Brain Rules for Baby - by John Medina
ISBN: 9780983263388Date read: 2012-01-01
How strongly I recommend it: 10/10
(See my list of 360+ books, for more.)
Go to the Amazon page for details and reviews.
My most-recommended book for those pregnant or with a newborn. I was terrified and dreading having a baby until I read this and it got me excited. Written by a developmental molecular biologist, sharing results of confirmed studies about baby brain development, and what to do accordingly. Two big rules: (2) No screens at all until after age two. (1) A child needs to feel safe.
my notes
“Brain Rules” are what I call the things we know for sure about how the early-childhood brain works. Each one is quarried from the larger seams of behavioral psychology, cellular biology, and molecular biology.
The great thing about science is that it takes no sides - and no prisoners. Once you know which research to trust, the big picture emerges and myths fade away.
To make it into this book, studies must first have been published in the refereed literature and then successfully replicated. Some results have been confirmed dozens of times.
Not having a robust-enough scientific filter is one of the reasons so many parenting books come to such opposing conclusions.
The greatest predictor of happiness is having friends.
Every brain is literally wired differently. No two kids are going to react to the same situation in an identical manner. So there is no such thing as one-size-fits-all parenting advice. Because of this individuality, I appeal to you to get to know your children. That means spending a lot of time with them. Knowing how they behave and how their behaviors change over time is the only way to discover what will and will not work in raising them.
One researcher has gone on record saying that peers - especially of the same sex - shape a child’s behavior much more than parents do.
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.
All the nurture in the world won’t change the fact that 50 percent of your child’s potential is genetic.
We evolved to have larger brains with higher IQs, which allowed us to move from leopard food to Masters of the Universe in 10 million very short years. We gained those brains through the energy savings of walking on two legs instead of four. But attaining the balance necessary to walk upright required the narrowing of the Homo sapiens pelvic canal. For females, that meant one thing: excruciatingly painful, often fatal births. An arms race quickly developed, evolutionary biologists theorized, between the width of the birth canal and the size of the brain. If the baby’s head were too small, the baby would die. If the baby’s head were too big, the mother would die. The solution? Give birth to babies before their skulls become too big to kill mom. The consequence? Bringing kids into the world before their brains are fully developed. The result? Parenthood.
We are so darn social. Understanding this about the brain is fundamental to understanding many of the themes in this book, from empathy to language to the effects of social isolation.
Alloparenting. If as a parent you feel as though you can’t do it alone, that’s because you were never meant to.
No commercial product has ever been shown to do anything to improve the brain performance of a developing fetus.
Your baby’s brain has to lash together an astonishing 1.8 million new connections per second to make a complete brain.
Baby brains never make the birth deadline. About 83 percent of synaptogenesis continues after birth.
Your baby girl’s brain will not completely finish its wiring until she is in her early 20s.
Boys brains may take even longer.
In humans, the brain is the last organ to finish developing.
Once babies can perceive inputs like sounds and smells, starting around the second half of the pregnancy, they become precisely attuned to them. And they subconsciously remember.
The cello was up against her late-pregnancy mid-abdomen, a structure filled with sound-conducting fluids, fully capable of relaying musical information to her unborn son. His developing brain was sensitive enough to record the musical memories. “All the scores I knew by sight were the ones she had played while she was pregnant with me.”
What you eat and smell can influence your infant’s perceptions, too. For a newborn, these things are the familiar comforts of home.
The brain will continue forming 10 billion synapses a day for almost a year after birth. During that interval, the brain uses external visual experiences to help it finish its internal construction projects.
Babies can hear mom’s voice in the womb by the end of the second trimester, and they prefer it to other voices at birth. They respond especially strongly after birth if mom’s voice is muffled, recreating the sonic environment of the womb. Babies even respond to television shows their mothers watched while still in the womb.
Newborns have a powerful memory for sounds they encountered while still in the womb in the last part of gestation. Re-exposing them to these comforting familiar sounds after birth is another way to smooth their transition into life on this cold, unfamiliar planet.
After the sixth month of gestational life. Your baby can smell the perfume you wear, and she can detect the garlic on the pizza you just ate. As a newborn, your baby will actually prefer these smells. The preference is called “olfactory labeling”. This is the basis for an odd piece of advice: Immediately after your baby is born, rub her with her own amniotic fluid before washing her with soap and water. It will calm her down, studies show. Why? As with sounds, smells remind babies of the comfortable home they were inhabiting for the past nine months. That’s because smell and certain types of memory form powerful neural linkages in the human brain.
What you eat during the last stages of pregnancy can influence the food preferences of your baby.
This is called flavor programming, and you can do it soon after your baby is born, too. Lactating mothers who eat green beans and peaches while nursing produce weaned toddlers with the same preferences.
Your baby’s IQ is a function of her brain volume. Brain size predicts about 20 percent of the variance in her IQ scores
Brain volume is related to birth weight, which means that, to a point, larger babies are smarter babies.
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.
IQ rises with birth weight, up to 8 pounds.
Cravings? Is the baby telegraphing its nutritional needs? The answer is no. Mostly it’s a matter of how a person uses food in her daily life. An anxious person who is comforted by the chemicals in chocolate might grow to crave chocolate whenever she feels stressed.
Some biologists believe we are susceptible to cavities now because sugar was not a regular part of our evolutionary experience, and we never developed a defense against it. Eating this way today (well, except for the insects) is called in some circles the paleo diet.
