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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
John Medina
Read between
June 2 - August 9, 2023
Your rules are reasonable and clear
You are warm and accepting when administering rules
You know by now that the brain’s chief interest is safety. When rules are not administered in safety, the brain jettisons any behavioral notion except one: escaping the threat. When rules are administered by warm, accepting parents, moral seeds are more likely to take root.
Every time your child follows the rules, you offer praise Scientists (and good parents) discovered long ago that you can increase the frequency of a desired behavior if you reinforce the behavior.
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.
automaticity is very powerful. Research shows that children internalize behaviors best when they are allowed to make their own mistakes and feel the consequences.
It provides very little guidance on its own. If it’s not accompanied by some kind of teaching moment, the child won’t know what the replacement behavior should be.
You risk counterproductivity, or even real damage to your connection with your child, if you punish incorrectly.
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.
The punishment must be administered consistently—every time the rule is broken.
The closer the punishment is to the point of infraction, the faster the learning becomes.
The punishment must be administered in the warm atmosphere of emotional safety. When kids feel secure even in the raw presence of parental correction, punishment has the most robust effect.
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.
The bottom line: Parents who provide clear, consistent boundaries whose reasons are always explained generally produce moral kids.
One of the latest lightning rods is a five-year review of the research literature by a committee of child development specialists sponsored by the American Psychological Association. The committee came out against corporeal punishment, finding evidence that spanking causes more behavioral problems than other types of punishment, producing more aggressive, more depressed, more anxious children with lower IQs. A spring 2010 study, led by Tulane University School of Public Health researcher Catherine Taylor, confirms the findings.
Scientific American Mind, the linkage between spanking and behavioral unpleasantness is more solid than the linkage between exposure to lead and lowered IQ. More solid, too, than the association between secondhand smoke and cancer.
When babies first start nodding off, unlike adults, they immediately enter into active sleep. For most newborns, this active state lasts 20 or 30 minutes.
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.
create a series of predictable bedtime rituals. These rituals can be almost anything, from singing favorite lullabies to turning all the lights in the house down low.
Whatever the activities, they should be consistently applied: same content, same order, same environment.
The more a parent “rescued” their infant at night, the more sleep problems the infant displayed over time.
“Comfort visits” also had consequences for childhood sleep far past the first year, other researchers discovered.
Responding to a child’s cry is something we may have been built to do. The fact that it is superimposed on an asymmetric cultural schedule where parents need to sleep at night so that they can go to work the next day does not change these feelings.
ask your pediatrician to rule out any physical problem before you implement a CIO strategy. Graduated extinction should be deployed
Voltaire once said, “Every man is guilty of all the good he did not do.”
Theory of Mind, is the first step to empathy. It is a consistent willingness to turn down the volume of one’s own priorities and experiences in favor of hearing another’s.
What is obvious to you is obvious to you.
Open-ended learning environments—with plenty of interactive, imaginative play—help provide the face time that develops these skills. Television, video games, and text messages, by definition, do not.
strong emotional regulation actually improves a child’s academic performance.
Emotional regulation also predicts a child’s future happiness,
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.
My wife and I devoted nearly 600 square feet in our house to creating such an environment, filled with music stations, reading and drawing and painting and crafting areas, lots of Legos, and lots of cardboard boxes. There was a math and science station, including a toy microscope. We changed the contents of these stations on a regular basis, and we eventually turned the space into our kids’ classroom.
Play “opposite day” After my children turned 3, I employed some fun activities to improve executive function, roughly based on the canonical work of Adele Diamond. I would tell them that today was “opposite day.” When I held up a drawn picture of the night, an inky black background sprinkled with stars, they were supposed to say “day.” When I held up a picture with a big blue sky inhabited by a big yellow sun, they were supposed to say “night.”
The idea for both exercises was to (a) give the boys a rule and (b) help them inhibit what they would do automatically in the face of this rule—a hallmark of executive function.
Step 1: Make a list of all the behaviors—the actions and words—you regularly broadcast to the world. Do you laugh a lot? Swear on a regular basis? Exercise? Do you cry easily or have a hair-trigger temper? Do you spend hours on the Internet? Make this list. Have your spouse do this, too, and compare.
Step 2: Rate them. There are probably things on this list of which you are justifiably proud. Others, not so much.
Step 3: Do something about this list. Engage regularly in the behaviors you love.
we divided digital experiences into categories. Two of the categories involved things necessary for schoolwork or for learning about computers: word processing and graphics programs, web-based research projects, programming, and so on. The boys were allowed to do these as homework required.
Our sons could “buy” a certain amount of Category I time. The currency? The time spent reading an actual book. Every hour spent reading could purchase a certain amount of Category I time. This was added up and could be “spent” on weekends after homework was done.
Speculate on another’s point of view In front of your children, verbally speculate about other people’s perspectives in everyday situations. You can wonder why the person behind you in line at a grocery is so impatient or what the joke is when a stranger talking on a cell phone laughs.
the end of each day just before lights out, we got into our pajamas and prepared for bed, then snuggled down together. My wife got out a book and, for the next half hour, read it aloud.
