Brain Rules for Baby (2 page)

As a scientist, I was very aware that watching a baby’s 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 world’s finest thinking machine. These mysteries fueled not only wonder and love but, as a rookie parent, I remember, anxiety and questions.

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 who’s ever had a child. There’s plenty of information out there. It’s just hard for parents to know what to believe.

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 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. That’s 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 don’t 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 me—and debunk their big myths, too.

Here are some of my favorites:

 

Myth:
Playing Mozart to your womb will improve your baby’s future math scores.

 

Truth:
Your baby will simply remember Mozart after birth—along with many other things she hears, smells, and tastes in the womb (see “Babies remember, page 31). If you want her to do well in math in her later years, the greatest thing you can do is to teach her impulse control in her early years (see “Self-control”, page 105).

 

Myth:
Exposing your infant or toddler to language DVDs will boost his vocabulary.

 

Truth:
Some DVDs can actually reduce a toddler’s vocabulary (page 147). It is true that the number and variety of words you use when talking to your baby boost both his vocabulary and his IQ (see“Talk to your baby—a lot”, page 127). But the words have to come from
you
—a real, live human being.

 

Myth:
To boost their brain power, children need French lessons by age 3 and a room piled with “brain-friendly” toys and a library of educational DVDs.

 

Truth:
The greatest pediatric brain-boosting technology in the world is probably a plain cardboard box, a fresh box of crayons, and two hours. The worst is probably your new flat-screen TV. (See “Hurray for play”, page 132.)

 

Myth:
Continually telling your children they are smart will boost their confidence.

 

Truth:
They’ll become
less
willing to work on challenging problems (see “What happens when you say, ‘You’re so smart,’” page 140). If you want your baby to get into a great college, praise his or her effort instead.

 

Myth:
Children somehow find their own happiness.

 

Truth:
The greatest predictor of happiness is having friends. How do you make and keep friends? By being good at deciphering nonverbal communication. (See “How to make friends”, page 167.) This skill can be honed. Learning a musical instrument (page 209) boosts the ability by 50 percent. Text messaging (page 151) may destroy it.

 

Research like this is continually published in respected scientific journals. But unless you have a subscription to the
Journal of Experimental Child Psychology,
this rich procession of findings may pass you by. This book is meant to let you know what scientists know—without having a Ph.D. to understand it.

I am convinced that not having a robust-enough scientific filter is one of the reasons so many parenting books come to such opposing conclusions. Just try to find a consensus from parenting experts about how to get your baby to sleep through the night. I can’t imagine anything more frustrating for first-time parents.

This underscores the fact that brain science can’t solve every single parenting situation. It can give us overarching rules, but it is not always good at the specifics. Consider this parent’s story, posted on
TruuConfessions.com
(a source I use throughout the book):

Can brain science weigh in on this situation? Not really. Research
tells us that parents must have clear rules and swift consequences for rule violations. It can’t tell us whether or not you should take off a door. In truth, we are just starting to learn what good parenting looks like. Parenting research is tough to do, for four reasons:

 

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.

From a researcher’s perspective, the brain’s willingness to respond to its external environment is pretty frustrating. Individual complexity is muddled in cultural differences, complete with their very own value systems. On top of that, families in poverty have very different problems from those of upper-middle-class families. The brain responds to all of this (poverty can influence IQ, for one). No wonder this stuff is so hard to research.

 

Kids raised in two-parent households are confronted with not one parenting style but two. Moms and dads often hold different parenting priorities, a source of great conflict in some relationships. A
combination
of the two styles guides the child. Here’s one example:

Two styles indeed. This argues for 100 percent cooperation between father and mother about how their children will be raised. That, of course, is impossible. Child-rearing in two-parent households will always be a hybrid proposition. Eventually, the children begin responding back to the parents, which will influence future parenting behavior. All of these changes complicate the research.

