Mom’s beef stew: Five ingredients of intelligence

The smell of my mother’s beef stew simmering in the kitchen on a cold winter’s day is easily the best comfort-food memory I have. Mom’s stew was like a warm hug in a bowl.

She once marched me into the kitchen to teach me how to make her famous beef stew. No easy task as she had the annoying habit of changing the recipe almost every time she made it. “It depends on who’s coming over for dinner,” Mom would explain, “or whatever we have lying around the house.” According to her, only two elements were critical to pull off her masterpiece: the quality of the beef and the gravy surrounding the meat.

Like Mom’s stew, human intelligence has two essential components, both fundamentally linked to our evolutionary need to survive.

The first is the ability to record information, called “crystallized intelligence.” The second component is the capacity to adapt that information to unique situations by reasoning and problem solving, called “fluid intelligence.”

In other words, we as humans have the ability to learn rapidly from our mistakes and the ability to apply that learning in unique combinations to our ever-changing world. Intelligence, seen through this evolutionary lens, is simply the ability to do these activities better than someone else.

Mandatory as memory and fluid intelligence are, though, they are not the entire recipe for human smarts. Many ingredients make up the human intelligence stew, and I’d like to describe five that I think you would do well to consider as you contemplate your child’s intellectual gifts. They are:

• The desire to explore
• Self-control
• Creativity
• Verbal communication
• Interpreting nonverbal communication

1. The desire to explore

This is one of my favorite examples of an infant’s penchant for exploration. I was attending the Presbyterian baptism of a 9-month-old. Things started out well enough. The infant was nestled quietly in his dad’s arms, but as the parents turned to face the pastor, the baby spied the handheld microphone. He quickly tried to wrest the mike out of the pastor’s grip, flicking his tongue out at the ball of the microphone. The little guy seemed to think that the mike was some kind of ice cream cone, and he decided to test his hypothesis.

Thousands of experiments confirm that babies learn about their environment through a series of increasingly self-corrected ideas. They use fluid intelligence to extract information, then crystallize it into memory. Nobody teaches infants how to do this, yet they do it all over the world. They are scientists, and their laboratory is the whole world.

Exploratory behavior is a talent highly prized in the working world, too. What traits separate creative, visionary people who consistently conjure up financially successful ideas from less imaginative, managerial types who carry them out? Two business researchers explored that simple question and found that visionaries had in common five characteristics, which the researchers termed “Innovator’s DNA.” Here are the first three:

• An unusual ability to associate. They could see connections not obvious to others
• An annoying habit of constantly asking “what if.” And “why not” and “how come you’re doing it this way.”
• An unquenchable desire to tinker and experiment.

The biggest common denominator of these characteristics? A willingness to explore. The biggest enemy was the non-exploration-oriented system in which the innovators often found themselves.

But you, as a parent, can encourage your child’s natural desire to explore—starting with understanding how inquisitiveness contributes to your child’s intellectual

success.

2. Self-control

A healthy, well-adjusted preschooler sits down at a table in front of two giant, freshly baked chocolate-chip cookies. It’s not a kitchen table—it’s Walter Mischel’s Stanford lab during the late 1960s. The smell is heavenly.

“You see these cookies?” Mischel says. “You can eat just one of them right now if you want, but if you wait, you can eat both. I have to go away for five minutes. If I return and you have not eaten anything, I will let you have both cookies. If you eat one while I’m gone, the bargain is off and you don’t get the second one. Do we have a deal?”

The child nods. The researcher leaves.

What does the child do?

If the children are kindergartners, 72 percent cave in and gobble up the cookie. If they’re in fourth grade, however, only 49 percent yield to the temptation. By sixth grade, the number is 38 percent, about half the rate of the preschoolers.

Welcome to the interesting world of impulse control. It is part of a suite of behaviors under the collective term “executive function.” Executive function controls planning, foresight, problem solving, and goal setting. Mischel and his many colleagues discovered that a child’s executive function is a critical component of intellectual prowess.

Why? Executive function relies on a child’s ability to filter out distracting (in this case, tempting) thoughts, which is critical in environments that are oversaturated with sensory stimuli and myriad on-demand choices. That’s our world, as you have undoubtedly noticed, and it will be your children’s, too.

3. Creativity

My mother’s favorite artist in the world was Rembrandt. She was much less enamored of 20th-century art. I remember her railing about Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain—simply a urinal—being placed in the same artistic firmament as her beloved van Rijn. Toilets as art? And she hated it? For me as an 11-year-old boy, that was artistic Valhalla!