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.
Only two supplements have enough data behind them to support an influence on brain development in utero. One is the folic acid taken around conception. The other: omega-3 fatty acids.
Eating fish, especially oily ones, is a good way to do it. If you don’t get enough omega-3, studies show, you are at much greater risk for dyslexia, attention-deficit disorders, depression, bipolar disorder,
Mothers who ate more fish starting in the second trimester had smarter babies than those who didn’t.
Researchers recommend that pregnant women eat at least 12 ounces of fish per week.
What about the mercury in fish, which can hurt cognition? It appears that the benefits outweigh the harm. Researchers recommend that pregnant women eat those 12 ounces from sources possessing less concentrated mercury (salmon, cod, haddock, sardines, and canned light tuna) as opposed to longer-lived predatory fish (sword-fish, mackerel, and albacore tuna).
Studies of effects of babies born during stressful ice storm in Canada, with the Canadian education system. The result is scary. By the time these “ice storm” children were 5, their behaviors differed markedly from children whose mothers hadn’t experienced the storm. Their verbal IQs and language development appeared stunted, even when the parents education, occupation, and income were taken into account. Was the mother’s stress the culprit? The answer turned out to be yes.
If you are severely stressed during pregnancy:
• It can change the temperament of your child: Infants become more irritable, less consolable.
• It can lower your baby’s IQ: The average decline is about 8 points in certain mental and motor inventories measured in a baby’s first year of life. Using David Wechsler’s 1944 schema, that spread can be the difference between “average IQ” and “bright normal”.
• It can inhibit your baby’s future motor skills, attentional states, and ability to concentrate, differences still observable at age 6. It can damage your baby’s stress-response system.
• Stress can even shrink the size of your baby’s brain.
Is this stressing you out? Luckily, not all stresses are created equal. Moderate stress in small amounts, the type most women feel in a typical pregnancy, actually appears to be good for infants.
Toxic types of stress Researchers have isolated three toxic types. Their common characteristic: that you feel out of control over the bad stuff coming at you.
• Too frequent. Chronic, unrelenting stress during pregnancy hurts baby brain development. The stress doesn’t necessarily have to be severe. The poison is sustained, long-term exposure to stressors that you perceive are out of your control. These can include an overly demanding job, chronic illness, lack of social support, and poverty.
• Too severe. A truly severe, tough event during pregnancy can hurt baby brain development. It doesn’t have to be an ice storm. Such an event often involves a relationship: marital separation, divorce, the death of a loved one
• Too much for you. Mental-health professionals have known for decades that some people are more sensitive than others to stressful events. If you have a tendency to be stressed all the time, so will your womb. We have increasing evidence that part of this stress sensitivity is genetic. Women under such a biological dictatorship will need to keep stress to a minimum during pregnancy.
The important stress hormone is cortisol. It’s the star player in a team of nasty molecules called glucocorticoids. These hormones control many of our most familiar stress responses.
A woman’s stress hormones affect her baby by slipping through the placenta and entering the baby’s brain, like cruise missiles programmed to hit two targets. This is the basis of the Brain Rule: Stressed mom, stressed baby. The first target is the baby’s limbic system, an area profoundly involved in emotional regulation and memory. This region develops more slowly in the presence of excess hormone.
Excess hormone from mom can mean baby has a difficult time turning off her own stress hormone system. Her brain becomes marinated in glucocorticoids whose concentrations are no longer easily controllable. The baby can carry this damaged stress-response system into adulthood.
http://www.brainrules.net/
There we’ve listed a number of techniques known from the research literature to reduce stress. A big one is exercise, which has so many benefits.
Evolutionary echoes imply that exercise was very much a part of our lives, including during pregnancy. Anthropologists think we walked as many as 12 miles per day.
Does that mean exercise should be a part of human pregnancies? Evidence suggests the answer is yes.
Aerobic exercise elevates a molecule in your brain that can specifically block the toxic effects of those nasty glucocorticoids. This heroic molecule is termed brain-derived neurotrophic factor. More BDNF means less stress, which means fewer glucocorticoids in your womb, which means better baby brain development. It may sound strange to say, but a fit mom has a much better chance of having a smart baby.
When her heart rate goes up, so does baby’s. When mom’s breathing rate increases, so does baby’s. But only if the exercise is moderate.
Overly strenuous exercise begins to shut off blood flow to the womb, restricting baby’s oxygen supply - not good for the brain. The womb can overheat, too.
Swimming is one of the best forms of exercise in later stages; the water helps dissipate excess heat away from the womb.
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), then slowing things down as the due date approaches. But you should exercise. As long as you don’t have obstetric or other medical complications, the American College of Obstetricians recommends 30 minutes or more of moderate exercise per day.
Sustained exposure to hostility can erode a baby’s IQ and ability to handle stress, sometimes dramatically. An infant’s need for caregiver stability is so strong, he will rewire his developing nervous system depending upon the turbulence he perceives.
“You want to get your kid into Harvard? You really want to know what the data say? I’ll tell you what the data say! Go home and love your wife!”
83 percent of new parents experienced a moderate to severe crisis in the marriage during the transition to parenthood.
Marital quality, which peaks in the last trimester of a first pregnancy, decreases anywhere from 40 percent to 67 percent in the infant’s first year. More recent studies, asking different questions, put the figure closer to 90 percent. During those 12 months, scores on hostility indices - measures of marital conflict - skyrocket. The risk for clinical depression, for both fathers and mothers, goes up.