 

Life gets even more complex as a child grows up. School and peer interactions play an increasingly powerful role in shaping children (anybody out there have a horrible high-school experience you still think about?). One researcher has gone on record saying that peers—especially of the same sex—shape a child’s behavior much more than parents do. As you might suspect, this idea has met with a great deal of skepticism. But not outright rejection. Children do not live in an exclusive social ecology dominated by parents and nobody else.

 

Even if all brains were wired identically and all parents behaved in a cookie-cutter fashion, a great deal of current research would still be flawed (or, at best, preliminary). Most of the data we have are associative, not causal. Why is that a problem? Two things can be associated without one causing the other. For example, it is true that all children who throw temper tantrums also urinate—the association is 100 percent—but that doesn’t mean urination leads to temper tantrums.

The ideal research would be to a) find the behavioral secret sauce that makes smart or happy or moral kids who they are, b) discover parents who were missing the secret sauce and give it to them, and c) measure the kids 20 years later to see how they turned out. That sounds not only expensive but impossible. This is why most research we have about parenting is associative, not causal. But these data
will be shared in the spirit that the perfect should not be the enemy of the good. The other frustrating and wondrous thing is this:

We can look simple and calm on the surface, like a glassy sea, but below that you find craggy canyons of emotion, murky ruminations, and floating, barely rational motivations. Occasionally, these characteristics—different ones for each person—will bubble to the surface. Consider one common emotional reaction to a toddler:

As a brain scientist, I can count at least eight separate behavioral research issues in this woman’s short paragraph. She is responding to stress, and the way her body does that was first carved out on the plains of the Serengeti. How she loses her patience depends in part on her genes, events while she was in the womb, and how she was raised as a little girl. Hormones are involved too, as are the neurological signals she uses to perceive her recalcitrant toddler. A memory of relief is also apparent—perhaps she is recalling a cruise?—as is her desire to escape. In only five sentences, she has taken us from the African savannah to the 21st century.

And brain researchers, from evolutionary theorists to memory specialists, study all of it.

So there
are
some solid things researchers can say about raising kids. Otherwise I would not have plopped down my own contribution to the pile of 40 gazillion books for parents. It has taken many good researchers many years to mine these nuggets of information.

Brain Rules for Baby
encompasses brain development in children ages 0 to 5. I know you’re likely to inhale parenting information when you’re pregnant, and you’re less likely to return later for more. So I wanted to catch your attention early on. But 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. We know this because a group of researchers had the patience to follow 123 low-income, at-risk preschoolers for four decades, until their 40th birthdays. Welcome to the HighScope Perry Preschool Study, one of the most extraordinary studies of its kind.

In 1962, researchers wanted to test the effects of an early-childhood preschool training program they had designed. Kids in Ypsilanti, Michigan, were randomly assigned to one of two groups. The first attended the preschool program (which eventually became a model for other preschool programs nationwide, including Head Start). The second group did not. The differences powerfully illustrate the importance of a child’s early years.

The kids in the program academically outperformed the controls in virtually every way you can measure performance, from IQ and language tests in the early years to standardized achievement assessments and literacy exams in the later years. More graduated from high school (84 percent vs. 32 percent for the girls). Not surprisingly, they were more likely to attend college. The kids who were not in the program were four times more likely to require treatment for a mental-health problem (36 percent vs. 8 percent). They were twice as likely to repeat a grade (41 percent vs. 21 percent).

As adults, those who had been in the program were less likely to commit crimes and more likely to hold steady jobs. They made more money, more often had a savings account, and were more likely to own a home. Economists calculated that the return on society’s investment in such a program was 7 to 10 percent, about what you’d
historically get in the stock market. Some estimate a substantially higher return: $16 for every tax dollar invested in early childhood.

The HighScope study is a prime example of the importance of environment in raising children. But nature plays just as large a role. Often, they are tough to separate, as in this old joke: A third-grade boy comes home and hands his father his report card. His father looks at it and says, “How do you explain these D’s and F’s? The boy looks up at him and says, “You tell me: Is it nature or nurture?”