Mom set aside her own preferences and followed my curiosity. She brought home two pictures wrapped in brown paper and sat me down. “Imagine,” she began, “that you tried to express in two dimensions all the information of a three-dimensional object. How would you do it?”

I stumbled around trying to get the right answer, but made no progress.

Mom interrupted. “Perhaps you would come up with something like this!” Mom revealed two prints of Picasso masterpieces: Three Musicians and Violin and Guitar. It was love at first cube. Three Musicians was a revelation to me, as was the creative mind that conceived it.

Why did I think that? How does anyone recognize creativity? It is a tough question, saturated in cultural subjectivity and individual experience, as the differences between me and my mother showed.

Researchers do believe that creativity has a few core components, however. These include the ability to perceive new relationships between old things, to conjure up ideas or things that do not currently exist. Creativity also must evoke emotions, positive or negative, in someone else. Something—a product, a result—has to come of the process.

Can you predict creativity in kids? Psychologist Paul Torrance created a 90-minute exam called the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking. Children might be presented with a picture of a stuffed rabbit, then told they have three minutes to improve upon the design to make it more fun to play with. They might be presented with a scribble, then told to make a narrative from it. Torrance then followed their lives into adulthood, assessing their creative output throughout: things like patents filed, books written, papers published, grants awarded, and businesses started.

As a research tool, the exam has been formally evaluated many times. Though the test is not without its critics, the most amazing finding remains how well a child’s scores predict his or her future creative output. The test has been translated into 50 languages and taken by millions of people. It is the go-to standard for evaluating creativity in children.

4. Verbal communication

The most memorable experience in my rookie year of parenting our younger son, Noah, was the moment he said his first multi-syllable word. At the time, he possessed a particular preoccupation with sea creatures, which I blame in equal parts on Finding Nemo and National Geographic. We put pictures of sea animals on the ceiling above his changing table, including a cartoon of a giant red Pacific octopus.

One morning I was busy changing his diaper, just before work. Noah suddenly stopped smiling and just stared straight at the ceiling as I cleaned him up.

Slowly, deliberately, he pointed his finger upward, turned his gaze from the ceiling, looked me straight in the eye, and said in a clear voice: “Oct-o-pus.” Then he laughed out loud.

I almost had a heart attack. “Yes!” I cried, “OCTOPUS!”

He replied, “Octo, octo, octopus,” laughing now. We both chanted it.

You can’t argue with the fact that verbal skills are important in human intelligence. What happened in Noah’s brain that made so many things come together at once on that changing table—or in any other child’s brain as language dawns on her like a sunrise? We don’t really know. Many theories abound about how we acquire language.

At birth, your baby can distinguish between the sounds of every language that has ever been invented. Professor Patricia Kuhl, co-director of the Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences at the University of Washington, discovered this phenomenon. But by their first birthday, Kuhl found, babies can no longer distinguish between the sounds of every language on the planet...Unless they have been spoken to, in person,  by someone who speaks another language.

Tucked into this data is a bombshell of an idea, one with empirical support across the developmental sciences. Human learning in its most native state is primarily a relational exercise. You can literally rewire a child’s brain through exposure to relationships.

5. Interpreting nonverbal communication

Though speech is a uniquely human trait, it is nestled inside a vast world of communication behaviors, many of which are used by other animals, too. But we aren’t always communicating the same thing, as legendary dog whisperer Cesar Millan points out. Millan is a world-champion dog handler. His secret is that he thinks like a dog, not like a person, when he’s interacting with a dog.

Millan told Men’s Health, “A lot of people who meet a new dog want to go over to him, touch him, and talk to him.” But, Millan says, “in the language of dogs, this is very aggressive and confusing.”

Instead, Millan says, when you meet a new dog, ignore the animal. Don’t make eye contact. Let the dog come over and inspect you, sniff you. Once the dog gives you cues that he doesn’t find you a threat then you can talk, touch, or make eye contact. When dogs attack people, they may in some cases simply be acting upon an ancient behavioral reflex involving a reaction to, of all things, somebody’s face.

Extracting social information by examining the face is a powerful slice of mammalian evolutionary history. But we humans use our faces, including eye-to-eye contact, for many reasons besides communicating threats. We have the most sophisticated nonverbal message systems on the planet. From babies on up, we constantly communicate social information with our bodies in coordination with our smiles and frowns.

