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

by John Medina

Once you know which research to trust, the big picture emerges and myths fade away.

She is responding to stress, and the way her body does that was carved out long ago on the plains of the Serengeti.

Brain Rules for Baby encompasses brain development in children ages 0 to 5.

what you do in your child’s first five years of life—not just the first year—profoundly influences how he or she will behave as an adult.

So evolutionary biologists have to wonder: Why would anyone willingly take on this line of work? The interview for the job, that single act of sex, is certainly fun. But then you get hired to raise a child. There are wonderful moments, but the essence of the contract is simply: They take. You give. You never get a paycheck with this job, only an invoice, and you’d better be prepared for some sticker shock. You’ll be out more than $220,000—before the college loans. This career comes with no sick days or vacation time, and it puts you permanently on call nights and weekends. Its successful execution will probably turn you into a lifelong worrywart. Yet thousands of people every day say yes to this job. There must be some compelling reason.

TruuConfessions.com, a website where parents can post anonymously to get things off their chests, seek advice, or share their parenting experiences with the world.

If I were to give a single sentence of advice based on what we know about in utero development during the first half of pregnancy, it would be this: The baby wants to be left alone. At least at first. From the baby’s point of view, the best feature of life in the womb is its relative lack of stimulation.

These outlandish claims have a long history.

It’s vital that this neural tube develop properly. If it doesn’t, the baby could have a protruding spinal cord or a tumor near his lower back, a condition known as spina bifida. Or the baby could grow without a complete head, a rare condition known as anencephaly. This is why every pregnancy book strongly recommends taking the B-complex vitamin folic acid:

There is only 1 IQ point difference between a 6.5-pounder and a 7.5-pounder. The fuel of food helps grow a larger baby. Between four months and birth, the fetus becomes almost ridiculously sensitive to both the amount and the type of food you consume. We know this from malnutrition studies. Babies experiencing a critical lack of nutriment have fewer neurons, fewer and shorter connections between the neurons that exist, and less insulation all around in the second trimester. When they grow up, the kids carrying these brains exhibit more behavioral problems, show slower language growth, have lower IQs, get worse grades, and generally make poor athletes.

Eating a balanced meal, with a heavy emphasis on fruits and vegetables, is probably still the best advice for pregnant women. For the non-vegetarians in the crowd, a source of iron in the form of red meat is appropriate. Iron is necessary for proper brain development and normal functioning even in adults, vegetarian or not.

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. Because the pushing phase is shorter, babies also are less likely to experience brain damage from oxygen deprivation.

What is the proper balance? Four words: moderate, regular aerobic exercise. For most women, that means keeping your heart rate below 70 percent of its maximal rate (which is 220 beats per minute minus your age),

In the first half of pregnancy, babies want to be left alone.

This is repeated day after day after ad nauseam day.

We know four of the most important sources of marital conflict in the transition to parenthood: sleep loss, social isolation, unequal workload, and depression.

Infants can discriminate human faces from nonhuman faces at birth and seem to prefer human ones.

Babies have no sleep schedule when they are born. The fact that you do does not occur to them.

The decline in general cognitive skill is equally dramatic (which is why chronically drowsy people don’t perform as well at work, either). Problem-solving abilities typically plummet to 10 percent of their non-drowsy performances,

This rarely happens in a visit to the pediatrician’s office, but it should. The good doctor would ask you about the health of your baby and give your little bundle of joy a routine examination. Then she’d look you in the eyes and ask some truly intrusive questions about your social life. “Do you have many friends?” the pediatrician would inquire. “What social groups do you and your husband belong to? How important are these groups to you? How diverse are they? How much contact time do you and your husband have with them?” The doctor doesn’t ask about these things because your social life is none of her business. The problem is, it is plenty of the infant’s business.

Females release oxytocin as part of their normal response to stress, a hormone that increases a suite of biological behaviors termed “tend and befriend.” Men don’t do this. Their resident testosterone provides too much hormonal signal-to-noise, blunting the effects of their endogenous oxytocin.

“Every time we get overly busy with work and family, the first thing we do is let go of friendships with other women. We push them right to the back burner. That’s really a mistake because women are such a source of strength to each other.”

