Brain Rules for Baby (34 page)

moral baby

Throughout
Brain Rules for Baby,
I’ve offered practical ways to apply the research to the real world of parenting. I want to compile them in one place, along with a few examples from my own parenting experience. These are things that worked for my family. I’m happy to share them, but I can’t guarantee that they will work for yours.

The best advice neuroscience can give a mother-to-be about how to optimize her baby’s brain development in the first half of pregnancy can be summarized by a single sentence: Do
nothing
. You don’t need to speak French to your embryo at this stage, or play Mozart. Your baby’s brain is not yet hooked up to her ears anyway. Neurogenesis, the major preoccupation of a baby’s brain at these early stages, proceeds in a mostly
automatic fashion. Just find a calm place where you can throw up on a regular basis, and take your doctor’s recommended amount of folic acid, which prevents neural tube defects.

Weight gain is normal, and pregnant women should plan on ballooning up. Malnourished moms tend to produce smaller, malnourished babies, and brain size is roughly associated with brain power. Most women need to add about 300 calories per day during pregnancy. Your physician can tell you how many and at what rate.

The best advice is still the oldest: a balanced diet of fruits and vegetables. This is simply replicating the nutritional experiences forged over our inescapable evolutionary history. Along with enough folic acid, pediatricians suggest eating foods rich in iron, iodine, vitamin B12, and omega-3.

Remember the flavor programming, where mothers who drank carrot juice had babies who liked carrot juice? This notion requires more research, but it is very possible that helping a child start a lifelong love affair with vegetables (or, more probably, a lifelong “I don’t hate all vegetables” affair) may start with you eating lots of fruits and vegetables in the last trimester of pregnancy.

My wife and I would take long walks together during both pregnancies. We often retrace these routes today, and we still remember how we felt about those pregnancies each time we do. Exercise has provided a lot of nostalgia for us.

Exercise is a known stress-reducer, good for keeping marauding glucocorticoids away from baby’s vulnerable neurons—and mom’s, too. It produces lots of brain-friendly chemicals and reduces the risk of clinical depression and anxiety disorders. Consult your physician first;
only your doctor knows exactly what you should be doing and how long you should be doing it. It changes with the stages of pregnancy.

Pregnancy is stressful, and the body is equipped to handle that. But excess stress can do damage to you and the baby. An overabundance of cortisol targets a baby’s developing neurons, interfering with proper brain development. Remove as much toxic stress as possible—for you and for baby.

 

Make a “Things that really bother me” list. Now mark the ones where you feel out of control. Toxic stress comes from feelings of helplessness. These are your enemy.

 

Exerting control may mean exiting the stressful situations you just marked. If that’s not an option, think about ways to reduce the stress that arises from them. Aerobic exercise is a must; you’ll find more of the best stress-reducing techniques at .
www.brainrules.net
.

 

Treat your wife like a queen. Do the dishes. Bring her flowers. Find out about her day. Developing those patterns while your wife is pregnant is one of the greatest gifts dads can give to their kids. That’s because one of the four significant sources of stress we discussed comes from a woman’s relationship with her significant other. When the man creates a backstop of unrelenting support, the woman has one less thing to worry about.

For evolutionary reasons, human babies were never meant to be born
and raised in isolation from a group. Psychotherapist Ruth Josselson believes it is especially important for young mothers to create and maintain an active social tribe after giving birth. There are two big problems with this suggestion: 1) Most of us don’t live in tribes, and 2) we move around so much that most of us don’t even live near our own families, our natural first tribal experience. The result is that many new parents live on the margins of their social lives. They don’t have a relative or trusted friend who can watch their kids while they take a shower, get some sleep, or make out with their spouses.

The solution is obvious: Reconstitute a vigorous social structure using whatever tools you have at hand.

Start forming one
now
, before the baby comes. There are many options. At the formal level, there are PEPS groups (Program for Early Parent Support) and churches and synagogues, all possessing built-in notions of community. Informally, you can host social get-togethers with your friends. Go out with other pregnant couples in Tribe Lamaze. Throw cooking parties, where you and your friends make a bunch of freezer meals. Having a 50-day meal supply all ready to eat before baby comes home is one of the best gifts you can give any prospective parent. Doing another 50 after baby arrives is a great way to cement your community.