From exploration, self-control, and creativity to verbal and nonverbal ability, it is clear that the intelligence stew has many ingredients. Standard IQ tests are not capable of measuring most of these elements, even though they play a powerful role in the future success of children. However, our survival depends on the ingredients described in my mom's stew.

Learn more in John Medina's Brain Rules for Baby.

Brain-based parenting tips

Put the research from John Medina's Brain Rules for Baby into practice.

Tracy Cutchlow, author of the international bestseller Zero to Five: 70 Essential Parenting Tips Based on Science, was the editor of Brain Rules for Baby. She put the research into practice with her own spirited daughter and saw great results. Now, as a licensed coach, she helps parents find calm and confidence with their children. If Brain Rules for Baby is the why, Zero to Five is the how. (Infant uncertainty, toddler tantrums, preschooler power struggles: you've got this!)


Below, Tracy shares some tips to get you started off on the right foot. You can sign up on the Zero to Five website for more parenting tips that work.

3 best ways to boost your baby’s language development

Baby refusing to eat? 8 things to consider

12 ways to include your toddler when cooking and cleaning

When your kid hits another kid (what to say in the moment)

This is how you truly listen to an angry kid

“You want to get your kid into Harvard?"

Listen to the audio excerpt from the Brain Rules for Baby Relationship chapter.

For most first-time moms and dads, the first shock is the overwhelmingly relentless nature of this new social contract. The baby takes. The parent gives. End of story. What startles many couples is the excruciating toll it can take on their quality of life—especially their marriages. The baby cries, the baby sleeps, the baby vomits, gets held, needs changing, must be fed, all before 4:00 a.m. Then you have to go to work. Or your spouse does. This is repeated day after day after ad nauseam day. Parents want just one square inch of silence, one small second to themselves, and they routinely get neither. You can’t even go to the bathroom when you want. You’re sleep deprived, you’ve lost friends, your household chores just tripled, your sex life is nonexistent, and you barely have the energy to ask about each other’s day.

 Is it any surprise that a couple’s relationship suffers? It’s rarely talked about, but it’s a fact: Couples’ hostile interactions sharply increase in baby’s first year.

When I lecture on the science of young brains, the dads (it’s almost always the dads) demand to know how to get their kids into Harvard. The question invariably angers me. I bellow, “You want to get your kid into Harvard? You really want to know what the data say? I’ll tell you what the data say! Go home and love your wife!” This chapter is about that retort: why marital hostility happens, how it alters a baby’s developing brain, and how you can counteract the hostility and minimize its effects.

Get the updated and expanded Brain Rules for Baby audiobook on Libro.fm.

Brain Rules for Baby: Updated and Expanded!

Brain Rules for Baby has grown! The book now features a chapter on the science of sleep -- the No. 1 question parents ask Dr. Medina.

sleepy baby - new chapter
"How do I get my baby to sleep through the night?"








John Medina introduces the new sleep chapter: video

A note from John Medina

I was hesitant, I admit, about adding a sleep chapter to Brain Rules for Baby. The science about getting your child to go to sleep is fairly wobbly.

But you keep asking me about it. Whenever I lecture, whenever you write me, the question “How do I get my child to go to sleep?” keeps reappearing like a public-television fund-raiser.

I do understand your need for junior to get regular sleep. I know one couple who decided not to have any more children because of the toll their first-born’s sleep habits took on their marriage. The issue can’t get much more important than that.

So I get it. Here is your chapter.

Besides, the professor in me can’t help but want to show you how weak-kneed science can be when it’s yoked to real-world problems. Infant sleep is a terrific illustration of science’s strengths and limitations.

In the Sleepy Baby chapter, you will discover two powerful, opposing ideas about how to get your baby to go to sleep. They’re not mutually exclusive, but they don’t tolerate each other very well. Which one you end up believing depends more on personal preference than peer review. It would be nice if the data were better behaved, but they’re not.

I do provide a solution, however. If you are having trouble getting your child to go to sleep, you will find this chapter useful. And if it solves your problem, feelings of love for your child will once again expand in your heart, like a second Big Bang. That’s the most compelling reason for me to add a new chapter on sleep.

Get the book!

eBook (PDF)
Brain Rules for Baby Audiobook

Just want the sleep chapter? Get it here.

Each ebook comes in PDF format, which you can send to your Kindle or other reading device.

Become a fan of Brain Rules for Baby on Facebook.