Why will you fight?
• sleep loss
• social isolation
• unequal workload
• depression
BABY MEMORY: The baby had only a single exposure to this event, but she had recalled it perfectly a week later.
Infants are extraordinarily delightful, surprisingly aggressive learners. They pick up everything.
Children have never been good at listening to their parents, but they have never failed to imitate them.
Don’t fight in front of the baby. (Rather: don’t fight!)
It is hard to overestimate the effect that sleep loss exerts over couples in the transition to parenthood.
Babies have no sleep schedule when they are born.
This can persist for months. A predictable schedule may not make itself visible for half a year, maybe longer.
Subjects saddled with sleep debt typically suffer a 91 percent loss in their ability to regulate strong emotions compared with controls. The decline in general cognitive skill is equally dramatic
Preschoolers demand some form of attention 180 times per hour.
You quickly exhaust your reservoir of good will toward your spouse. Sleep loss alone can predict most of the increases in hostile interactions between new parents.
Do you have many friends?
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?
Social isolation can lead to clinical depression in the parents. Depression can affect the parents physical health.
Women with families do 70 percent of all household tasks. Dishes, dirt, diapers, minor household repairs, all of it.
Women spend a whopping 39 hours per week performing work related to child care. Today’s dad spends about half that - 21.7 hours a week.
Women experiencing overwhelming anxiety, moodiness, or sadness require intervention. Left untreated, the consequences of postpartum depression can be tragic, ranging from a severe drop in quality of life to infanticide and suicide. Left untreated, postpartum depression also will debilitate the lively, interactive bonds that are supposed to develop between parent and child in the earliest months. Instead, the baby begins mirroring the mother’s depressive actions. It’s called reciprocal withdrawal. These children become more insecure, socially inhibited, timid, and passive - about twice as fearful on average as children raised by mothers who aren’t depressed.
People view their own behaviors as originating from amendable, situational constraints, but they view other people’s behaviors as originating from inherent, immutable personality traits. The classic example is the job candidate who arrives late for an interview. The candidate ascribes his tardiness to situations beyond his control (being caught in traffic). The interviewer ascribes his tardiness to personal irresponsibility (not taking traffic into account).
People tend to have inflated views of themselves and their futures. They think they’re more likely than they actually are to become wealthy, have a brighter occupational future, and are somehow less likely to contract infectious diseases (one reason illnesses like cancer can be so emotionally devastating is that people never think it will happen to them, only to the “other guy”). People overestimate how much they can learn about others from short encounters. When fighting, people believe they are perfectly unbiased, informed, and objective, while simultaneously thinking their opponents are hopelessly prejudiced, clueless, and subjective.
== EMPATHY (parents and kids):
The most caring child. The boy who won related a story about his elderly next-door neighbor. The man had just lost his wife of many decades. The 4-year-old heard him sobbing in his backyard and decided to investigate. Crawling onto the neighbor’s lap, the boy just sat there while the man grieved. It was strangely comforting to the gentleman. The boy’s mom later asked her son what he had said to the neighbor. “Nothing,” the little guy said. “I just helped him cry.” Empathy works so well because it does not require a solution. It requires only understanding.
Choosing to empathize - at its heart it is simply a choice - is so powerful it can change the developing nervous systems of infants whose parents regularly practice it.
Empathy, defining it with three key ingredients:
• Affect detection. First, a person must detect a change in the emotional disposition of someone else. In the behavioral sciences, “affect means the external expression of an emotion or mood, usually associated with an idea or an action.
• Imaginative transposition. Once a person detects an emotional change, he transposes what he observes onto his own psychological interiors. He “tries on” the perceived feelings as if they were clothes, then observes how he would react given similar circumstances.
• Boundary formation. The person who is empathizing realizes at all times that the emotion is happening to the other person, never to the observer. Empathy is powerful, but it is also has boundaries.
Couples who regularly practice empathy see stunning results. It is the independent variable that predicts a successful marriage.
If the wife felt she was being heard by her husband - to the point that he accepted her good influence on his behavior - the marriage was essentially divorce-proof. (Interestingly, whether the husband felt heard was not a factor in divorce rates.)
70 percent of marital conflicts are not resolvable; the disagreement remains. As long as the participants learn to live with their differences - one of the biggest challenges in marriage - this is not necessarily bad news. But differences must be grasped, even if no problems are solved. One of the reasons empathy works so well is because it does not require a solution. It requires only understanding.
Create an “empathy reflex” - your first response to any emotional situation.
When you first encounter somebody’s “hot” feelings, execute two simple steps:
1. Describe the emotional changes you think you see.
2. Make a guess as to where those emotional changes came from.
Human intelligence has two essential ingredients:
(1) the ability to record information.
(2) 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. This capacity for reasoning and problem solving is termed “fluid intelligence”.
Intelligence, seen through this evolutionary lens, is simply the ability to do these activities better than someone else.
Many other ingredients make up the human intelligence stew:
• The desire to explore
• Self-control
• Creativity
• Verbal communication
• Decoding nonverbal communication
Babies learn about their environment through a series of increasingly self-corrected ideas. They experience sensory observations, make predictions about what they observe, design and deploy experiments capable of testing their predictions, evaluate their tests, and add that knowledge to a self-generated, growing database. The style is naturally aggressive, wonderfully flexible, and annoyingly persistent. They use fluid intelligence to extract information, then crystallize it into memory.
