Brain Rules for Baby (35 page)

Longer is better. You’ll get a smarter baby, a healthier baby, a happier baby. Breast-feeding is one of the most practical, most brain-boosting behaviors we know; the benefits are extremely well-established.

Talk to your baby a lot. This is as simple as saying, “It’s a beautiful day when you look outside and see the sun. Just talk. During infancy, do so in “parentese”, those clusters of exaggerated vowel sounds at high frequencies. A rate of 2,100 words per hour is the gold standard.

There may be as many different types of playrooms as there are families, but every one of them should have the following design element: lots of choices. A place for drawing. A place for painting. Musical instruments. A wardrobe hanging with costumes. Blocks. Picture books. Tubes and gears. Anything where a child can be safely let loose, joyously free to explore whatever catches her fancy. Did you see the movie
Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory
? If so, you may have been filled with wonder at the chocolate plant, complete with trees, lawns, and waterfalls—a totally explorable, nonlinear ecology. That’s what I mean. I am focusing on artistic pursuits because kids who are trained in the arts tend to resist distractions better, stay focused better, and have better scores on fluid intelligence tests.

My wife and I devoted nearly 600 square feet in our house to creating such an environment, filled with music stations, reading and drawing and painting and crafting areas, lots of Legos, and lots of cardboard boxes. There was a math and science station, including a toy microscope. We changed the contents of these stations on a regular basis, and we eventually turned the space into our kids classroom.

After my children turned 3, I employed some fun activities to improve executive function, roughly based on the canonical work of Adele Diamond. I would tell them that today was “opposite day. When I held up a drawn picture of the night, an inky black background sprinkled with stars, they were supposed to say “day.” When I held up a picture with a big blue sky inhabited by a big yellow sun, they were supposed to say “night.” I would alternate the pictures with increasing rapidity and check for their responses.

They had a blast with this; for some reason we always ended up rolling on the floor laughing.

I did a kinetic form of this exercise with my elder son, who was a natural drummer, when he was 4. We each had a spoon and a pan.
The rule was that when I struck a pan with a spoon once, he had to do it twice. When I hit a pan twice, he had to strike it three times. Or once. (I changed it up quite a bit.)

The idea for both exercises was to a) give the boys a rule and b) help them inhibit what they would do automatically in the face of this rule—a hallmark of executive function. We had a certain place in our Chocolate Factory for these types of play. There are a ton of exercises like these you can do with your kids. For a list of nearly 20 great ones, check out Ellen Galinsky’s
Mind in the Making
.

See if elements of the Tools of the Mind program will fit in with your lifestyle. Here’s one way this worked at my house: Our boys might decide that they wanted to make a construction site. (They had a favorite video that featured various construction machines, which we watched ad nauseam. We still take it out for birthdays, as a funny nostalgia piece.) We would sit down together and plan the elements of what would go into the construction site, what might occur there once it was built, and how cleanup should best be handled once finished. Our imaginations ran wild, but a linear list of goals would be created from the exercise. Then the boys would play.

A full description of the Tools program is available here:

These playroom designs and games have a non-pressured, open-ended quality to them. That’s no accident. The more strangled children feel emotionally, the more stress hormones swarm their brains, and the less likely they are to succeed intellectually. Teaching your children to focus, then letting them loose inside a Chocolate Factory, allows them to exercise their gifts far better than kids who can ̛t focus and who aren ̛t allowed choices. Note that what is missing in these ideas is Mandarin lessons and algebra classes and reading Rousseau by age 3.

One of the most familiar forms of parental guidance is direct instruction, which parents deploy in earnest as their child becomes verbal. “Please come with me.” “Stay away from strangers.” “Eat your broccoli.” But direct instruction is not the only way kids learn from their parents, and it may not be the most efficient. They also learn through observation. And your kids are observing you like a hawk. Here’s a three-step suggestion:

Step 1:
Make a list of all the behaviors—the actions and words—you regularly broadcast to the world. Do you laugh a lot? Swear on a regular basis? Exercise? Do you cry easily or have a hair-trigger temper? Do you spend hours on the Internet? Make this list. Have your spouse do this, too, and compare.

Step 2:
Rate them. There are probably things on this list of which you are justifiably proud. Others, not so much. Whether good or bad, these are the behaviors your children will encounter on a regular basis in your household. And they will imitate them, whether you want them to or not. Decide which behaviors you want your children to emulate and circle them. Decide which behaviors you’d rather have them not imitate at all and put an “X” through them.