P.S. Zero to Five by Tracy Cutchlow is due June 17th!

To fans of the Brain Rules books

As John Medina’s editor, I worked closely with him to shape Brain Rules and then Brain Rules for Baby. It’s been a thrill to watch both books climb onto the bestseller lists while getting rave reviews from you. I’m grateful for the books on a personal level as well. I imagine you feel the same way.

Brain Rules for Baby is the one book I asked my husband to read before our baby was born. (I even considered threatening that we couldn’t have a baby until he read it.)

Then our baby arrived.

I wanted to revisit some of the things I’d learned, but suddenly I had no time for long books. And while I understood why doing this or that was beneficial for baby’s brain, I still had questions about how. (Speak 2,100 words an hour to your baby? Seriously? How?) I dug back into the original research. Thus, my new book, Zero to Five, was born. I’d love to tell you about it.

Zero to Five has exhausted new parents in mind

• how to give baby’s brain a boost—including specific language you can use or actions you can take.
• bite-sized information in a clean design. Flip the book open to any page and you’ll get something out of it.
• spiral-bound, so it stays open. You can read while holding baby, or keep your place when you get interrupted two minutes later.
• anecdotes from my first two years with baby, just to liven things up (I made it—phew!)
• beautiful photographs of real families. These make Zero to Five a truly special book.

I’m excited to share this book with my fellow Brain Rules fans. It’s due June 17.

Want a sneak peak of the book, free? Click the yellow "free tips" button at www.zerotofive.net.

Tracy Cutchlow is the editor of the bestselling books Brain Rules for Baby and Brain Rules. As a journalist, she has worked for MSN Money and the Seattle Times. She lives in Seattle with her husband and daughter.

Connect with Zero to Five on Facebook and Twitter

Interview with John Medina

Many parents are concerned about the sleep patterns of their children but in some cultures (Argentina, Spain), staying up late seems not to be a problem. Finally, is there any impact of bedtime or sleep pattern on babies and toddler’s cognitive development?

The most important factor appears to be establishing a consistent bedtime rhythm, regardless of what schedule you follow.

There is room for variation. Different people have different internal clocks – under partial genetic control - regardless of culture. These differences begin to appear in childhood. Some kids turn out to be natural night-owls, for example, and seem to be at their cognitive peak at night (we call them late chronotypes). Others show peaks in the morning (we call them early chronotypes) – and there are all shades in between. What chronotype your child possesses is important for parents to determine - and for kids to follow. Getting the proper amount of regular sleep certainly influences positive cognitive development. But what “proper” means may depend on what child you are talking about.

Several studies showed the benefits of co-sleeping, but some articles also highlight the fact that frequent awakenings during the night can generate stress for babies. Finally, do we know what is the global impact of this practice on sleep quality?

There are pros and cons to cosleeping and the current state of research gives no clear recommendation. There is no permanent damage done if you cosleep with them. There is no permanent damage done if you do the tried-and-true Cry It Out protocols. You can say that frequent awakenings not only stress the baby, they also stress the parents. Continuously stressed parents usually don’t make continuously good parents. Whichever style gives the adult more sleep is generally the healthier option.

Of course this has global implications. The less sleep you get, the more susceptible you become to anxiety and depressive disorders. Sleep loss also affects how you age. The global impact of depression and a poor transit through aging is incalculable.

Baby-wearing, with scarves for example, is increasingly used in western societies, but it has been practiced for centuries in other parts of the world. Does this practice have an impact on babies’ psychomotor development? By fostering visual or tactile exploration of the world for example. And do we know if the induced proximity between parents and babies strengthens the attachment?

I know of no studies conclusively determining whether baby-wearing has either a negative or a positive effect on a baby’s psychomotor development. It’s important for kids to move, for sure, but it’s also important they feel safe. And though safety cues are extremely important for a baby, how that is perceived depends on the child. Some babies seem to love scarves. For others, it’s their worst nightmare.

There are a variety of family structures, from nuclear families to multi-generational families. Does growing up in an extended family and multiplying interactions have an impact on children’s learning abilities, language acquisition or social skills?

I am deeply in favor of multi-generational families. The exposure to multiple intellects provides terrific opportunities for kids to hear alternate points of view -  and learn a great deal about navigating social relationships in a safe, loving atmosphere. Provided the family has a safe, loving atmosphere, that’s a net positive intellectual experience

In some countries, at an early age, toddlers spend much more time with their peers than with their parents and are very independent. What can be the impact of this early autonomy on their cognitive development?

