Brain Rules for Baby (3 page)

I was once at a lively, noisy science fair with my own third-grade son, and we were touring some of his classmates efforts. Several experiments involved seeds, soil, and growth curves. One memorable little girl took great pains to explain to us that her seeds had started with identical DNA. She had planted one in a nutrient-rich soil and watered it carefully. She had planted the other in a nutrient-poor soil and watered it carefully, too. Time passed. The seed nurtured with terrific soil made a terrific plant, which she proudly let me hold in my hands. The seed nurtured in poor soil made a pitiful, withered plant. She let me hold that, too. Her point was that the seed material provided identical growth opportunities for both plants, but that starting equal was not enough.“You need both seed and soil”, she explained to me—nature and nurture—to get the desired results.

She’s right, of course, and it’s a metaphor I use in the book to divide the research on raising smart and happy kids. There are some factors parents can’t control and some they can. There’s seed, and there’s soil. All the nurture in the world won’t change the fact that 50 percent of your child’s potential is genetic. Good news: As a parent, you can only do your best. That said, even as a professional geneticist, I am convinced we can exert far more influence over our kids’ behavior than is popularly imagined. It’s a very, very big job that takes a lot of work. The reason has deep evolutionary roots.

It’s a question that bothers many evolutionary scientists: How come it takes so long to raise a human child? Aside from perhaps a whale or two, we have the longest childhood on the planet. Where did this decades-long sojourn come from, and why don’t other animals have to endure what we go through? Just a couple of delightful things we human parents endure:

Yes, you have to teach children
everything
—even how to regulate their body fluids. And they are built to learn, which means you have to watch even your most cavalier behaviors. Both take a tremendous amount of energy. So evolutionary biologists have to wonder: Why would anyone willingly take on this line of work?

The interview for the job, that single act of sex, is certainly fun. But then you get hired to
raise a child.
There are wonderful moments, but the essence of the contract is simply: They take. You give. You never get a paycheck with this job, only an invoice, and you’d better be prepared for some sticker shock. You’ll be out more than $220,000—before the college loans. This career comes with no sick days or vacation time, and it puts you permanently on call nights and weekends. Its successful execution will probably turn
you into a lifelong worrywart. Yet thousands of people every day say yes to this job. There must be some compelling reason.

Of course, there is. The brain’s chief job description—yours, mine, and your hopelessly adorable children’s—is to help our bodies survive another day. The reason for survival is as old as Darwin and as young as sexting: so we can project our genes into the next generation. Will a human willingly overcome self-interest to ensure the survival of his or her family’s genes into the next generation? Apparently, yes. Enough of us did hundreds of thousands of years ago that we grew up to take over the Serengeti, then take over the world. Taking care of a baby is a sophisticated way of taking care of ourselves.

But why does it take so much time and effort?

Blame our big, fat, overweight, gold-plated, nothing-else-like-it brains. We evolved to have larger brains with higher IQs, which allowed us to move from leopard food to Masters of the Universe in 10 million very short years. We gained those brains through the energy savings of walking on two legs instead of four. But attaining the balance necessary to walk upright required the narrowing of the
Homo sapiens
pelvic canal. For females, that meant one thing: excruciatingly painful, often fatal births. An arms race quickly developed, evolutionary biologists theorized, between the width of the birth canal and the size of the brain. If the baby’s head were too small, the baby would die (without extraordinary and immediate medical intervention, premature infants won’t last five minutes). If the baby’s head were too big, the mother would die. The solution? Give birth to babies before their skulls become too big to kill mom. The consequence? Bringing kids into the world before their brains are fully developed. The result?
Parenthood.

Because the bun is forced to come out of the oven before it is done, the child needs instruction from veteran brains for years. The relatives are the ones who get the job, as they brought the child
into the world in the first place. You don’t have to dig deep into the Darwinian playbook to find a cogent explanation for parenting behavior.

That’s not the entire mystery of parenting, but it underscores its importance. We survived because enough of us became parents good enough to shepherd our pooping, peeing, swearing, breathtakingly vulnerable offspring into adulthood. And we have no real say in the matter. A baby’s brain simply isn’t ready to survive the world.

Clearly, childhood is a vulnerable time. More than a decade passes between the birth of a baby and its ability to reproduce—an eternity compared with other species. This gap shows not only the depth of the brain’s developmental immaturity but also the evolutionary need for unflinchingly attentive parenting. Adults who formed protective and continuous teaching relationships with the next generation were at a distinct advantage over those who either could not or would not. In fact, some evolutionary theorists believe that language developed in all its richness just so that this instruction between parent and child could occur with greater depth and efficiency. Relationships among adults were crucial as well—and still are, despite ourselves.

Modern society is doing its level best to shred deep social connections. We move constantly. Our relatives are often scattered across hundreds, even thousands, of miles. These days we make and maintain our friendships electronically. One of the chief complaints new parents have in the transition to parenthood is the great isolation they feel from their social circle. To their relatives, baby is often a stranger. To their friends, baby is often a four-letter word. That’s not how it was supposed to be.

