Brain Rules for Baby

Table of Contents

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

pregnancy

relationship

smart baby

 

happy baby

 

moral baby

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 utero—a 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, “What’s 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 questions—over 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 that’s 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.