Brain Rules for Baby by John Medina

Relationships

Brain cares about survival before learning, they need to feel safe in order to learn.

Hostility between parents can harm newborn's developing brain and nervous system. Empathy reduces hostility. Make empathy a reflex:
1. Describe the emotional changes you think you see
2. Make a guess as to where those emotional changes came from

Most common sources of marital turbulence: sleep loss, social isolation, unequal distribution of household workload, and depression. Be aware, respond with empathy.

Smart Baby

1. Breastfeeding is brain boosting
2. Talk to baby - variety matters. Parentese helps: high pitched tone, sing song voice and stretched vowels
3. Guided play everyday which focuses on impulse control and self regulation. Tools of the Mind classroom: preschoolers fill in a play plan of what they will be doing during the play "I'm going to make a Lego castle and pretend I'm a knight", kids receive direct, open ended mechanics of pretending "I'm pretending my baby is crying. Is yours? What should we say?" At the end of the week they list what they experienced and what they learnt.

Praise effort not intelligence. "I'm so proud of you. You must have really studied hard"

Each additional hour of TV watched by a child under 3 increases likelihood of attentional problem by age 7 by 10%. No TV before 2 (even second hand TV distracts kids from their play). After age 5 TV can improve learning like Dora the Explorer. Watch the show with your kid, interacting with the media, helping them to analyze and think critically about what they just experienced.

Video games are played sitting down. Important to do aerobic exercise (increases executive brain function from 50% to 100%). Even better to exercise with children.

Happy Baby

Your infant needs you to watch, listen, and respond. Do not smother as they need to learn how to regulate their own emotions (through you labelling the emotion) and for independent play.

Labeling emotions is neurologically calming. Empathy makes good friends (relationships is number one predictor of happiness in people)

Parents who raise happy kids have four attitudes towards emotions:
They do not judge emotions - no emotion is good or bad
They acknowledge the reflexive nature of emotions - don't deny the existence of your child's emotions
They know that behaviour is a choice, even though an emotion is not
They see a crisis as a teachable moment - you never want a serious crisis to go to waste, potential catastrophe becomes potential lesson

Two tons of empathy:
To defuse a meltdown you acknowledge the child's feelings and empathize. Emotions are contagious, empathy calms the nerves.

If 30% of your interactions with your child are empathetic, you will raise a happy kid.

Moral Baby

Goal of moral development: willingness to make the right choices and to withstand pressure to make the wrong ones, even in the absence of a credible threat or the presence of reward.

Loss of emotion = loss of decision making. Proven by loss/damage to ventromedial and polar prefrontal cortices.

Need all 3:
Clear, consistent rules and rewards - visible chart for rules can help, must be warm when administering rules, every time your child follows the rules you offer praise, praising the absence of bad behaviour is just as important as praising the good.

Discipline: negative reinforcement and punishment

Punishment - must be swift (child learns faster), aversive, consistent (between all care-givers), emotionally safe (kid should feel oh they actually care about me). Punishment suppresses behaviour but not the knowledge of how to misbehave so need to teach what the proper behaviour should be. You risk counterproductivity if punish incorrectly.

Explaining the rules - important to explain the rationale of rule and its consequences, might offer how it effects others, what principles are good etc (inductive parenting)

Adapt discipline strategy to child's temperament

Spanking - 3 yr olds spanked more than twice in a month were 50% more likely to be aggressive by age 5. Spanking is more likely to trigger deferred imitation instincts than moral internalization. Inductive parenting takes effort, spanking does not. Spanking is lazy parenting?