Its not about providing autonomy. It’s about providing perceptions of safety, as I mentioned previously.

The reason is that the brain – even a child’s brain - is the world’s most sophisticated survival organ. If the child feels safe in an independent peer-filled environment, their brain development will maximized. And if that happens, I am all for early independent interactions. But not all kids feel safe in an independent peer-filled environment at an early age. Some get that later.  Parents should pay very close attention to what type of baby they have brought into the world, not into what country the child was born - and decide for themselves how much autonomy they can stand.

Conversely, in some cultures, parents are especially present and try to stimulate their babies’ intellectual growth from the very first months. What are the effects of this enhanced involvement on children’s development?

The greatest predictor of intellectual success is the emotional stability of the home - not the presence of toys or devices built to improve infant cognitive development. Most of those products haven’t been tested, and the few that have been tested don’t work very well. One study actually showed it did more harm.

If you want to maximize your child’s intellectual growth, the best thing you can do is to go home and love your partner. 

5 Brain Rules for Parents

There's a great ongoing conversation over at the Brain Rules for Baby Facebook page amongst new parents who have learned from Brain Rules for Baby. Author Dr. John Medina recently shared his 5 essential Brain Rules for Parents:

1. You are going to make lots of mistakes.

2. That’s okay. 

3. If you pay close attention to the safety needs of your children, – both the emotional and physical ones - you will almost always win.

4. If you treat your kids like they were merit badges, you will almost always lose.

5. Be prepared to live with contradictions. The parenting social contract is singular: they take and you give. Yet if you do it right, it won’t matter. You would die for them anyway, which means parenting is the best way to become a saint. Or a martyr. It is hard to believe that ripping your heart out of your pleural cavity and pinning it to your shirtsleeve could be the best thing that will ever happen to you. But it is. Parenting is probably the hardest thing you will ever do, but it is so much on the right side of worth it.

New Brain Rules for Baby Videos

We are excited for you to meet Brain Rules Baby, who shares parenting wisdom from Brain Rules for Baby in these 60-second videos.

Watch Out - Your Kids Are Watching You More Than You Think


That's right, kids are really good a imitation.  Even a 13-month-old child can remember an event a week after a single exposure.  Even when you don't realize it, your kids are watching the world around you.  What you allow into your child's brain influences their expectations about the world, which in turn influences not only what they are capable of perceiving, but their very behavior.

View on YouTube

Under 2? No TV for you!


Americans 2 years of age and older now spend an average of four hours and 49 minutes per day in front of the TV—20 percent more than 10 years ago. And we are getting this exposure at younger and younger ages, made all the more complex because of the wide variety of digital screen time now available. In 2003, 77 percent of kids under 6 watched television every day. And children younger than 2 got two hours and five minutes of “screen time” with TVs and computers per day. The average American is exposed to about 100,000 words per day outside of work. Fully 45 percent of those words come from television. The fact is, the amount of TV a child should watch before the age of 2 is zero.

View on YouTube

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How do you get a baby to sleep through the night? We have no idea.

I am often asked why Brain Rules for Baby doesn't include advice on how to get your child to sleep through the night. The omission is deliberate, and my recent answer to one reader's question via e-mail explains the reasoning. I thought you would like to see the answer, too. Thanks for all of your interest in the book. It means a great deal.
-- John

Dear Reader;

You raise an important issue regarding sleep, one of the most critical in the early months of child-rearing. Unfortunately, I cannot give a response equal to its criticality.

If you are having problems with getting your child to sleep through the night, you have probably read everything you could on the issue. In that journey, you might have noticed there are many different opinions about how to get kids to sleep through the night - often by experts in the field. You might further have noticed that these well-established researchers and clinicians often appear to say contradictory things. The advice can almost be put into a continuum. On one end, there are researchers like Dr. Richard Ferber, interpreted as saying draconian things like “let your kid tough it out at night” (that’s hardly a fair characterization, by the way). On the other end is pediatrician William Sears and family who is interpreted as saying “respond to every demand at night” (also hardly a fair characterization). Here are the two references from these seasoned medical professionals, which make great comparative reading for the views they hold:

“Solve Your Childs’ Sleep Problems”,

Richard Ferber, 2006

and

“The Baby Sleep Book”

William Sears et al, 2005

Why the contradiction? BECAUSE NOBODY REALLY KNOWS HOW TO ADDRESS THE SLEEP ISSUE. There does not appear to be a one-size-fits-all answer, which is why any advice which claims to be THE ANSWER does not pass my “grump factor”, as a scientist. My standard response, therefore, is to appeal to the wisdom of the real expert, the parent – YOU – and say something like “Every brain is wired differently from every other brain. Go out and buy both of these books and expose yourself to the various recommendations. Then determine which strategies (or combinations of strategies) your child – based on your knowledge – is most likely to respond. Try these strategies in a systematic fashion, and progressively design new ones until you find the strategy that does work.”