Exploratory behavior - the willingness to experiment, to ask extraordinary questions of ordinary things - is a talent highly prized in the working world.
What traits separate creative, visionary people who consistently conjure up financially successful ideas from less imaginative, managerial types who carry them out?
Visionaries had in common five characteristics, which the researchers termed “Innovator’s DNA.” Here are the first three:
• An ability to associate creatively. They could see connections between seemingly unrelated concepts, problems or questions.
• An annoying habit of consistently asking “what if”. And “why not” and “how come you’re doing it this way”. These visionaries scoured out the limits of the status quo, poking it, prodding it, shooting upward to the 40,000-foot view of something to see if it made any sense and then plummeting back to earth with suggestions.
• An unquenchable desire to tinker and experiment. The entrepreneurs might land on an idea, but their first inclination would be to tear it apart, even if self-generated. They displayed an incessant need to test things: to find the ceiling of things, the basement of things, the surface area, the tolerance, the perimeters of ideas - theirs, yours, mine, anybody’s. They were on a mission, and the mission was discovery. The biggest common denominator of these characteristics? A willingness to explore. The biggest enemy was the non-exploration-oriented system in which the innovators often found themselves.
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.
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.
A child’s brain can be trained to enhance self-control and other aspects of executive function.
By their first birthday, babies can no longer distinguish between the sounds of every language on the planet. They can distinguish only between those to which they have been exposed in the past six months.
The brain appears to have a limited window of opportunity in an astonishingly early time frame. The cognitive door begins swinging shut at six months, and, unless something pushes against it, the door closes. By 12 months, your baby’s brain has made decisions that affect her the rest of his life.
Only one thing keeps that door open to another language. You have to deliver the words through a social interaction. A real live person has to come into the room and speak the language directly to the child. If the child’s brain detects this social interaction, its neurons will begin recording the second language, phonemes and all. To perform these cognitive tasks, the brain needs the information-rich, give-and-take stimulation that another human being provides.
Intelligence is not developed in electronic lifeless machines but in the arms of warm, loving people. You can literally rewire a child’s brain through exposure to relationships.
Learning sign language may boost cognition by 50 percent.
Could learning physical gestures improve other cognitive skills? One study hints that it could, though more work needs to be done. Kids with normal hearing took an American Sign Language class for nine months, in the first grade, then were administered a series of cognitive tests. Their attentional focus, spatial abilities, memory, and visual discrimination scores improved dramatically - by as much as 50 percent - compared with controls who had no formal instruction.
Could your child’s ability to read faces and gestures predict her success in our 21st-century workforce? The investigators who studied successful entrepreneurs think so.
Five characteristics in the Innovator’s DNA study.
• They were great at a specific kind of networking. Successful entrepreneurs were attracted to smart people whose educational backgrounds were very different from their own. This allowed them to acquire knowledge about things they would not otherwise learn.
• They closely observed the details of other people’s behaviors. The entrepreneurs were natural experts in the art of interpreting extrospective cues: gestures and facial expressions. Consistently and accurately interpreting these nonverbal signals is probably how they were able to extract information from sources whose academic resources were so different from their own.
Want your baby to grow up to be a successful innovator? Make sure she has nonverbal skills down cold - and an inquisitiveness to match.
(Theodore Roosevelt on his dad:) “He not only took great and untiring care of me… he also most wisely 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.”
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
• praising effort rather than accomplishment.
Brain research tells us there are also several TOXINS:
• pushing your child to perform tasks his brain is not developmentally ready to take on
• stressing her to the point of a psychological state termed “learned helplessness”
• for the under-2 set, television.
The profound need to strike a balance between intellectual freedom and well-disciplined rigor.
Misconception: Many well-meaning moms and dads think their child’s brain is interested in learning. That is not accurate. The brain is not interested in learning. The brain is interested in surviving. Every ability in our intellectual tool kit was engineered to escape extinction. Learning exists only to serve the requirements of this primal goal.
We do not survive so that we can learn. We learn so that we can survive.
Most important: 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.
Breast-feeding is a brain booster
There’s little controversy about it in the scientific community. 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.
Few interactions with children are as much fun as learning to speak their language. As they learn to speak ours, heaping tablespoons of words into their minds is one of the healthiest things parents can do for their brains. 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 more parents talk to their children, even in the earliest moments of life, the better their kids linguistic abilities become and the faster that improvement is achieved.
The variety of the words spoken (nouns, verbs, and adjectives used, along with the length and complexity of phrases and sentences) is nearly as important as the number of 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. Children whose parents talked positively, richly, and regularly to them knew twice as many words as kids whose parents talked to them the least.
Even though babies don’t respond like adults, they are listening, and it is good for them.
Talk a lot! No language exposure is too silly. “Now we’re going to change your diaper.” “Look at the beautiful tree! “What is that?” You can count steps out loud as you walk up a staircase. Just get in the habit of talking.
“Parentese”. It is catnip to a baby’s ear. Parentese is characterized by a 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. Parentese also makes the sound of each vowel more distinct; this exaggeration allows your baby to hear words as distinct entities and discriminate better between them. The melodic tone helps infants separate sounds into contrasting categories. And the high pitch may assist infants in imitating the characteristics of speech.
When should you start doing all this talking? As soon as they are born.
I do believe in a form of disciplined repetition as children begin formal schooling. But many parents are so preoccupied with their young child’s future that they transform every step of the journey into a type of product development, recoiling at open-ended anything.
