Defining family
Maybe you saw 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 are being raised not by their biological parents but by their biological grandparents. One in five 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 more modern families, 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.”
The sources of the stories
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 teenagers 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 reviewed 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 into these pages. I applaud both their courage and their sense of humor for letting dear old Dad share slivers of their early lives.
The sources of the data
In these pages, there are places where virtually every sentence is referenced. But for readability of the book, the references have migrated online to www.brainrules.net/references. The Brain Rules website, www.brainrules.net, is chock-full of additional supporting material, including dozens of videos. Certain subjects I leave out altogether: some to keep the book at a reasonable length; others because there is just not enough supporting documentation.
My wife’s kitchen
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 countless 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 fruits and vegetables 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 participate in 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.
brain rule
Healthy mom, healthy baby
pregnancy
One day I gave a lecture to a group of expecting couples. A woman and her husband came up to me afterward, looking anxious. “My father is a ham radio operator,” the wife said. “He told my husband that he should start tapping on my belly. Is that a good thing?” She looked puzzled. So did I. “Why tapping?” I asked. The husband said, “Not just any tapping. He wants me to learn Morse code. He wants me to start tapping messages into the kid’s brain, so the little guy will be smart. Maybe we could teach him to tap back!” The wife interjected, “Will that make him smart? My belly is really sore, and I don’t like it.”
I remember this being a funny moment; we had a good laugh. But it was also sincere. I could see the questioning look in their eyes.
Whenever I lecture on the extraordinary mental life of the developing fetus, I can almost feel a wave of panic ripple across the room. Pregnant couples in the audience become concerned, then start furiously scribbling down notes, often talking in excited whispers to their neighbors. Parents with grown children sometimes seem satisfied, sometimes regretful; a few even look guilty. There is skepticism, wonder, and, above all, lots of questions. Can a baby really learn Morse code in the latter stages of pregnancy? And if he could, would it do him any good?
Scientists have uncovered many new insights about a baby’s mental life in the womb. In this chapter, we’ll delve into the magnificent mystery of how brains develop—all starting from a handful of tiny cells. We’ll talk about what that means for Morse code, detailing the things proven to aid in utero brain development. Hint: There are only four. And we will explode a few myths along the way; for one, you can put away your Mozart CDs.
Quiet, please: Baby in progress
If I were to give a single sentence of advice based on what we know about in utero development during the first half of pregnancy, it would be this: The baby wants to be left alone.
At least at first. From the baby’s point of view, the best feature of life in the womb is its relative lack of stimulation. The uterus is dark, moist, warm, as sturdy as a bomb shelter, and much quieter than the outside world. And it needs to be. Once things get going, your little embryo’s pre-brain will pump out neurons at the astonishing rate of 500,000 cells a minute. That’s more than 8,000 cells per second, a pace it will sustain for weeks on end. This is readily observable three weeks after conception, and it continues until about the midpoint in your pregnancy. The kid has a great deal to accomplish in a very short time! A peaceful lack of interference from amateur parents is just what you’d expect the baby to need.
In fact, some evolutionary biologists believe this is why morning sickness still persists in human pregnancies. Morning sickness, which can last the entire day (and, for some women, the entire pregnancy), makes a woman stick to a bland, boring diet—if she eats much at all. This avoidance strategy would have kept our maternal ancestors away from the natural toxins in exotic or spoiled foods in the wild, unregulated menu of the Pleistocene diet. The accompanying fatigue would keep women from engaging in physical activity risky enough to harm the baby.
Researchers now think it could make the baby smarter, too. One study, yet to be replicated, looked at children whose mothers suffered from major nausea and vomiting during pregnancy. When the children reached school age, 21 percent scored 130 or more points on a standard IQ test, a level considered gifted. If their mothers had no morning sickness, only 7 percent of kids did that well. The researchers have a theory—still to be proved—about why. Two hormones that stimulate a woman to vomit may also act like neural fertilizer for the developing brain. The more vomiting,