Brain Rules for Baby (12 page)

These asymmetries originate from a phenomenon well established in the cognitive neurosciences. Any human behavior has many moving parts, roughly divisible into background and foreground elements. Background components involve our evolutionary history, genetic makeup, and fetal environment. Foreground components involve acute hormones, prior experiences, and immediate environmental triggers. Alone in our skulls, we have privileged access to both sets of components, providing detailed knowledge of our psychological interiors, motivations, and intentions. Formally called introspection, we know what we intend to mean or to communicate on a minute-to-minute basis. The problem is, nobody else does. Other people can’t read our minds. The only information others have about our interior states and our motives is what our words say and how our faces and bodies appear. This is formally called extrospection.

We are amazingly blind about the limits of extrospective information. We know when our actions fail to match our inner thoughts and feelings, but we sometimes forget that this knowledge is not available to others. The disparity can leave us bewildered, surprised at how we come across to other people. As poet Robert Burns wrote, “Oh that God the gift would give us / to see ourselves as others see us.”

Introspective knowledge clashing with extrospective information is the Big Bang of most human conflicts. It has been directly observed between people trying to give directions to a lost soul and between
warring nations trying to negotiate a peace agreement. It forms the basis of most breakdowns in communication, including conflicts in marriage.

If asymmetry lies at the heart of most struggles, it follows that more symmetry would produce less hostility. Hard to believe that a 4-year-old boy in a cheesy empathy contest could illustrate this insight to be essentially correct. But he did. The late author Leo Buscaglia tells of being asked to judge a contest to find 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.”

There are many layers to this story, but its essence is distillable: This is a response to an asymmetrical relationship. The old man was sad. The little boy was not. Yet the willingness of this inadvertent counselor to enter the emotional space of the old man, to
empathize
, changed the equilibrium of the relationship.

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.

I used to think that squishy topics like empathy had as much neuroscientific support as the psychic hotline. If 10 years ago someone had told me that empathy was going to be as empirically
well-described as, say, Parkinson’s disease, I would have laughed out loud. I’m not laughing now. Growing and robust research literature describes empathy, defining it with three key ingredients:

Couples who regularly practice empathy see stunning results. It is the independent variable that predicts a successful marriage, according to behaviorist John Gottman, who, post-hoc criticisms notwithstanding, forecasts divorce probabilities with accuracy rates approaching 90 percent. In Gottman’s studies, 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.) If that empathy trafficking was absent, the marriage foundered.

Research shows that 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. That’s extremely important to recognize. If there is wiggle room for negotiation only 30 percent of the time, empathy becomes the premier exercise in any couple’s conflict-management workout. That’s probably why its absence is such a powerful predictor of divorce.

Gottman, among other researchers, discovered a similar effect in child-rearing. He has said, “Empathy not only matters, it is the foundation of effective parenting.”

What must you do to get the kind of marital successes Gottman reported? You need to close that gap I described, the imbalance between what you know about your inner feelings and what you deduce about your spouse’s. The way to do that is to create an “empathy reflex”—your first response to any emotional situation. Researchers defined the empathy reflex while attempting to socialize high-functioning autistic children. It’s surprisingly simple and surprisingly effective, something akin to the little boy crawling up onto the old man’s lap. When you first encounter somebody’s “hot” feelings, execute two simple steps:

Then you can engage in whatever nasty reactive bad habits are normal for you. I give you fair warning, however. If the empathy reflex becomes an active part of the way you manage conflicts, it will be difficult for you to stay nasty and reactive. Here’s a real-life example taken from one of my research files.

A woman’s 15-year-old daughter was allowed to go out on Saturdays but had to obey a strict midnight curfew. She ignored this curfew one weekend, not returning until 2 a.m. The daughter crept into the house and saw the dreaded living room lamp still on, with a visibly angry mother waiting in the chair. The kid was scared out of her wits, of course. She also seemed troubled. Mom perceived she’d had a tough night. This scene would normally signal the opening rounds of an emotional smackdown, a familiar and draining event for both. But Mom had heard from a friend about the empathy reflex and chose to deploy it instead.

Beginning with a simple affective description, she commented, “You look scared out of your mind. The teenager paused, nodded slightly. “You not only look scared”. she continued, “you look upset. Really upset. In fact, you look humiliated”. The teenager paused again. This was not what she was expecting. The mom then deployed step 2, guessing at the origin.

“You had a bad time tonight, didn’t you? The daughter grew wide-eyed. A tough night indeed. Tears suddenly sprang into her eyes. Mom guessed what probably occurred, and her voice softened. “You had a fight with your boyfriend.” The teenager burst out crying. “He broke up with me! I had to get another ride home! That’s why I was late!” The daughter collapsed into her mother’s loving arms, and both of them cried. There would be no smackdown that evening. There seldom is in the arms of an empathy reflex—whether in parenting or in marriage.

It is not the whole story, of course. Mom still punished her daughter; rules are rules, and she was grounded for a week. But the complexion of the relationship changed. Her daughter even began
imitating the empathy reflex, a common research finding in households where it is actively practiced. Early the next week, the daughter saw her mother scrambling to make a late dinner, visibly upset after a long day at work. Instead of asking what was on the menu, the daughter said, “You look really upset, Mom. Is it because it’s late and you’re tired and you don’t want to make dinner?”

The mother couldn’t believe it.

Couples who have solid relationships defined by empathy and who prepare for the transition to parenthood avoid the worst of the Four Grapes of Wrath. Such preparation creates the best domestic ecology for the child’s healthy brain development.

These parents may or may not get their kid into Harvard, but they will not get their kid into a custody battle. They enjoy the highest probability for raising smart, happy, morally aware kids.

Nothing in President Theodore Roosevelt’s early life suggested even a whiff of future greatness. He was a sickly child, nervous and timid, and so asthmatic he had to sleep upright in bed to keep from asphyxiating. He was too ill to attend formal classes, forcing his parents to school him at home. Because of a serious heart condition, his doctors suggested he find a line of work that would tether him to a desk and by all means avoid strenuous physical activity.

Fortunately, 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; graduated Phi Beta Kappa; ran for the state legislature at age 23; and published his first scholarly book, a history of the War of 1812, the next year. He gained a reputation as a thought-provoking historian and, eventually, an able politician. And zoologist. And philosopher, geographer, warrior,
and diplomat. Roosevelt became commander-in-chief at the age of 42, the youngest ever. He remains the only president awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor, and he was the first American to win the Nobel Peace Prize.

What made Roosevelt so darn smart, given his less than auspicious start? Clearly, genetics helped our 26th president. For all of us, nature controls about 50 percent of our intellectual horsepower, and environment determines the rest. This means two things for parents: First, no matter how hard your child tries, there will be limits to what his brain can do. Second, that’s only half of the story. Aspects of your child’s intelligence will be deeply influenced by his environment, especially by what you do as parents. We’ll look at both the seed and the soil. This chapter discusses the biological basis of a child’s intelligence. The next chapter explains what you can do to optimize it.