Open-ended activities are as important to a child’s neural growth as protein.
The box the flashcards come in is probably more beneficial to a toddler’s brain than the flashcards themselves.
The secret sauce is not unstructured, do-anything-you-want play.
The type of play that gives all the cognitive benefits is a type that focuses on impulse control and self-regulation.
The type of play is mature dramatic play, or MDP. To get the benefits in those bullet points, MDP has to be engaged in many hours a day.
This has been codified into a school program called Tools of the Mind,
The ideas for Tools of the Mind come from Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky.
Here’s what happens in a Tools of the Mind classroom:
A play plan:
Before the preschoolers take off into a day filled with imaginative play, they take colored markers and fill out a printed form called a play plan. This announces in explicit terms what the activity du jour will be: “I am going to have tea with my dollies at the zoo”, or “I am going to make a Lego castle and pretend I’m the knight”. The kids carry around a clipboard with the activities written on them.
Practice pretending:
The children are then coached on dramatic play in a technique called “make-believe play practice. The kids receive direct, open-ended instruction about the mechanics of pretending! Here’s a sentence from the training manual: “I’m pretending my baby is crying. Is yours? What should we say?” The little ones are then let loose to their imaginations. At the end of each week, the children have a short “learning conference” with the instructor, listing what they experienced and learned during the period. They also have group meetings. Any discipline intervention usually becomes a group discussion centered around problem solving.
Classrooms look like the equivalent of a late-Christmas-morning living room. Legos are scattered everywhere. Sandboxes are sprinkled around the room. There are jigsaw puzzles to figure out. Blocks with which to build entire new worlds. Clothes for dress-up. Places for crafts. Boxes! Lots of time - and space - for interaction with other kids. The combinations of situations in which individual imagination and creativity could be deployed are seemingly endless.
It works. Kids in the program typically perform 30 percent to 100 percent better than controls on just about any executive function test you throw at them.
They challenge the notion that rote-drilled learning atmospheres always equal better performance. These data flatly state that emotional regulation - reining in impulses - predicts better cognitive performance.
What separates high performers from low performers: Deliberate practice. 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.
What happens when you say, ‘You’re so smart’? Your child will begin to perceive mistakes as failures. He will become more concerned with looking smart than with actually learning something. He will be less willing to confront the reasons behind any deficiencies, less willing to make an effort. Such kids have a difficult time admitting errors.
What to say instead: ‘You really worked hard’
30 years of study show that children raised in growth-mindset homes consistently outscore their fixed-mindset peers in academic achievement. They do better in adult life, too. That’s not surprising. Children with a growth mindset tend to have a refreshing attitude toward failure. They do not ruminate over their mistakes. They simply perceive errors as problems to be solved, then go to work.
TV / SCREENS:
The main thing to consider when you think of exposing your kids to Screen World is the content of what your child will be consuming, for two reasons.
The first is that kids are really good at imitation. Ability to reproduce a behavior, after witnessing it only once, is called deferred imitation. Deferred imitation is an astonishing skill that develops rapidly. A 13-month-old child can remember an event a week after a single exposure. By the time she is almost a year and a half, she can imitate an event four months after a single exposure. The skill never leaves children, something the advertising industry has known for decades.
The brain’s eager willingness to insert its opinion directly into what you are currently experiencing - then fool you into thinking this hybrid is the actual reality.
Your perception of reality is a handshake agreement between what your senses bring to your brain and what your brain thinks ought to be there. And what you expect to be out there is directly tied to what you allowed into your brain in the first place.
What you allow into your child’s brain influences his expectations about the world, which in turn influences not only what he is capable of perceiving but his very behavior.
The amount of TV a child should watch before the age of 2 is zero.
For each hour of TV watched daily by children under age 4, the risk increased 9 percent that they would engage in bullying behavior by the time they started school. This is poor emotional regulation at work.
Just having the TV on while no one is watching - secondhand exposure - seemed to do damage, too, possibly because of distraction. In test laboratories, flashing images and a booming sound track continually diverted children from any activity in which they were otherwise engaged,
After age 2, the worst effects on kids brains may come because television coaxes kids away from exercise.
What about all those store shelves lined with educational videos and DVDs?
The products didn’t work at all. They had no positive effect on the vocabularies of the target audience, infants 17 to 24 months. Some did actual harm. For every hour per day the children spent watching certain baby DVDs and videos, the infants understood an average of six to eight fewer words than infants who did not watch them.
Not everything about TV is negative. It depends upon the content of the TV show, the age of the child, and perhaps even the child’s genetics. Before age 2, TV is best avoided completely. But after age 5, the jury is out
If you must watch TV: Watch the chosen TV show with your kids, interacting with the media, helping them to analyze and think critically about what they just experienced. And rethink putting a TV in the kids room: Kids with their own TVs score an average of 8 points lower on math and language-arts tests than those in households with TVs in the family room.
Exercise - especially aerobic exercise - is fanastic for the brain, increasing executive function scores anywhere from 50 percent to 100 percent. This is true across the life span, from young children to members of the golden-parachute crowd. Strengthening exercises do not give you these numbers (though there are many other reasons to do them).
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 (up to 1½ times more, depending upon the study). 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. Remember that deferred-imitation business? Encouraging an active lifestyle is one of the best gifts you can give your child.
Perfecting nonverbal communication skills takes years of practice. It’s critical that kids do it. Real-life experiences 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.
