I moved back home with my grandparents to save money for school. I grew up here. My roots run deep. One of our dearest neighbors died and his family is getting the house together to sell. Tonight, a bunch of us, including his son, congregated in the garage, drank wine and reminisced about so many of the neighbors and family who are no longer with us. There was laughter and tears, but there was such a precious feeling [that] the ones who had gone before us were there, and laughing too. It was so amazing!
We are so darn social. Understanding this about the brain is fundamental to understanding many of the themes in this book, from empathy to language to the effects of social isolation. Because the brain is a biological organ, the reasons are evolutionary. Most scientists believe we survived because we formed cooperative social groups. This forced us to spend lots of time in the land of relationships, getting to know one another’s motivations, psychological interiors, and systems of reward and punishment.
Two benefits emerged. One was the ability to work as a team—useful for hunting, finding shelter, and defending against predators. The other was the ability to help raise one another’s children. The battle between birth-canal size and baby-skull size meant females needed time to recover from giving birth. Somebody had to take care of the kids. Or take over the nurturing if she died. The task fell mostly to females (males can’t lactate, after all), though many scientists believe the most successful groups were ones where males played an active role in supporting the females. That communal need was so strong, and so critical to our survival, that researchers have given the phenomenon its own name: alloparenting. If as a parent you feel as though you can’t do it alone, that’s because you were never meant to.
Though no direct knowledge exists of how our hunter-gatherer ancestors raised their kids, evidence for these tendencies abounds today. We know babies come into this world wired with a deep desire to form relationships with other people. Since birth parents are the first humans that infants encounter, their natural first targets are family. But that soon extends to others. One mother reported watching American Idol with her son, age 2. As the host interviewed the crying contestants who didn’t make it, the boy jumped up, patted the screen, and said, “Oh no, don’t cry.” This skill requires deep relational skills, illustrating as much a biological process as it does a sweet kid. All of us have natural connecting abilities.
If you understand that the brain has a deep need for relating to others, and that the brain is interested foremost in survival, the information in this book—the things that best develop your baby’s brain—will make sense.
A few notes before we begin
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