Even if you see no trouble on the marital horizon and you have lots of friends, there is no guarantee that this will remain true after baby comes. A few ideas:

 

Begin regular “check-in” times with each other. Check in twice a day, once in the morning and once in the afternoon, easy as a quick phone call or email. Why twice? The morning will allow you to see how the day is beginning to progress. The afternoon can help you prepare for the evening. New parents have only about one-third the time
alone together they had when they were childless. That’s just another form of social isolation. Starting now, while you have energy, gives you space to develop the habit before baby comes, when you won’t have the energy.

 

Yes, the great joy in physical intimacy includes a healthy helping of spontaneity. Problem is, you can kiss spontaneity out the window when you bring baby home. Sexual activity usually plummets after the birth of a child, and the loss of associated emotional intimacy can be devastating for couples. Scheduling sex—however often is right for you—can buffer against this tendency. It also gives each partner time to mentally decompress and get into the mood. Try incorporating two types of sex into your lives: spontaneous sex and maintenance sex.

 

A woman in one of our research projects had recently been exposed to training in the empathy reflex. She was shopping at Costco after a long day at work when she discovered at the checkout counter that only stubs were left in the checkbook. She called hubby requesting assistance. She got instead a lecture about personal responsibility: Why didn’t she look in the checkbook before taking it? Where was her reserve of cash? “That’s not what you’re supposed to say, she reminded him. “You’re supposed to say, ‘You sound tired, honey, and frustrated and mad. And you’re angry because calling me was the last thing on your mind after a hard day at work and you are probably humiliated right now and you just want to go home!’” She faced the phone. “That’s what you’re supposed to say, dummy!” Then she hung up. Well, that last bit isn’t part of the training. But everyone needs practice in the two-step of reading emotions and guessing the cause. The most common source of conflicts is the gap between a person’s unknowable intentions and observable behavior. That gap can be bridged by empathy.

 

If you have a fight in front of your children, reconcile in front of your children. This allows your child to model how to fight fair
and
how to make up.

 

Guys, start helping around the house
now
. Make a list of what your wife does. Make a list of what you do. If your list displays the toxic inequality typical in the United States—you know, the one predictive of
divorce rates
—then change the list. Balance it until you both are satisfied with what equality means. Once the list has been renegotiated, get started on these changes immediately. Before you are sleep deprived. Before you are socially isolated. Before you start fighting. There is even empirical support that you will get more sex if you do. No kidding. Somebody actually studied it.

 

No marriage is perfect, for sure, but some marriages will survive parenthood much better than others. Do you know into which category your marriage falls? Marital intervention programs can tell you. Two of the most well-regarded programs in the United States were developed in the laboratories of Philip and Carolyn Cowan, and John and Julie Gottman. Their websites are chock full of diagnostic tools, practice sessions, books they have written on the subject, and sign-up forms for conferences. Links to these programs, their literature, and the peer-reviewed references are at
www.brainrules.net
.

A new parent’s first exposure to child-based medical professionals is usually a pediatrician. I am advocating that you add another to the list: a mental-health professional. Someone affordable with whom you can check in as questions come up, just like
a pediatrician. There are many reasons to get started on this journey, beginning with the fact that most pediatricians do not have advanced training in mental-health issues. Here are three more:

Mental-health issues will arise for many children.
I am not just talking about the usual behavioral suspects, like autism and ADHD. The average age of onset of ANY mental-health issue, from mood disorders to thought disorders, is 14.

Delay is your enemy.
The earlier a mental-health issue is detected, the easier it is to treat. It can take a while to find a mental-health professional who fits with your family, so it’s good to get started now. I am aware that for some, this advice will be a waste of time. For others, it will be the most important thing they will ever do for their kids.

Depression affects as many as 1 in 5 new parents.
Having a mental-health professional can act like an insurance policy for you, too. If there are no issues, there will be no need to visit, but if one crops up, you will already know where to turn.