I have an example of this flexible, deliberate approach in my own child-rearing experience.

It was almost seven months before my eldest child slept successfully through the night. What worked for me was to give him a “modified” Ferber protocol – a gentler version of his recommendation, which took almost a week to execute successfully (I literally took off time from work to do it, relieving my poor exhausted wife).

My youngest child also had trouble getting to sleep. But when I tried my “modified” Ferber strategy, it did not work for him. What did the trick was a modified “Sears” strategy. And it also took about a week to become successful too. Living proof for the fact there is no over-arching strategy that will work for every child.

I wish you well. Solving this riddle is one of the toughest tasks in the early years of child-rearing.

John Medina

Discipline Advice: A Magic Trick for Getting Kids to Follow Rules

Let's say little Aaron has been punished for a moral infraction -- stealing a pencil from classmate Jimmy -- just before a test. The punishment was subtractive in nature -- Aaron would have no dessert that night. But Aaron was not just punished and left alone.

He was also given a magic follow-up sentence, one that makes any form of punishment more effective, long-lasting, and internalized.

Watch this video from brainrules.net to see an example (watch on YouTube):

Explanations given to Aaron ranged from "How could Jimmy possibly complete his test without his pencil?" to "Our family doesn't steal."

Here's what happens to Aaron's behavior when explanations are supplied consistently over the years:

When Aaron thinks about committing that same forbidden act in the future, he will remember the punishment. He becomes more physiologically aroused, generating uncomfortable feelings.

Aaron will make an internal attribution for this uneasiness. Examples might include: "I'd feel awful if Jimmy failed his test," "I wouldn't like it if he did that to me," "I am better than that," and so on. Your child's internal attribution originates from whatever rationale you supplied during the correction.

Now, knowing why he is uneasy -- and wanting to avoid the feeling -- Aaron is free to generalize the lesson to other situations. "I probably shouldn't steal erasers from Jimmy, either." "Maybe I shouldn't steal things, period."

Cue the applause of a million juvenile correction and law-enforcement professionals. Inductive parenting provides a fully adaptable, internalizable moral sensibility -- congruent with inborn instincts. (Aaron also was instructed to write a note of apology, which he did the next day.)

Kids who are punished without explanation do not go through these steps. Parke found that such children only externalize their perceptions, saying, "I will get spanked if I do this again." They were constantly on the lookout for an authority figure; it was the presence of an external credible threat that guided their behavior, not a reasoned response to an internal moral compass. Children who can't get to step two can't get to step three, and they are one step closer to Daniel, the boy who stabbed a classmate in the cheek with a pencil.

The bottom line: Parents who provide clear, consistent boundaries whose reasons for existence are always explained generally produce moral kids.

Note that I said "generally." Inductive discipline, powerful as it is, is not a one-size-fits-all strategy. The temperament of the child turns out to be a major factor. For toddlers possessed of a fearless and impulsive outlook on life, inductive discipline can be too weak. Kids with a more fearful temperament may react catastrophically to the sharp correctives their fearless siblings shrug off. They need to be handled much more gently.

All kids need rules, but every brain is wired differently, so you need to know your kid's emotional landscapes inside and out -- and adapt your discipline strategies accordingly.

Brain Rules in the News:
Forbes - Being There why it still pays to meet in the flesh
Our 365 - 6 Questions for John Medina
Radio New Zealand Interview with John Medina
Sound Medicine (NPR) Interview

Breast-Feeding Debate Closed? Brain Science Weighs In

I remember meeting up with an old friend who had just become a mother. Baby in tow, we entered a restaurant. She immediately insisted on sitting at a private booth, and after five minutes, I discovered why. Mom knew that her baby would soon be hungry. When he was, she discreetly unbuttoned her blouse, adjusted her bra, and began breast-feeding. The baby latched on for dear life.

