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

by John Medina

Within a year and a half, most kids can pronounce 50 words and understand about 100 more. That figure explodes to 1,000 words by a child’s third birthday and to 6,000 just before the sixth birthday. Calculated from birth, we acquire new words at the rate of three per day. This project takes a long time to finish. English will require the mastery of about 50,000 words, and that doesn’t even include idioms and fixed expressions like “hitting a home run” or “pot of gold.”

Adults with training can still learn to distinguish speech sounds in other languages. But in general, the brain appears to have a limited window of opportunity in an astonishingly early time frame. The cognitive door begins swinging shut at 6 months old, and then, unless something pushes against it, the door closes. By 12 months, your baby’s brain has made decisions that affect her the rest of her life.

If you’ve ever seen National Geographic’s Dog Whisperer, you know Millan is a world-champion dog handler. His secret is that he thinks like a dog, not like a person, when he’s interacting with a dog. Millan told Men’s Health, “A lot of people who meet a new dog want to go over to him, touch him, and talk to him.” That is, of course, the custom when people meet a new person. But, Millan says, “in the language of dogs, this is very aggressive and confusing.” Instead, Millan says, when you meet a new dog, ignore the animal like an aloof, jilted lover. Don’t make eye contact. Let the dog come over and inspect you, sniff you. Once the dog gives you cues that he doesn’t find you a threat—like backing away or rubbing

Competently decoding another person’s face can take years of experience; like Othello, adults sometimes make mistakes. The only way to improve this accuracy is by interacting with other people. That’s why babies need human time in their earliest years. Not computer time.

Paul Ekman, professor emeritus from the University of California–San Francisco, seldom misinterprets people’s faces. He has cataloged more than 10,000 possible combinations of facial expressions, creating an inventory called the Facial Action Coding System (FACS). This research instrument allows a trained observer to dissect an expression in terms of all the muscular actions that produced

One of Ekman’s research videotapes shows an interaction between a psychiatrist and “Jane,” his very troubled patient. Jane had been suffering from such severe depression that she was hospitalized and under suicide watch.

The entrepreneurs were natural experts in the art of interpreting extrospective cues: gestures and facial expressions.

(your kid’s chances of being a great entrepreneur are linked to her ability to decode faces?).

That’s not to say that everyone is a potential Einstein. These gifts are unevenly sprinkled among our children,

Dad would encourage Teddy to try hard. Then harder. Then hardest.

refused to coddle me, and made me feel that I must force myself to hold my own with other boys and prepare to do the rough work of the world.

Teddy was born smart and born into wealth, two factors not every parent is capable of providing. But Teddy was also born into love and attentive guidance, two things every parent is capable of providing.

We’re thinking in terms of soil, so it makes sense to formulate a fertilizer. What you put in is as important as what you leave out. 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.

The brain is not interested in learning. The brain is interested in surviving.

We do not survive so that we can learn. We learn so that we can survive.

If you want a well-educated child, you must create an environment of safety. When the brain’s safety needs are met, it will allow its neurons to moonlight in algebra classes. When safety needs are not met, algebra goes out the window.

One simple example of the brain’s fixation on safety occurs during an assault. It’s called “weapon focus.” Victims of an assault often suffer from amnesia or confusion; they usually can’t recall the facial features of the criminal. But they often can completely recall the details of the weapon used.

The brain is learning under these hostile conditions (stress can marvelously focus the mind); it is just concentrating on the source of the threat.

The student’s mind was focusing on the source of the threat, just as it had been molded to do over the past few million years. The teacher’s anger could not direct the student to the instrument to be learned because the instrument was not the source of danger. The teacher was the source of danger.

“I’ve been thrown out of other places because I did this,” she explained. Though shrouded in an oversize sweater, she was visibly nervous as the waiter took her order. If America knew what breast milk can do for the brains of its youngest citizens, lactating mothers across the nation would be enshrined, not embarrassed.

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.

The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that all mothers breast-feed exclusively for the first six months of their babies’ lives, continue breast-feeding as their kids start taking on solids, and wean them after a year.

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.

Though 2,100 words per hour might sound like a lot, it actually represents a moderate rate of conversation.

While other parts of Vygotsky’s work are starting to show some intellectual arthritis, his ideas on self-regulation have held up well.

Here is where parents make a common mistake—one that often creates the saddest sight a teacher can behold: a bright child who hates learning. Ethan’s parents constantly told him how brainy he was. “You’re so smart! You can do anything, Ethan. We are so proud of you,” they would say every time he sailed through a math test.

The parents had no idea that this form of praise was toxic.

“What do you think?”

His response was clever: ‘I have friends on both sides of the issue, and I like to stand with my friends.’

the amount of TV a child should watch before the age of 2 is zero.

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.

Einstein, arguably as bright as they come, is rumored not to have spoken in complete sentences until he was 3.

This individuality is partially genetic, but it also occurs because neurons are so responsive to the outer environment. They easily form new connections and break off existing ones, a property known as neuroplasticity.

Jean Piaget (who worked for a time with Alfred Binet, the IQ guy) came up with four phases of cognitive development in kids, which he called sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, and formal operational.

It can create a psychological state called learned helplessness, which can physically damage a child’s brain. The child learns he can’t control the negative stimuli (the parent’s anger or disappointment) coming at him or the situations that cause it. Think of a third-grade boy who comes home from school every night to a drunken dad, who then beats him up. The little guy has to have a home, but it is awful to have a home. He will get the message that there is no way out, and eventually he will not try to escape, even if a way later presents itself.

Learned helplessness is a gateway to depression, even in childhood.

Parents often tell me their highest goal is to raise a happy child. When I ask what they mean, exactly, I get varying responses. Some parents mean happiness as an emotion: They want their children to regularly experience a positive subjective state. Some parents mean it more like a steady state of being: They want their children to be content, emotionally stable. Others seem to mean security or morality, praying that their child will land a good job and marry well, or be “upstanding.” Past a few quick examples, however, most parents find the notion hard to pin down. Scientists do, too. One researcher who has spent many years trying to get at the answer is a delightful elf of a psychologist named Daniel Gilbert, at Harvard.

Their lives were to be stretched out like a rack for years so that teams of professionals, including psychologists, anthropologists, social workers, even physiologists, could keep track of everything that happened to them.

“The only thing that really matters in life [is] your relationships to other people.”

By the time a person reaches middle age, they are the only predictor.

“Human beings are in some ways like bees. We have evolved to live in intensely social groups, and we don’t do as well when freed from hives.”

A 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.

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

Money increases happiness only when it lifts people out of poverty to about $50,000 a year in income. Past that, wealth and happiness part ways. 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. After their basic needs are met, they just need some close friends and relatives.

RoboCop’s visor; you can see him digitally tagging only the bad guys for further processing, leaving everyone else alone. Aim, fire: He blows away only the bad guys. This kind of filtering is exactly what emotions do in the brain. You’re probably used to thinking of emotions as the same thing as feelings, but to the brain, they’re not. 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. Feelings are the subjective psychological experiences that emerge from this activation.

emotions help us prioritize our sensory inputs.

He flashed me a megawatt smile that could have powered Las Vegas

A great deal of neurological activity occurs in both the cortex and limbic structures in all babies’ early weeks.

By 6 months of age, a baby typically can experience surprise, disgust, happiness, sadness, anger, and fear. What babies don’t have are a lot of filters. Crying for many months remains the shortest, most efficient means of getting a parent to put a Post-it note on them. Parental attention is deep in the survival interests of the otherwise helpless infant, so babies cry when they are frightened, hungry, startled, overstimulated, lonely, or none of the above. That makes for a lot of crying.