’t get much practice interpreting nonverbal cues.
Pressure can extinguish curiosity
Continual anger or disappointment becomes toxic stress
“The only thing that really matters in life [is] your relationships to other people.”
colleague of Vaillant’s showed that people don’t gain access to the top 10 percent of the happiness pile unless they are involved in a romantic relationship of some kind.
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
This suggests something practical and relieving: Help your children get into a profession that can at least make around $50,000 a year. They don’t have to be millionaires to be thrilled with the life you prepare them for.
They are also two of the most predictive for social competency: • emotional regulation • our old friend, empathy
Individuals who are thoughtful, kind, sensitive, outward focused, accommodating, and forgiving have deeper, more lasting friendships—and lower divorce rates—than people who are moody, impulsive, rude, self-centered, inflexible, and vindictive.
In the textbook definition, emotions are simply the activation of neurological circuits that prioritize our perceptual world into two categories: things we should pay attention to and things we can safely ignore.
Emotions provide an important perceptual filtering ability, in the service of survival. They play a role in affixing our attention to things and in helping us make decisions.
By 6 months of age, a baby typically can experience surprise, disgust, happiness, sadness, anger, and fear.
Along with the ability to regulate emotions, the ability to perceive the needs of another person and respond with empathy plays a huge role in your child’s social competence.
If your marriage has a three-to-one ratio of active-constructive versus toxic-conflict interactions, your relationship is nearly divorce-proof. The best marriages have a ratio of five to one.
Slow MAOA: Lessoning the pain of a trauma
DRD4-7: A guard against insecurity
Long 5-HTT: Stress resistance
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. Starting with the process of bonding with baby, parents who pay close attention to the emotional lives of their children, in a very particular manner, have the best shot at making them happy.
Attentive, patient interactivity actually helps your baby’s neural architecture develop in a positive way, tilting her toward emotional stability.
At birth, babies appear to express disgust, distress, interest, and contentment. Within six months, they experience anger, fear, sadness, surprise, and joy. Give them another year and they will feel embarrassment, jealousy, guilt, and maybe even pride.
Knowing what your kids tag—what things they have an emotional reaction to—and then responding to that knowledge in specific ways is not only part of the attachment process, but one of the big secrets to raising happy kids.
How you deal with the emotional lives of your children—your ability to detect, react to, promote, and provide instruction about emotional regulation—has the greatest predictive power over your baby’s future happiness.
• a demanding but warm parenting style • comfort with your own emotions • tracking your child’s emotions • verbalizing emotions • running toward emotions • two tons of empathy
Responsiveness. This is the degree to which parents respond to their kids with support, warmth, and acceptance. Warm parents mostly communicate their affection for their kids. Hostile parents mostly communicate their rejection of their kids.
Demandingness. This is the degree to which a parent attempts to exert behavioral control. Restrictive parents tend to make and enforce rules mercilessly. Permissive parents don’t make any rules.
Authoritative: Just right Responsive plus demanding. The best of the lot. These parents are demanding, but they care a great deal about their kids. They explain their rules and encourage their children to state their reactions to them. They encourage high levels of independence, yet see that children comply with family values. These parents tend to have terrific communication skills with their children.
You have to be comfortable with your emotions in order to make your kids comfortable with theirs.
He could then be delighted when mom returned, smiling, rather than staying overstimulated by her persistence and probably crying.
The first is that parents who possess emotional information gain the great power of behavioral prediction.
become pros at forecasting probable reactions to almost any situation. This results in an instinctive feel about what is most likely to be helpful, hurtful, or neutral to their child,
researchers were somewhat startled to find that when parents paid too much attention to their kids’ cues—responding to every gurgle, burp, and cough—the kids became less securely attached.
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.
Verbalizing has a soothing effect on the nervous systems of children. (Adults, too.) Thus, the Brain Rule: Labeling emotions calms big feelings.
if you want happy kids later in life, get them started on a musical journey early in life.
• 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.
Some parents let their kids freely express whatever emotions they have, then allow whatever behavior the kid engages in to spew forth all over the world. They believe there is little you can do about a stream of negative emotions, except perhaps to scramble up the bank and let the flood pass by. Parents with these attitudes are descending into an abdication of their parenting responsibilities. Statistically, they will raise the most troubled children of any parenting style ever tested.
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.
When the brain perceives empathy, the vagus nerve relaxes the body. This nerve connects the brain stem to other areas of the body, including the abdomen, chest, and neck. When it is overstimulated, it causes pain and nausea.
“Empathy comes from being empathized with,”
The more empathy your child sees, the more socially competent he’ll become, and the happier he’ll be.
Acknowledge, name, and empathize with emotions. Save judgment for any unacceptable behavior arising from emotions.
http://moral.wjh.harvard.edu
your parenting objective is to get your child to pay attention to and align himself with his innate sense of right and wrong.
After age 3, kids begin to lie in earnest, though they usually do so imperfectly. The nasty habit picks up astonishing speed. By age 4, a child will tell a lie about once every two hours; by age 6, she will do it every 90 minutes. As a child grows in vocabulary and social experience, the lies become more sophisticated, more prevalent, and harder to spot.
The three legs are: • Clear, consistent rules and rewards • Swift punishment • Rules that are explained