Here are the numbers: Women with families do 70 percent of all household tasks. Dishes, dirt, diapers, minor household repairs, all of it.

pulls the “I am the bread-winner card”

It is titled Porn for Women. It’s a picture book of hunks, photographed in all their chiseled, muscle-bound, testosterone-marinated, PG-rated glory. Lots of naked chests and low-cut jeans, complete with tousled hair and beckoning eyes. And they are ALL doing housework. A well-cut Adonis loads the washing machine; the caption reads: “As soon as I finish the laundry, I’ll do the grocery shopping. And I’ll take the kids with me so you can relax.” Another hunk, the cover guy, vacuums the floor.

Roosevelt’s mind did not cooperate with either his body or his doctor. Possessed of a voracious intellect, a photographic memory, and a ceaseless need to achieve, he wrote his first scientific paper (“The Natural History of Insects”) at the age of 9. He was accepted to Harvard at the age of 16,

nature controls about 50 percent of our intellectual horsepower, and environment determines the rest.

Einstein died in New Jersey in 1955. His autopsy was performed by Thomas Stoltz Harvey,

He excised the famous physicist’s brain and photographed it from many angles. Then he chopped the brain into tiny blocks.

frustratingly, overarching patterns are few.

To date, no intelligence gene has been isolated.

If cells and genes aren’t any help, what about behaviors? Here, researchers have struck gold.

We now have in hand a series of tests for infants that can predict their IQs as adults. In one test, preverbal infants are allowed to feel an object hidden from their view in a box. If the infants can then correctly identify the object by sight—called cross-modal transfer—they will score higher on later IQ tests than infants who can’t. In another test, measuring something researchers call visual recognition memory, infants are set in front of a checkerboard square. This is an oversimplification, but the longer the infants stare, the higher their IQ is likely to be. Sound unlikely? These measurements, taken between 2 and 8 months of age, correctly predicted IQ scores at age 18!

Some researchers believe IQ tests measure nothing more than your ability to take IQ tests. The fact is, researchers don’t agree on what an IQ test measures.

he invented the statistical concepts of standard deviation and linear regression, and he used them to study human behavior.

He’s the one who coined the phrase “nature versus nurture.”

IQ is malleable. IQ has been shown to vary over one’s life span, and it is surprisingly vulnerable to environmental influences. It can change if one is stressed, old, or living in a different culture from the testing majority. A child’s IQ is influenced by his or her family, too. Growing up in the same household tends to increase IQ similarities between siblings, for example. Poor people tend to have significantly lower IQs than rich people.

There are people who don’t want to believe IQ is so malleable. They think numbers like IQ and “g” are permanent, like a date of birth instead of a dress size.

From 1947 to 2002, the collective IQ of American kids went up 18 points.

The second component is the capacity to adapt that information to unique situations. This involves the ability to improvise, based in part on the ability to recall and recombine specific parts of the database.

From an evolutionary perspective, the potent combination of memorization and extemporization conferred on us two survival-rich behaviors: the ability to learn rapidly from our mistakes and the ability to apply that learning in unique combinations to the ever-changing, ever-brutal world of our East African cradle.

They conducted a whopping six-year study with more than 3,000 innovative executives, from chemists to software engineers. After being published in 2009, the study won an award from Harvard Business Review.

An unusual ability to associate. They could see connections between concepts,

An annoying habit of consistently asking “what if.” And “why not” and “how come you’re doing it this way.”

An unquenchable desire to tinker and experiment.

to find the ceiling of things,

“If you look at 4-year-olds, they are constantly asking questions. But by the time they are 6½ years old, they stop asking questions because they quickly learn that teachers value the right answers more than provocative questions.

Mischel found that children who could delay gratification for 15 minutes scored 210 points higher on their SATs than children who lasted one minute. Why? 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.

Once the brain has chosen relevant stimuli from a noisy pile of irrelevant choices, executive function allows the brain to stay on task and say no to unproductive distractions. At the neurobiological level, self-control 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.

When their brains are caught in the act of being creative, the medial and orbital sectors of the prefrontal cortex, regions just behind the eyes, light up like crazy on an fMRI. More “managerial types” (that’s actually what researchers call them) don’t have these scores—or these neural activities.