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

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Table of Contents

To my amazing kids and their even more amazing mother, for teaching me that when confronted with a choice between two equally plausible theories, it is always best to take the one that is funnier.

brain rules

pregnancy

Babies develop an active mental life in the womb
Stressed mom, stressed baby
Eat right, stay fit, get lots of pedicures

relationship

Happy marriage, happy baby
The brain seeks safety above all
What is obvious to you is obvious to you

smart baby

The brain cares about survival before learning
Intelligence is more than IQ
Face time, not screen time

Safe baby, smart baby
Praise effort, not IQ
Guided playevery day
Emotions, not emoticons

happy baby

Babies are born with their own temperament
Emotions are just Post-it notes
Empathy makes good friends

The brain craves community
Empathy soothes the nerves
Labeling emotions calms big feelings

moral baby

Babies are born with moral sensibilities
Discipline + warm heart = moral kid
Let your yes be yes and your no be no

introduction

Every time I lectured to a group of parents-to-be about baby brain development, I made a mistake. The parents, I thought, had come for a tasty helping of science about the brain in uteroa little neural crest biology here, a little axonal migration there. But in the Q&A session after each lecture, the questions were always the same. The first, delivered by a very pregnant woman one rainy night in Seattle, was,What can my baby learn while she is still in my womb? Another woman asked, Whats going to happen to my marriage after we bring our baby home? A dad delivered the third question, with some authority: How do I get my kid into Harvard? An anxious mom asked the fourth question: How can I make sure my little girl is going to be happy? And the fifth belonged to a downright noble grandmother. How do I make my grandchild good? she asked. She had taken over parenting responsibilities from a drug-addicted daughter. She did not want the same thing to happen again.

No matter how many times I tried to steer the conversation toward the esoteric world of neural differentiation, parents asked variations on these same five questionsover and over again. Finally, I realized my mistake. I was giving parents Ivory Tower when they needed Ivory Soap. So, this book will not be concerned with the nature of gene regulation in the developing rhombencephalon. Brain Rules for Baby instead will be guided by the practical questions my audiences keep asking.

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. Each was selected for its ability to assist newly minted moms and dads in the daunting task of caring for a helpless little human.

I certainly understand the need for answers. Having a first child is like swallowing an intoxicating drink made of equal parts joy and terror, chased with a bucketful of transitions nobody ever tells you about. I know firsthand: I have two boys, both of whom came with bewildering questions, behavioral issues, and no instructions. I soon learned thats not all they came with. They possessed a gravitational pull that could wrest from me a ferocious love and a tenacious loyalty. They also were magnetic: I could not help staring at their perfect fingernails, clear eyes, dramatic shocks of hair. By the time my second child was born, I understood that it is possible to split up love ad infinitum and not decrease any single portion of it. With parenting, it is truly possible to multiply by dividing.

As a scientist, I was very aware that watching a babys brain develop feels as if you have a front-row seat to a biological Big Bang. The brain starts out as a single cell in the womb, quiet as a secret. Within a few weeks, it is pumping out nerve cells at the astonishing rate of 8,000 per second. Within a few months, it is on its way to becoming the worlds finest thinking machine. These mysteries fueled not only wonder and love but, as a rookie parent, I remember, anxiety and questions.

Too many myths

Parents need facts, not just advice, about raising their children. Unfortunately, those facts are difficult to find in the ever-growing mountain of parenting books. And blogs. And message boards, and podcasts, and mother-in-laws, and every relative whos ever had a child. Theres plenty of information out there. Its just hard for parents to know what to believe.

The great thing about science is that it takes no sidesand no prisoners. Once you know which research to trust, the big picture emerges and myths fade away. To gain my trust, research must pass my grump factor. 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. Where I make an exception for cutting-edge research, reliable but not yet fully vetted by the passage of time, I will note it.

To me, parenting is about brain development. Thats not surprising, given what I do for a living. I am a developmental molecular biologist, with strong interests in the genetics of psychiatric disorders. My research life has been spent mostly as a private consultant, a for-hire troubleshooter, to industries and public research institutions in need of a geneticist with mental-health expertise. I also founded the Talaris Institute, located in Seattle next to the University of Washington, whose original mission involved studying how infants process information at the molecular, cellular, and behavioral levels. That is how I came to talk to groups of parents from time to time, like on that rainy Seattle night.

Scientists certainly dont know everything about the brain. But what we do know gives us our best chance at raising smart, happy children. And it is relevant whether you just discovered you are pregnant, already have a toddler, or find yourself needing to raise grandchildren. So it will be my pleasure in this book to answer the big questions parents have asked meand debunk their big myths, too.

Here are some of my favorites:

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