From marriages to workplaces, the largest source of conflict comes from the asymmetry between extrospective and introspective information. 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.
A healthy skepticism toward a digital-only world is probably best. The best current advice may be keeping those machines mostly in the off position for as long as you can.
Overachieving moms and dads into categories. Four of them are:
• Gourmet parents. These parents are high achievers who want their kids to succeed as they did.
• College-degree parents. Your classic “hot-housers”, these parents are related to Gourmets but believe that the sooner academic training starts, the better.
• Outward-bound parents. Wanting to provide their kids with physical survival skills because the world is such a dangerous place, these parents are often involved in the military and law enforcement.
• Prodigy parents. Financially successful and deeply suspicious about the education system, these parents want to guard their kids against the negative effects of schooling.
Regardless of category, hyper-parents often pursue their child’s intellectual success at the expense of their child’s happiness.
Extreme intellectual pressure is usually counterproductive. Hyper-parenting can actually hurt your child’s intellectual development at these stages.
Children are extraordinarily reactive to parental expectations, aching to please and fulfill when little; aching to resist and rebel when older. If little kids sense a parent wants them to accomplish some intellectual feat for which their brains are not yet ready, they are inexorably forced into a corner. This coerces the brain to revert to “lower-level” thinking strategies, creating counterfeit habits that may have to be unlearned later.
Children are natural explorers. But if parents supply only rigid educational expectations, interest will be transformed into appeasement. Children will stop asking potent questions like “Am I curious about this?” and start asking, “What will satisfy the powers that be?” Exploratory behavior is not rewarded, so it is soon disregarded. Remember, the brain is a survival organ, and nothing is more important to a child than the safety (approval, in this case) parents can provide.
Definitions of happiness.
Daniel Gilbert proposes these three:
• Emotional happiness.
(emotional) feeling, an experience, a transient subjective state incited by - though ultimately untethered to - something objective in the real world.
• Moral happiness.
a philosophical suite of attitudes leads a good and proper life, filled with moral meaning, he or she might feel deeply satisfied and content.
• Judgmental happiness.
Happy about going to the park. Happy for a friend who just got a dog. This involves making a judgment about the world, not in terms of some transient subjective feeling but as a source of potentially pleasurable feelings, past, present, or future.
The Grant Study is probably the most thorough research of its type ever attempted. And what did they come up with after all these years? What in the end constitutes the good life? Consistently makes us happy?
The only thing that really matters in life are your relationships to other people.
Successful friendships.
Friendships are a better predictor than any other single variable. By the time a person reaches middle age, they are the only predictor.
The more intimate the relationship, the better.
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
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.
Many ingredients go into creating socially smart children.
Two of the most predictive for social competency:
• emotional regulation
• empathy
Individuals who are thoughtful, kind, sensitive, outward focused, accommodating, and forgiving have deeper, more lasting friendships.
Moody, rude, and impulsive sound an awful lot like faulty executive control.
These people are not regulating their emotions.
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 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 (things we think we’ve seen before).
By 6 months, a typical baby 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.
The ability to verbally label an emotion, which is a very important strategy for emotional regulation, isn’t there yet.
Young children may not be aware of the emotions they are experiencing. They may not yet understand the socially correct way to communicate them. The result is that your little one may act out in anger when he is actually sad, or she may just become grumpy for no apparent reason.
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.
To have empathy, your child must cultivate the ability to peer inside the psychological interiors of someone else, accurately comprehend that person’s behavioral reward and punishment systems, then respond with kindness and understanding.
Notice what the daughter’s creative empathy did for her mom’s attitude toward their relationship. It seemed to bind them together. These empathetic interactions have names. When one person is truly happy for another, or sad for another, we say they are engaging in active-constructive behaviors. These behaviors are so powerful, they can keep not only parents and children together but husbands and wives together.
Human temperament is a complex, multidimensional concept - a child’s characteristic way of responding emotionally and behaviorally to external events. These responses are fairly fixed and innate; you can observe them in your baby soon after he or she is born.
It is possible to create a stressed baby simply by increasing the mother’s stress hormones.
Something you can see in a game of peekaboo. It’s the power of two-way communication in cementing relationships between a parent and child.
Communication is uneven, doled out in fits and starts, mostly led by baby, and always two-way. Tronick calls it “interaction synchrony.” Attentive, patient interactivity actually helps your baby’s neural architecture develop in a positive way, tilting her toward emotional stability.
Attachment theory springs from the finding that babies come into this world preloaded with lots of emotional and relational abilities. Babies appear to express disgust, distress, interest, and contentment at birth. Within six months, they experience anger, fear, sadness, surprise, and joy. Give them another year, and they will get embarrassed, experience jealousy, feel guilt, 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.
The attachment bond is made stronger and more intimate through a variety of experiences, many involving how attentive a parent is to the baby in the early years.
The relationships that form from this activity slowly develop over time, perhaps two years or longer. Parents who consistently apply attention - especially in these early years - statistically raise the happiest 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.
Your child’s emotional life takes the center role.
The critical issue is your behavior when your children’s emotions become intense enough to push you out of your comfort zone.
• 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
Two dimensions in parenting, each on a continuum:
• 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 at all.
Only one style produces happy children.
• Authoritarian: Too hard Unresponsive plus demanding. Exerting power over their kids is very important to these parents, and their kids are often afraid of them. They do not try to explain their rules and do not project any warmth.