Take a moment to mark all the times the writer of this story references her friends and family:

We are so darn social. Understanding this about the brain is fundamental to understanding many of the themes in this book, from empathy to language to the effects of social isolation. Because the brain is a biological organ, the reasons are evolutionary. Most scientists believe we survived because we formed cooperative social groups. This forced us to spend lots of time in the land of relationships, getting to know one another’s motivations, psychological interiors, and systems of reward and punishment.

Two benefits emerged. One was the ability to work as a team—useful for hunting, finding shelter, and defending against predators. The other was the ability to help raise one another’s children. The skirmishes between birth-canal size and baby-skull size meant females needed time to recover from giving birth. Somebody had to take care of the kids. Or take over the nurturing if she died. The task mostly fell to females (males can’t lactate, after all), though many scientists believe the most successful groups were ones where males played an active role in supporting the females. That communal need was so strong, and so critical to our survival, that researchers have given the phenomenon its own name: alloparenting. If as a parent you feel as though you can’t do it alone, that’s because you were never meant to.

Though no one has a time machine capable of whisking us back to the Pleistocene, evidence for these tendencies abounds today. A baby is born eager to connect with his family and is prewired to relate to
others. One mother reported watching
American Idol
with her son, age 2. As the host interviewed the crying contestants who didn’t make it, the boy suddenly jumped up, patted the screen, and said, “Oh no, don’t cry.” This skill requires deep relational skills, illustrating as much a biological process as it does a sweet kid. All of us have natural connecting abilities.

If you understand that the brain is interested foremost in survival, and that the brain has a deep need for relating to others, the information in this book—the things that best develop your baby’s brain—will make sense.

Did you see this soft-drink commercial? The camera follows a pleasant-looking, college-age young man at a social event in a large house. It’s the holidays, and he is busy introducing you to his various friends and family, singing a song, and passing out soft drinks. There’s his mom, his sis, his brother, his “surprisingly cool stepmother”, and the two kids his stepmom had before meeting his dad, plus aunts, cousins, office mates, his best friend, his judo coach, his allergist, even his Twitter fans. It was the clearest example I have seen that the definition of the American family is changing. Rapidly.

It never was stable. The definition of a nuclear family—one man, one woman, and 2.8 kids—has been around only since Victorian times. With a divorce rate of 40 percent to 50 percent circling like a vulture over American marriages for more than three decades and remarriage common, the “blended” family is now the more typical family experience. So is the single-parent household, with more than 40 percent of all American births occurring to unmarried women. More than 4.5 million kids aren’t being raised by their biological parents at all but by their biological
grand
parents. One in 5 gay couples is now raising children.

Many of these social changes have moved too quickly for the scientific community to adequately study them. You can’t do a 20-year study, for example, on gay marriages that have only recently been made legal. Over the years, the best parenting data have been mined from heterosexual relationships in a traditional 20th-century marriage. Until researchers have had a chance to investigate the dynamics of the newer models, we simply won’t know if the insights described here directly apply to other situations. That’s why I use the terms “marriage and “spouse” instead of “partner”.

 

Many of the first-person stories in this book come from
TruuConfessions.com
, a website where parents can post anonymously to get things off their chests, seek advice, or share their parenting experiences with the world.

Other stories come from experiences my wife and I have had parenting our two sons, Josh and Noah, who are just entering adolescence at this writing. We have kept a diary of their growing-up years, writing down fragments of observations, scavenging our memories of a holiday, a trip, or some wonderful thing our kids taught us that day. Both boys looked at every story in which they were involved, and I asked their permission to put each one in the book. Only the ones they said yes to made it onto these pages. I applaud both their courage and their sense of humor for letting dear old dad share slivers of their early lives.

 

In these pages, there are places where virtually every sentence is referenced. But for readability, the references have migrated online to
www.brainrules.net
.
The website is chock full of additional supporting material, including animations of the basic concepts. Some subjects I leave out altogether, some to keep the book at a reasonable length, others because there is just not enough supporting documentation.

 

We’re just about ready to get started. Given the tremendous amount of information in this book, I wanted a metaphor to help organize it. The solution comes from my wife, who, among many other talents, is a gifted cook. Our kitchen is stocked with many things, from mundane items like oatmeal (yes, our family eats “porridge”) to bottles of exotic wine. She makes lots of comfort food, so there are ingredients for beef stew and spice rubs for chicken. Kari also keeps a garden of fresh fruits and vegetables right outside the kitchen door, and she uses a variety of natural fertilizers to enrich the soil. A three-legged stool in the kitchen helps our boys reach the cabinets and help with the cooking. You’ll recognize these items throughout the chapters, including the seeds and soil of the garden. I hope that visualizing my wife’s garden and kitchen will render these many ideas in a friendly, accessible form.

Ready to grow a smart, happy baby? Pull up a chair. You are going to read about a truly magical world. The most important job you’ve ever signed up for may also be the most interesting thing you’ll ever do.