Mom had to go through all kinds of contortions to hide this activity. "I've been thrown out of other places because I did this," she explained. Though shrouded in an oversize sweater, she was visibly nervous as the waiter took her order.

If America knew what breast milk can do for the brains of it youngest citizens, lactating mothers across the nation would be enshrined, not embarrassed. Though the topic is much debated, there's little controversy about it in the scientific community.

Breast milk is the nutritional equivalent of a magic bullet for a developing baby. It has important salts and even more important vitamins. Its immune-friendly properties prevent ear, respiratory and gastrointestinal infections.

And in a result that surprised just about everybody, studies around the world confirmed that breast-feeding, in short, makes babies smarter. Breast-fed babies in America score on average eight points higher than bottle-fed kids when given cognitive tests, an effect still observable nearly a decade after the breast-feeding has stopped. They get better grades, too, especially in reading and writing.

Why? We have some ideas (watch on YouTube):

The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that all mothers breast-feed exclusively for the first six months of their babies' lives, continue breast-feeding as their kids start taking on solids, and wean them after a year.

If we as a country wanted a smarter population, we would insist on lactation rooms in every public establishment. A sign would hang from the door of these rooms: "Quiet, please. Brain development in progress."

Kids Lie Every 90 Minutes -- And That's a Good Thing (VIDEO)

Kids are bad at lying, at least at first. In the magical fairy dust of the childhood mind, kids initially have a hard time distinguishing reality from fancy, which you can see in their eagerness to engage in imaginative play.

They also perceive their parents to be essentially omniscient, a belief that won't be completely destroyed until the 20-kiloton blast of puberty. The fuse gets lit early, though, around 36 months, when kids begin to realize that parents can't always read their minds. To their delight (or horror), children discover they can give their parents false information without its being detected. Or, at least, they think they can. The child's realization that you can't always read his or her mind coincides with the flowering of something we call Theory of Mind skills.

What is Theory of Mind? This video explains:

This timeline suggested to researchers that children have an age-dependent relationship with certain types of moral reasoning, too. There's evidence that kids are born with certain moral instincts, but it takes a while to coax them into their mature form.

Babies Pick Up On More Than You'd Think

At first blush, babies seem mostly preoccupied with more mundane biological processes, like eating and pooping and spitting up all over your shirt. This fooled a lot of researchers into believing that babies weren't thinking about anything at all. Scientists coined the term "tabula rasa" -- blank slate -- to describe these "empty" creatures. They regarded infants as merely helpless helpings of cute, controllable, human potential.

Modern research reveals a radically different point of view. We now know that a baby's greatest biological preoccupation involves the organ atop their necks. Infants come preloaded with lots of software in their neural hard drives, most of it having to do with learning. Want some startling examples?

In 1979, University of Washington psychologist Andy Meltzoff stuck out his tongue at a baby that was just 42 minutes old, then sat back to see what happened. After some effort, the baby returned the favor, slowly rolling out his own tongue. Meltzoff stuck his tongue out again. The infant responded in kind. Meltzoff discovered that babies could imitate right from the start of their little lives (or, at least, 42 minutes from the start of their little lives).

That's an extraordinary finding. Imitation involves many sophisticated realizations for babies, from discovering that other people exist in the world to realizing that they have operating body parts, and the same ones as you. That's not a blank slate. That's an amazing, fully operational cognitive slate.

Capitalizing on this finding, Meltzoff designed a series of experiments revealing just how much babies are prewired to learn -- and how sensitive they are to outside influences in pursuit of that goal. Here's one of those experiments (Watch Deferred Imitation on YouTube):

Yes, infants come equipped with an amazing array of cognitive abilities -- and they are blessed with many intellectual gadgets capable of extending those abilities:

• They understand that size stays constant even when distance changes the appearance of size.


• They display velocity prediction.


• They understand the principle of common fate: The reason the black lines on the basketball move when the ball bounces is because the lines are part of the basketball.


• Infants can discriminate human faces from nonhuman faces at birth and seem to prefer them. From an evolutionary perspective, this latter behavior represents a powerful safety feature. We will be preoccupied with faces most of our lives.

How did babies acquire all of this knowledge before being exposed to the planet? Nobody knows, but they have it, and they put it to good use with astonishing speed and insight. Babies create hypotheses, test them, and then relentlessly appraise their findings with the vigor of a seasoned scientist. This means infants are extraordinarily delightful, surprisingly aggressive learners. They pick up everything.