Step 3:
Do something about this list. Engage regularly in the behaviors you love. It’s as easy as telling your spouse on a regular basis how much you love her. Put on an extinction schedule the ones you don ̛t want to have around. It’s as easy (and as hard) as turning off the television.

Get into the habit of rewarding the intellectual exertion your child puts into a given task rather than his or her native intellectual resources. Begin by practicing on your spouse and even your friends. If they do something well, say, “You must have put a lot of effort into that rather than, “Wow, you are really talented.” When children praised for their effort fail, they are much more likely to try harder.

Knowing full well the need for our kids to be digitally conversant, yet fully aware of the dangers, we came up with a few rules as our boys became preschoolers. First, my wife and I divided digital experiences into categories. Two of the categories involved things necessary for school work or for learning about computers: word processing and graphics programs, web-based research projects, programming, and so on. The boys were allowed to do these as homework required.

Recreational experiences—digital games, certain types of web surfing, and our Wii gaming system—we called Category I. They were off limits except under one condition. Our sons could “buy a certain amount of Category I time. The currency? The time spent reading an actual book. Every hour spent reading could purchase a certain amount of Category I time. This was added up and could be “spent” on weekends after homework was done. This worked for us. The kids picked up a reading habit, could do the digital work necessary for their futures, and were not completely locked out of the fun stuff.

Most infants have a limit to how much stimulation they can take at any one time. Make a list of your baby’s “can we stop now?” cues, which can be as subtle as head-turning or as obvious as bawling. Then get into a rhythm based on that, interacting in response to your baby’s cues, withdrawing when she’s had enough.

Continue to monitor your child’s emotions as he or she gets older. Jot down a few sentences describing your child’s likes and dislikes. Update it continuously as various emotional responses develop. Making a list gets you in the habit of paying attention, and it provides a baseline, allowing you to notice any changes in behavior.

Learning to make friends takes years of practice. Kids consistently exposed to the delightful rough and tumble of other children get experience with personalities who are as innocent as they are, as selfish as they are, as desirous of peer interactions as they are. That means arranging plenty of play dates. Let your children interact with multiple age groups, too, and a variety of people. But pay attention to how much your child can handle at one time. Social experiences must be tailored to individual temperaments.

In front of your children, verbally speculate about other people’s perspectives in everyday situations. You can wonder why the person behind you in line at a grocery is so impatient or what the joke is when a stranger talking on a cell phone laughs. It’s a natural way to practice seeing other people’s points of view—the basis of empathy.

My wife and I turned this into a family tradition. At the end of each day just before lights out, we got into our pajamas and prepared for bed, then snuggled down together. My wife got out a book and, for the next half hour, read it aloud. Though the boys are a bit too old for snuggling now, we still do this just-before-sleep public reading. It exposes the boys to a broader vocabulary of words in a different “voice”, it brings all four of us together as a family, and it compels our brains to get out of our own experiences, imagining different worlds populated by people who don ̛t react as we do.

When faced with a strong emotion, turn to empathy first:

Remember, understanding someone’s behavior is not the same thing
as agreeing with it. It is just your opening response to any situation, especially when intense emotions are involved. If you want to have empathic children, they will need to see it modeled on a regular basis. Empathy comes from being empathized with.

What are your emotions about emotions? One particularly insightful test can be found in John Gottman’s book
Raising an Emotionally Intelligent Child: The Heart of Parenting
. Another, more technical book is Volume 4 of the
Handbook of Child Psychology.
Look in the chapter titled “Socialization in the Context of the Family: Parent-Child Interaction”, by E.E. Maccoby and J.A. Martin
.

You can do this by yourself, with your spouse or with close friends. When you experience a feeling, simply state out loud what that feeling is. Verbalizing emotions gives you a better command over your emotional life, allowing for more insightful self-regulation. It is also a great model for children. I remember trying in vain to open a jar of pickles. My 4-year-old walked in, glanced up at me, and said, “Daddy, you look mad. Are you mad?” “Yep”, I replied. “I can’t get the pickle jar open.” Later that day, I noticed he was getting frustrated building a Lego model. “You look angry, son”, I said. “Are you angry?” He looked at me and said, “Yes. I’m mad. This is my jar of pickles!”

If your children are surrounded by people who can talk about feelings, they will be able to verbalize their feelings, too—invaluable to you when they reach puberty.

Instruments, singing, whatever—make music a consistent part of your child’s experience. Long-term musical exposure has been shown to greatly aid a child’s perception of others emotions. This in turn predicts your child’s ability to establish and maintain friendships.

People who earn six- and seven-figure incomes, studies show, are not substantially happier than those who earn five. The cutoff is about $50,000, in 2010 dollars.