A little TV after age 2
Make screen time social
Allow mistakes, discomfort, and boredom
Discipline
Be firm but warm
Follow four rules about rules
Emotion first. Problem second.
Label intense emotions
Teach instead of punish
Consider the consequences
Plan ahead to avoid trouble
Rock your routines
Call a calm-down, not a time-out
Ask, “Can you think of a better way?”
Move
Rock, jiggle, and swing
Keep moving
Slow down
Be still
Don’t bother to compare
Work part-time if you can (maybe less)
Be more, do less
About Tracy
I’m a former journalist at the Seattle Times, editor of the bestselling books Brain Rules and Brain Rules for Baby, and mom to one precocious 2-year-old. I like to think I’m a recovering perfectionist, but I still do way too much research on every little thing. I’m a city girl who loves to be outdoors. I’m staying home with baby, mostly, until either of us decides to renegotiate our contract. I live in Seattle with my husband, Luke Timmerman.
About Betty
Moments are special, don’t you agree? My role is to anticipate fleeting glances, nuanced toe-curls and moist eyes that tell stories. I began using cameras in grade school, and I never stopped. Visual storytelling has taken me to Africa, Indonesia, Central and South America, and Israel. It also has deeply immersed me in the community of Seattle, where I worked for two-and-a-half decades as a staff photographer at the Seattle Times before leaving to pursue independent projects. I live in Seattle with my husband, Benjamin Benschneider (also a photographer) and three very nice cats.
For Geneva, Baby G, Little Cheeky, Beautiful Baby
For Luke, my rock
For Mom and Dad, who did many of the things in this book
Where are the photographs?
This is a text-only version of the book created for devices that don’t like photographs or large file sizes. To see the book in its full glory, please order the color version.
We parents have questions.
Lots of questions.
At least, I do. My husband and I had our first baby in our mid-30s, after months of “should we or shouldn’t we?” We’d spent about fifteen minutes around newborns before that point. Like many expecting couples, our preparation consisted of birth-education classes. And research on diapers, clothing, and gear. (As avid cyclists, we had a balance bike picked out as early as a baby swing.) These weren’t much help in how to raise a baby. Unlike many expecting couples, I’d edited the childhood brain-development book Brain Rules for Baby. Very handy! But, of course, no book can match the experience of having a baby right there in your arms, crying or cooing. We had questions then, and we have questions now.
Every parent I’ve come across has had challenges. The themes are similar, even if the particulars differ: Doing our best for baby during pregnancy, even when we don’t want to. (Giving up wine or coffee comes to mind.) Sleep. Comforting baby. Feeding baby. Sleep. Getting out of the house. Getting a break. Keeping baby intellectually stimulated. Keeping up with friendships. Sleep. Digital devices. Discipline. Sleep.
My husband and I are certainly no different. Our baby surprises us, delights us, concerns us, and frustrates us. When she stumps us, I go looking for answers.
I ask friends. I talk with my mom. I search online, as my husband rolls his eyes. I like to consider all the options! But soon I’m buried in opposing opinions (“Best thing I ever tried”; “Didn’t work for me AT ALL”), vague parenting articles, and irrelevant forum comments.
Then I’ll flip through the many brain-development and parenting books on my shelf, accumulated while editing Brain Rules for Baby or writing this book. I pore through studies, staring at sentences like “Briefly, trajectory methodology uses all available developmental data points and assigns individuals to trajectories based on a posterior probability rule.” All are filled with what seems, post-baby, like a very large amount of very small type.
And I think: it would be nice to have one inviting, just-tell-me-what-to-do, open-to-any-page collection of parenting’s best practices, based on what the research says.
This is that book. The wonderful images were captured by photojournalist Betty Udesen. We met in 2001, when we worked together on multimedia stories for the Seattle Times. I asked her if she’d work with me on this book, and I feel very fortunate that she said yes.
Where do I get off writing a parenting book? I’m not a neuroscientist or a child-development expert. Instead, I’m drawing on my fifteen-year career as a journalist to help me assess the scientific research and distill it into something readable for tired parents. I’ve sprinkled in anecdotes from my own life. Not because my experience is vast, and not because it will be exactly like yours, but to give you an idea of the fun, weird, funny, tough moments that make up parenting.
I’ve focused on baby’s first five years because they involve an incredible amount of change. When it comes to mobility, language, empathy, and motor skills, you can’t tell the difference between a 30-year-old and a 31-year-old. But the difference between a 1-year-old and a 2-year-old? Remarkable. Amazing. Fascinating. Crazy. More than 90 percent of brain development takes place in those first five years.
So, these early years matter. We’re setting baby up for success. And we’re establishing our philosophies as parents, which will carry us well beyond five years. The themes in these pages—love, talk, play, connect, discipline, move, slow down—are as important at 2 months old as they are at 2 years old, 5 years old, 15 years old, and even 50 years old. We’re all human.
This book is rooted in research. I don’t provide a citation within the text for every study, but all of the references are online at www.zerotofive.net. In trying to answer questions, researchers account for all kinds of variables, and they filter out bias as much as possible. It’s the best guide we’ve got.
Still, social-sciences research rarely can give us absolute truth. Here’s one example: say researchers are trying to determine whether music lessons make preschoolers smarter. They do a randomized