Which is one reason you want to be careful about what kind of television shows your children watch. You may also want to take a look at the behaviors your kids see most often: yours.

More Resources
The Art of Childraising - interview with Guy Kawasaki
Brain Rules Videos - all the segments from the Brain Rules DVD
Brain Rules for Baby Videos - watch videos ranging from temper tantrums to TV viewing

'Parentese': Can Speaking To Your Baby This Way Make Her Smarter? (VIDEO)

For the longest time, we couldn't figure out the words coming from our nine-month-old son Josh.

Whenever he took a car ride, he would start saying the word "dah," repeating it over and over again as we strapped him into his car seat, "Dah dah dah, goo, dah dah, big-dah, big-dah." It often sounded like a child's version of an old Police song. We couldn't decode it and would just respond, a bit sheepishly, "Dah?" He would emphatically reply, "Dah." Sometimes our response made him happy. Sometimes it didn't do anything at all.

It wasn't until we were tooling down the interstate one fine, sunny day, moon-roof wide open to the clouds, that we finally figured it out.

Josh saw an airplane flying overhead and shouted excitedly, "Sky-dah! Sky-dah!" My wife suddenly understood. "I think he means airplane!" she said. She asked him, pointing to the sky, "Sky-dah?" Josh cheerily replied, "Sky-dah!" Just then a big noisy semi-truck passed us, and Josh pointed to it with concern. "Big-dah, Big-dah," he said. My wife pointed at the truck too, now shrinking in the distance. "Big-dah?" she asked, and he responded excitedly, "Big-dah!" Then "dah, dah, dah."

We got it. For whatever reason, "dah" had become Joshua's word for "vehicle." Later, Josh and I watched a ship cross Puget Sound. I pointed to the container vessel and guessed, "Water-dah?" He sat up, staring at me like I was from Mars. "Wet-dah," he declared, like a mildly impatient professor addressing a slow student.

Few interactions with children are as much fun as learning to speak their language. As they learn to speak ours, heaping tablespoons of words into their minds is one of the healthiest things parents can do for their brains.

Speak to your children as often as you can. It is one of the most well-established findings in all of the developmental literature -- which is why it is among those detailed in my new book, "Brain Rules for Baby: How to Raise a Smart and Happy Child From Zero to Five."

The linkage between words and smarts was discovered through some pretty invasive research. In one study, investigators descended upon a family's home every month for three years and jotted down every aspect of verbal communication parents gave their children. They measured size of vocabulary, diversity and growth rate of vocabulary, frequency of verbal interaction, and the emotional content of the speech. Just before the visits were finished, the researchers gave IQ tests. They did this with more than 40 families, then followed up years later.

Through exhaustive analysis of this amazingly tough work, two very clear findings emerged:

1) The variety and number of words matter.

The more parents talk to their children, even in the earliest moments of life, the better their kids' linguistic abilities become and the faster that improvement is achieved. The gold standard is 2,100 words per hour. The variety of the words spoken (nouns, verbs, and adjectives used, along with the length and complexity of phrases and sentences) is nearly as important as the number of words spoken. So is the amount of positive feedback.

You can reinforce language skills through interaction: looking at your infant; imitating his vocalizations, laughter and facial expressions; rewarding her language attempts with heightened attention.

Children whose parents talked positively, richly and regularly to them knew twice as many words as kids whose parents talked to them the least. When these kids entered the school system, their reading, spelling and writing abilities soared above those of children in less verbal households. Even though babies don't respond like adults, they are listening, and it is good for them.

2) Talking increases IQ.

Talking to children early in life raises their IQs, too, even after controlling for important variables such as income. By age three, kids who were talked to regularly by their parents (called the talkative group) had IQ scores 1.5 times higher than those kids whose parents talked to them the least (called the taciturn group). This increase in IQ is thought to be responsible for the talkative group's uptick in grades.

It takes a real live person to benefit your baby's brain, so get ready to exercise your vocal cords. Not the portable DVD players, not your television's surround sound, but your vocal cords.

What should you say and how should you say it? Find out in these videos (also on YouTube):

WATCH:

More Brain Rules Resources
- Brain Rules Multimedia on Exercise, Sleep, Stress, and more
- Brain Rules Sleep Slideshow Sleep well, think well
- Take the Parent Quiz What's the best way to handle a temper tantrum?
- Brain Rules for Baby Podcast John talks with Geoffrey Grosenbach about parenting
- Brain Rules for Baby Introduction Share the intro with a friend