• Indulgent: Too soft Responsive plus undemanding. These parents truly love their kids but have little ability to make and enforce rules. They subsequently avoid confrontation and seldom demand compliance with family rules. These parents are often bewildered by the task of raising kids.
• Neglectful: Too aloof Unresponsive plus undemanding. Probably the worst of the lot. These parents care little about their children and are uninvolved in their day-to-day interactions, providing only the most basic care.
• Authoritative: Just right. Responsive plus demanding. Probably 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.
Your meta-emotion philosophy. A meta-emotion is how you feel about feelings (“meta” literally means ascending, or looking from above). Some people welcome emotional experiences, considering them an important and enriching part of life’s journey. Others think that emotions make people weak and embarrassed and that emotions should be suppressed. Some people think a few emotions are OK, like joy and happiness, but some should stay on a behavioral no-fly list; anger, sadness, and fear are popular choices. Still others don’t know what to do with their emotions and try to run from them.
Whatever you feel about feelings - your own or other people’s - is your meta-emotion philosophy.
Your meta-emotion philosophy turns out to be very important to your children’s future. It predicts how you will react to their emotional lives, which in turn predicts how (or if) they learn to regulate their own emotions.
You have to be comfortable with your emotions in order to make your kids comfortable with theirs.
The mom was extraordinarily attuned to her child’s emotional cues. She knew that her baby’s turning away probably meant he needed a break from the sensory flood he was receiving. Mom withdrew, waited patiently, and did not resume until baby signaled he was no longer flooding. He could then be delighted when mom returned, smiling, rather than staying overstimulated by her persistence and probably crying.
The total elapsed time was less than 5 seconds, but, stretched over years, this emotional sensitivity can make all the difference between a productive kid and a juvenile delinquent.
Parents with the happiest kids started this habit early in their parenting careers and then continued it over the years. They kept track of their children’s emotions the way some people keep track of their stock portfolios or favorite baseball team. They did not pay attention in a controlling, insecure style but in a loving, unobtrusive way, like a caring family physician. They knew when their kids were happy, sad, fearful, or joyful, often without asking. They could read and interpret with astonishing accuracy their child’s verbal and nonverbal cues.
Parents who continue paying attention over the years are not caught off-guard by their children’s ever-changing emotional development.
It is possible to give too much of a good thing. In the late 1980s, 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 actually became less securely attached. Children (like anybody) didn’t take too well to being smothered. The stifling seemed to interfere with emotional self-regulation, messing with a natural need for space and independence.
The girl threw her doll to the floor. “Ally’s doll! Ally’s doll!” She began to cry.
You can imagine a parent making any of several choices in the face of this bubbling brew.
“You seem sad. Are you sad?” is what the girl’s dad said.
The little girl nodded, still angry, too.
The dad continued. “I think I know why. You’re sad because Ally’s gotten all the presents. You only got one!”
The little girl nodded again.
“You want the same number and you can’t have it, and that’s unfair and that makes you sad.”
The dad seemed to be pouring it on.
“Whenever somebody gets something I want and I don’t, I get sad, too.”
Silence.
Then the dad said the line most characteristic of a verbalizing parent.
“We have a word for that feeling, honey”, he said. “Do you want to know what that word is?”
She whimpered, “OK.”
He held her in his arms. “We call it being jealous. You wanted Ally’s presents, and you couldn’t have them. You were jealous.”
She cried softly but was beginning to calm down.
“Jealous”, she whispered.
“Yep”, Dad replied, “and it’s an icky feeling.”
“I been jealous all day”, she replied, nestling into her daddy’s big strong arms.
This big-hearted father is good at a) labeling his feelings and b) teaching his daughter to label hers. He knows what sadness in his own heart feels like and announces it easily. He knows what sadness in his child’s heart looks like, and he is teaching her to announce it, too. He is also good at teaching joy, anger, disgust, concern, fear - the entire spectrum of his little girl’s experience. 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,
Labeling emotions is neurologically calming.
As the dad addressed his daughter’s feelings directly, the little girl began to calm down. This is a common finding; you can measure it in the laboratory. Verbalizing has a soothing effect on the nervous system of children.
Verbal and nonverbal communication are like two interlocking neurological systems. Infants brains haven’t yet connected these systems very well. Their bodies can feel fear, disgust, and joy way before their brains can talk about them.
Learning to label emotions provides the linkage. The earlier this bridge gets constructed, the more likely you are to see self-soothing behaviors, along with a large raft of other benefits.
Powerful way to fine-tune a child’s hearing for the emotional aspects of speech: musical training.
Fearless in the face of raging floods of emotions from their child. They don’t try to shoot down emotions, ignore them, or let them have free reign over the welfare of the family. Instead, these parents get involved in their kids strong feelings. They have four attitudes toward emotions (yes, their meta-emotions):
• 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.
These parents seem to know that emotions don’t make people weak and they don’t make people strong. They only make people human. The result is a savvy let-the-children-be-who-they-are attitude.
Denying the existence of emotions can make them worse.
Behavior is a choice, even though an emotion is not Day-to-day, parents of happy kids do not allow bad behavior simply because they understand where it came from.
Speak softly but carry an obvious rule book.
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 will raise the most troubled children of any parenting style ever tested.
It’s a myth that releasing emotions makes everything better (that blowing your top will defuse your anger, for example).
“Blowing off steam” usually increases aggression.
People produce lasting change only in response to a crisis.
Replace the words “potential catastrophe” with “potential lesson”.
