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This overruling is emotional regulation. There is nothing wrong with crying, or any other number of expressions, but you realize that there are social contexts where the behavior is appropriate and social contexts where it is not. People who do this well generally have lots of friends. If you want your kids to be happy, you will spend lots of time teaching them how and when this filtering should occur.

Because kids often express their emotions indirectly, you have to consider the environmental context before you attempt to decode your child's behavior. If you are concluding that parents need to pay a lot of attention to the emotional landscapes of their kids to understand their behavior - all to get them properly socialized - you are 100% correct.

Until they acquire language, what's in store for young children as their tiny, emotion-heavy brains stitch themselves together is lots of confusion. This struggle is especially poignant in the early toddler years. Young children may not be aware of the emotions they are experiencing. They may not yet understand the socially correct way to communicate them.

You're probably used to thinking of emotions as the same time as feelings, but to the brain, they're not. Emotions are like Post-it notes that cause the brain to pay attention to something. Our brains tag those inputs most immediately concerned with our survival: threats, sex, and patterns. Emotions help us prioritize our sensory inputs. As you'd expect, a child's ability to regulate emotions take a while to develop.

The two ingredients go into creating socially smart children that have the strongest backing in the hard neurosciences, and also are of the most predictive for social competency:

- emotional regulation
- empathy

You will need to teach your children how to socialize effectively - how to make friends, how to keep friends - if you want them to be happy.

Help your children get into a profession that can at least make mid-five figures. Past $50k per year in income, wealth and happiness part ways. 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 needs lots of close friends and relatives.

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
- cultivating a general 'attitude of gratitude'
- sharing novel experiences with a loved one
- deploying a ready 'forgiveness reflex' when loved one slights you

The only thing that really matters in life are your relationships with other people. The more intimate the relationship, the better. People don't gain entrance to the top 10% of the happiness pile unless they are involved in a romantic relationship of some kind. Marriage is a big factor.

Recall that from marriages to workplaces, the largest source of conflict comes from the asymmetry from extrospective and introspective. A great deal of asymmetry can be averted through the correct interpretation of nonverbal cues. The less practice humans get at it, the more immature their social interactions are likely to be, which has implications ranging from future divorce rates to erosion of productivity.

Perfecting nonverbal communication skills take years of practice, and it's crucial that kids do it. Real-life experience are much messier than life on the Internet and not at all anonymous. Flesh-and-blood people touch each other, get in each other's way, constantly telegraph information to each other in a fashion not easily reformatted into emoticons and three-letter abbreviations.

The Internet and associated media encourage private consumption. This leads to the odd condition 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. That's the world autistic kids live in, by the way.

Parents who start their kids out on a vigorous exercise schedule are more likely to have children for whom exercise becomes a steady, even lifelong, habit. Fit kids score higher than on executive function tests than sedentary controls, and those scores remain as long as the exercise does. The best result accrue if you do the exercises with your children.

Exercise - especially aerobic exercise - is fantastic for the brain, increasing executive function scores anywhere from 50% to 100%. This is true across the life span, from young children to members of the golden-parachute crowd. Strengthening exercise do not give you these numbers (though there are many other reasons to do them).

Before age 2, TV is best avoided completely. But after age 5, the jury is out on this harsh verdict. Some television shows improve brain performance at this age. Not surprisingly, these shows tend to be the interactive types.

Rather than praising him for being smart, they should have praised him for working hard. This appeals to controllable effort rather than to unchangeable talent. It's called 'growth mindset' praise.

If you praise your child for some fixed characteristics, three things are statistically likely to happen: First, your child will begin to perceive mistakes as failure. Second, perhaps as a reaction to the first, she will become more concerned with looking smart than with actually learning something. Third, she will be less willing to confront the reasons behind any deficiencies, less willing to make an effort.

How can you get that kind of effort from your child? Surprisingly, it's how you praise him. What you praise defines what your child perceives success to be.

What separate high performers from low performers is not some divine spark. It is a much more boring but ultimately more controllable factor. All other things being equal, it is effort. From a psychological perspective, effort is in part the willingness to focus one's attention and then sustain that focus. Effort also involves impulse control and a persistent ability to delay gratification.

Vygotsky predicted that the ability of the under-5 crowd to engage in imaginative activities was going to be a better gauge of academic success than any other activity - including quantitative and verbal competencies. The reason, Vygotsky believed, was that such engagement allowed children to learn how to regulate their social behaviors.

The type of play that gives all the cognitive benefits is the type that focuses on impulse control and self-regulation. The date are so clear, you could use them to design the family playroom.

We now know that open-ended activities are as important to a child's neural growth as protein.

When should you start doing all this talking? The real answer is that nobody knows, but we have strong hints that the answer is going to be 'as soon as they are born'.

Parentese also makes the sound of each vowel more distinct; this exaggeration allows them to hear words as distinct entities and discriminate between them. The melodic tone helps separate sounds in contrasting categories. And the high pitch may assist in imitating the characteristics of speech. After all, with a vocal tract one-quarter the size of yours, they can produce fewer sounds, at first only at higher pitches.

Parentese is characterized by high-pitched tone and a sing-song voice with stretched-out vowels. Though parents don't always realize they do it, this kind of speech helps a baby's brain learn. Why? It is much easier to understand a speaker who has slowed down, for one.

Though 2,100 words per hour might sound like a lot, it actually represents a moderate rate of conversation. No language exposure is too silly. "Now we're going to change your diaper. Look at the beautiful trees! What is that?" You can count steps out loud as you walk up a staircase. Just get in the habit of talking.

The gold standard is 2,1000 words per hour. The variety of the words spoken is nearly as important as the number of the 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.

There are also several toxins: pushing your child to perform tasks his brain is not developmentally to take on, stressing her to the point of a psychological state termed 'learned helplessness', and for the under-2 set, television.