is the proper balance? Four words: moderate, regular aerobic exercise. For most women, that means keeping your heart rate below 70 percent of its maximal rate (which is 220 beats per minute minus your age), then slowing things down as the due date approaches. But you should exercise. As long as you don’t have obstetric or other medical complications, the American College of Obstetricians recommends 30 minutes or more of moderate exercise per day.
Good advice, even though we are not wildebeests.
Every little bit counts
Maybe you’re not in the habit of exercising every day. Maybe you’re feeling guilty enough already for drinking that second cup of coffee while pregnant. If so, perhaps you will appreciate some reassurance from the research world: As a species, Homo sapiens have been successfully making babies for 250,000 years. We did very well without all this fancy knowledge, thank you, and with such success that we conquered the world. Your best intentions—Morse code belly tapping notwithstanding—will go a long way toward creating a great environment for your developing baby.
Key points
• In the first half of pregnancy, babies want to be left alone.
• Don’t waste your money on products claiming to improve a preborn baby’s IQ, temperament, or personality. None of them have been proved to work.
• In the second half of pregnancy, babies begin to perceive and process a great deal of sensory information. They can even smell the perfume you wear.
• Brain boosters at this stage: gaining the proper weight, eating a balanced diet, exercising moderately, and reducing stress.
brain rule
Start with empathy
relationship
I remember feeling almost completely overwhelmed when we brought our firstborn son, Joshua, home from the hospital. We placed our new baby in the car seat for the first time, praying that we were buckling him in correctly. I drove home from the hospital at a snail’s pace—miraculous, for me. My wife was in the backseat, just to keep an eye on things. So far, so good.
When the little guy entered our house, his tiny face suddenly corrugated into annoyance. He started screaming. We changed his diaper. Still he screamed. My wife fed him. He took one or two gulps, then resumed screaming, tried to wiggle out of my wife’s arms, tried to get away. This didn’t happen in the hospital. Were we doing something wrong? I held him. My wife held him. Eventually, he calmed down. Then he seemed to go to sleep. We were so relieved. “We can do this,” we kept telling ourselves. It was late, and we decided to follow his lead. No sooner did our heads hit the pillow than Joshua started crying again. My wife got up and fed him, then handed Josh to me. I burped him, changed him, laid him back down. He was calm and settled, and we went back to bed. I didn’t even get to feel the warmth of the sheet before the crying and screaming resumed. My wife was exhausted, recovering from a 21-hour labor, in no shape to help. I got up, held the baby, then set him back into his crib. He calmed down. Success! I crept back to bed. I got only as far as the pillow before the crying began again. I tucked my head under the blankets, hoping it would stop. It didn’t. What was I supposed to do?
This bewildering routine, and my reactions to them, recurred day after day. I had deep feelings for my son—always will—but I wondered at the time what ever made me decide to have a baby. I had no idea that something so wonderful was also going to be so hard. I learned a difficult but important lesson: Once a kid comes into the world, the calculus of daily living coughs up new equations. I am good at math, but I was no good at this. I had no idea how to solve these problems.
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. Sometimes the baby brings a hormone-soaked honeymoon period. (One couple I know constantly quoted Tagore to each other: “Every child comes with the message that God is not yet discouraged of man!”) Even then, things quickly deteriorate. The hostility can be so severe that, in some marriages, having a baby is actually a risk factor for divorce.
Why do I bring this up in a book about baby brain development? Because it has serious consequences for the baby’s brain. We learned in the Pregnancy chapter how exquisitely sensitive a baby in the womb is to outside stimuli. Once baby leaves his comfortable, watery incubator, his brain becomes even more vulnerable. Sustained exposure to hostility can erode a baby’s IQ and ability to handle stress, sometimes dramatically. An infant’s need for caregiver stability is so strong, he will rewire his developing nervous system depending upon the turbulence he perceives. If you want your child to be equipped with the best brain possible, you need to know about this before you bring home your bundle of joy.
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.
Most marriages suffer
Most couples don’t imagine such marital turbulence when they get pregnant. Babies, after all, are supposed to bring endless, unremitting joy. That’s the idealistic view many of us have, especially if our parents grew up in the late 1950s—an era steeped in a traditional view of marriages and families. TV programs like Leave It to Beaver and Ozzie & Harriet depicted working fathers as all-wise; stay-at-home mothers as all-nurturing; children as surprisingly obedient and, when not, creating small but manageable crises easily resolvable in 23 minutes. The protagonists were mostly middle class, mostly white, and, it turns out, mostly wrong.
A bracingly cold glass of water was thrown on this Eisenhoweresque perception by famed sociologist E. E. LeMasters. Rather than babies bringing nirvana to marriages, he showed the opposite. In 1957, he published a paper showing that 83 percent of married couples experienced more turbulence in their relationships with the birth of a baby—some couples severely so. Not surprisingly, these findings were met with a great deal of skepticism.
Time, and further research, proved to be on the side of LeMasters. Armed with better methodologies and longer study periods, studies