The drinking fountain is broken.
Emily starts to whine. “I want some water!” “I want water NOW!”
Here’s what you are supposed to do:
You acknowledge the child’s feelings and empathize.
“You’re thirsty, aren’t you? Getting a big gulp of cold water would feel so good. I wish that drinking fountain was working so I could lift you up and let you drink as much as you wanted.”
Sound odd? Many parents would expect this response to make things worse, like trying to extinguish a flame by dousing it with lighter fluid.
But the data are remarkably clear:
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.
Verbalize her feelings, validating them, signaling understanding.
The coaching of emotions.
A person tends to experience feelings generated by the emotions of surrounding crowds. If people around you are fearful, angry, or violent, you often catch the same feelings, as if it were a virus.
Empathy comes from being empathized with.
Novices learn to play the game best when they can practice regularly with pros. The more empathy your child sees, the more socially competent he’ll become, and the happier he’ll be.
You can create moral maturity in most children.
What exactly does “moral” mean?
A set of value-laden behaviors embraced by a cultural group whose main function is to guide social behavior.
A conscience is something that makes you feel good when you do good things and makes you feel bad when you don’t.
Internalization is the most important measure of moral awareness. A child who can resist the temptation to defy some moral norm, even when the possibility of detection and punishment is zero, has internalized the rule.
After age 3, kids begin to lie in earnest, though they usually do so imperfectly. They pick up speed on the nasty habit with astonishing frequency. 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.
When children observe bad behavior, they have learned it. Even if the bad behavior is punished, it remains easily accessible in the child’s brain.
Emotions are the foundation of a child’s happiness. It appears that they are also the basis of moral decision-making.
Without the irrational, you can’t achieve the rational.
“The brain that cannot process emotions cannot make up its mind.”
This well-balanced triad statistically provides children with the sturdiest seat - the most finely attuned moral reflexes. The three legs are:
• Clear, consistent rules and rewards
• Swift punishment
• Explaining the rules
Consistent rules that are rewarded on a regular basis.
Your rules are reasonable and clear
Nanny’s solution:
She brings in a physical chart with rules and expectations written right on it - including a reasonably formulated time for bed - then mounts it where the entire family can see. The chart produces an objective authority where the rule is...
a) realistic
b) clearly stated
c) visible to all.
You are warm and accepting when administering rules.
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 much more likely to take root.
Every time your child follows the rules, you offer praise.
Instead of waiting for your 3-year-old to get on the swings, you can reinforce his behavior every time he gets near the door. After a while, he will spend more time at the door. Then you reinforce his behavior only when he opens the door. Then only when he goes outside. Then when he spends time near the swing set. Eventually, he’ll get on the swings and you two can play together. This process, called shaping, can take much patience, but it usually doesn’t take much time.
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.
Mom tried talking to her, reasoning with her, and, when these failed, yelling at her. She eventually brought out the heavy artillery - spanking - but nothing changed. Why were Mom’s strategies failing? Because her punishments were actually providing the little girl what she desired most: Mom’s undivided attention. As difficult as this might seem, Mom’s best shot at breaking this cycle was to ignore her daughter when she misbehaved.
Instead, Mom would reinforce her daughter’s desirable behaviors by paying rich, undivided attention only when she acted in accordance with the laws of the family.
Children internalize behaviors best when they are allowed to make their own mistakes and feel the consequences.
The other day my son had a tantrum in the phone store and took his shoes and socks off. Instead of arguing with him to put them back on, I let him walk outside a few feet in the snow. It took about 2 seconds for him to say, “Mommy, want shoes on.” This is the most effective punishment strategy known.
Punishment has several limitations:
• It suppresses the behavior but not the child’s knowledge of how to misbehave.
• 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.
• Punishment always arouses negative emotions fear and anger are natural responses - and these can produce such resentment that the relationship may become the issue rather than the obnoxious behavior. You risk counterproductivity, or even real damage to your connection with your child, if you punish incorrectly.
The punishment must be administered consistently - every time the rule is broken.
Consistency must be there not only from one day to the next but from one caregiver to the next.
The closer the punishment is to the point of infraction, the faster the learning becomes.
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. This evolutionary need for safety is so powerful, the presence of the rules themselves often communicates safety to children. “Oh, they actually care about me”.
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.
Parents who provide clear, consistent boundaries whose reasons for existence are always explained generally produce moral kids.
Spanking caused more behavioral problems than other types of punishment, producing more aggressive, more depressed, more anxious children with lower IQs.
3-year-olds spanked more than twice in a month were 50 percent more likely to be aggressive by age 5.
Inductive parenting takes effort. Hitting a kid does not. In my opinion, hitting is a lazy form of parenting.
“The only time I ever felt qualified to be a parent was before I had kids.”
Be willing to enter into your child’s world on a regular basis and to empathize with what your child is feeling.
Every time I chose to put my children’s priorities ahead of my own, even when I didn’t feel like it, I found I was learning to love more honestly.
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 full of costumes. Blocks. Picture books. Tubes and gears. Anything where a child can be safely let loose, joyously free to explore whatever catches his fancy.
A list of nearly 20 great exercises you can do with your kids, in Ellen Galinsky’s book “Mind in the Making”.
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 is so impatient, or what joke someone on a cellphone is laughing about. It’s a natural way to practice seeing other people’s points of view - the basis of empathy.
Abe Lincoln(?) quote: “I have friends on both sides of the issue, and I like to stand with my friends”.