Brain Rules for Baby (33 page)

The first theme is empathy. Empathy is enabled by the ability to understand someone else’s motivations and behaviors, as this little girl did:

The parents asked their daughter to make an effort to understand the psychological interiors of the bully. This compelled the girl to do a difficult thing: temporarily remove herself from her own experience and jump into somebody else’s. Powerful idea.
Hard
idea. This skill, Theory of Mind, is the first step to empathy. It is a consistent willingness to turn down the volume of one’s own priorities and experiences in favor of hearing another’s. Theory of Mind is not the same thing as empathy. You can use your secret knowledge of someone else’s motivations to be a dictator if you like. You need to add a certain measure of kindness to Theory of Mind skills to get empathy, as this child shows:

In the Relationship chapter, we discussed empathy’s role in stabilizing marriages by creating bridges between extrospective and introspective points of view. It is embodied in the Brain Rule: What is obvious to you is obvious to you. In Happy Soil, we outlined the value of empathy in forming friendships, one of the greatest predictors of a child’s future happiness. In the Smart chapters, we discovered that it takes years of high-quality face time and practice with interpersonal interaction to build a child’s ability to decode faces and other nonverbal cues. These skills enable a child to accurately
forecast another person’s behavior and, in turn, empathize with it. Though empathy skills are unevenly granted by genes, they can be improved with practice. Soil nurtures seed. Open-ended learning environments—with plenty of interactive, imaginative play—help provide the face time that develops these skills. Television, video games, and text messages, by definition, do not. Empathy has neuroscientific scaffolding behind it, including mirror neurons, which is why it belongs in a
Brain Rules
book.

If it is imperative to get inside another person’s experience, what should you pay attention to once you arrive? After all, scientists can tease out at least eight different aspects of even our simplest behaviors, as we found in the introduction with the mom who was dreaming of Mai Tais. Which aspect is most worthy of your attention? The answer is the second central theme of this book. What you should pay attention to are your child’s emotions.

Here’s an example from one of the most painful rites of passage in childhood: the impromptu drafting of backyard sports teams. Five-year-old Jacob came home early from playing with the neighborhood boys. “Nobody picked me, he said dejectedly to his mom, throwing his baseball mitt on the kitchen floor and turning toward his room. His mother looked thoughtful. “You seem like your feelings really got hurt, Jake. True?” Jacob paused, glaring at the floor. “You look angry, too”, Mom continued. “It’s no fun when you feel sad and angry, is it, honey? Jacob now responded with force: “I was really mad! They picked Greg, and he told them not to pick me.” Mom asked, “Do you think it would help if you talked to Greg about it?” “No, I just don’t think Greg likes me today. Maybe I’ll try tomorrow”, Jacob said. Mom gave Jacob a hug and later whipped up a batch of terrific chocolate-chip cookies. Which Jacob did not share with Greg.

The mother chose in that instant to pay close attention to her son’s emotions. She penetrated her son’s psychological space and empathized—that’s the first theme—but what she chose to focus on once she got there was his emotional life. She empathized with his obvious feelings of rejection. Mom did not try to hide them, neutralize them, or throw stones at them. This consistent choice separates the superstar parents from the rest.

In the Pregnancy and Relationship chapters, we discovered how important emotional health is to both prenatal and postnatal baby brain development. In Smart Soil, we talked about how strong emotional regulation actually improves a child’s academic performance. That’s because it improves executive-function behaviors such as impulse control and planning for the future, which in turn affects grades. But emotions don’t just influence GPAs. Emotional regulation also predicts a child’s future happiness, a notion developed in the Happy chapters. This leads to the astonishing conclusion that a happier baby is a smarter baby, too. In the Moral chapter, we discovered that emotions are the heart and soul behind most of our decisions, from making the right friends to making the right moral decisions. Throughout, we talked about how parents who focus on emotions help create emotional stability in their children.

At the most basic level, these themes can be boiled down to a single sentence:
Be willing to enter into your child’s world on a regular basis and to empathize with what your child is feeling.
Simple as a song. Complex as a symphony. The behaviors of good parenting follow from this attitude. If you also create a set of rules and enforce them with consistency and warmth, you have virtually everything you need to start your parenting journey.

Along the way, you’ll find something interesting: As you enter your child’s emotional world, your own becomes deeper. After my sons
were born, it was not long before I noticed a large change had come over me—one that continues to this day. 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. As they became toddlers, then preschoolers, these choices allowed me to become more patient. With my students. With my colleagues. With my amazing wife. I became more sensitive in my decision-making, too, now that I had to take into consideration not only the feelings of my wife but those of two little people as well. I was becoming more thoughtful despite myself. I also began to care greatly about the future, the world in which my boys will raise their children.

My boys are still small. But their presence in my mind is as large as the day they were born. And their influence on my life looms ever larger as they mature. Or maybe I am the one maturing. I don’t mean to say that parenting is one big self-help program. But in the messy world of child rearing, it’s startling how profoundly a two-way street the social contract actually is. You may think that grown-ups create children. The reality is that children create grown-ups. They become their own person, and so do you. Children give so much more than they take.

This struck me one night when my wife and I were snuggling with our younger preschooler, putting him to bed. My wife hugged him and thought he felt like soft bread dough. She said to him, “Oh, Noah, you’re just so squeezable and soft and delicious! I could almost take a bite out of you. You’re so yummy!” Noah responded, “I know, mommy. I’ve really got to lower my carbs.”

We laughed ’til we cried. Seeing his personality blossom was truly a gift. This is the message I want to leave you with as we part ways. As a new parent, you may feel sometimes that all children do is take from you, but it is just a form of giving in disguise. Kids present you with an ear infection, but what they are really giving you is patience. They present you with a tantrum, but they are really giving you the honor of witnessing a developing personality. Before you know it,
you’ve raised up another human being. You realize what a great privilege it is to be a steward of another life.

I said that parenting is all about developing human brains, but my aim was inches too high. Parenting is all about developing human hearts. There is no idea in this book more important for new parents than that one.

pregnancy

relationship

smart baby

 

happy baby