Brain Rules for Baby (17 page)

We’re thinking in terms of soil, so it makes sense to formulate a fertilizer. What you put in is as important as what you leave out. There are four nutrients you will want in your behavioral formula, adjusting them as your baby gets older: breast-feeding, talking to your baby, guided play, and praising effort rather than accomplishment. Brain research tells us there are also several toxins: pushing your child to perform tasks his brain is not developmentally ready to take on; stressing her to the point of a psychological state termed “learned helplessness”; and, for the under-2 set, television. A few additives, hawked by marketers, are optional to irrelevant. What we’ll discover is the profound need to strike a balance between intellectual freedom and well-disciplined rigor.

First, I need to correct a misconception. Many well-meaning moms and dads think their child’s brain is interested in learning. That is not accurate. The brain is not interested in learning. The brain is interested in
surviving.
Every ability in our intellectual tool kit was engineered to escape extinction. Learning exists only to serve the
requirements of this primal goal. It is a happy coincidence that our intellectual tools can do double duty in the classroom, conferring on us the ability to create spreadsheets and speak French. But that’s not the brain’s day job. That is an incidental byproduct of a much deeper force: the gnawing, clawing desire to live to the next day. We do not survive so that we can learn. We learn so that we can survive.

This overarching goal predicts many things, and here’s the most important: If you want a well-educated child, you must create an environment of safety. When the brain’s safety needs are met, it will allow its neurons to moonlight in algebra classes. When safety needs are not met, algebra goes out the window. Roosevelt’s dad held him first, which made his son feel safe, which meant the future president could luxuriate in geography.

 

One simple example of the brain’s fixation on safety occurs during an assault. It’s called“weapon focus. Victims of an assault often suffer from amnesia or confusion; they usually can’t recall the facial features of the criminal. But they often can completely recall the details of the weapon used. “It was a Saturday night special, held in the left hand, wood handle”, a witness might exclaim. Why remember the perp’s gun, which is not always helpful to the police, and not the perp’s face, which almost always is? The answer reveals the brain’s familiar priority: safety. The weapon holds the biggest potential threat, and the brain focuses on it because the brain is built to concentrate on survival. The brain is learning under these hostile conditions (stress can marvelously focus the mind); it is just concentrating on the source of the threat.

A former fighter pilot, teaching at an aeronautics university, discovered how this works in the classroom. One of his students had been a star in ground school but was having trouble in the air. During a training flight, she misinterpreted an instrument reading, and he yelled at her, thinking it would force her to concentrate. Instead, she
started crying, and though she tried to continue reading the instruments, she couldn’t focus. He landed the plane, lesson over. What was wrong? From the brain’s perspective, nothing was wrong. The student’s mind was focusing on the source of the threat, just as it had been molded to do over the past few million years. The teacher’s anger could not direct the student to the instrument to be learned because the instrument was not the source of danger. The teacher was the source of danger. This is weapons focus, merely replacing “Saturday Night Special” with “ex-fighter pilot.”

The same is true if you are a parenting a child rather than teaching a student. The brain will never outgrow its preoccupation with survival.

Now we can dig into our fertilizer, starting with four ingredients you want in your developmental soil.

I remember meeting up with an old friend who had just become a mother. Baby in tow, we entered a restaurant. She immediately insisted on sitting at a private booth, and after five minutes, I discovered why. Mom knew that once her baby smelled food, he’d become hungry. When he did, she discreetly unbuttoned her blouse, adjusted her bra, and began breast-feeding. The baby latched on for dear life. Mom had to go through all kinds of contortions to hide this activity. “I’ve been thrown out of other places because I did this”, she explained. Though shrouded in an oversize sweater, she was visibly nervous as the waiter took her order.

If America knew what breast milk can do for the brains of it youngest citizens, lactating mothers across the nation would be enshrined, not embarrassed. Though the topic is much debated,
there’s little controversy about it in the scientific community. Breast milk is the nutritional equivalent of a magic bullet for a developing baby. It has important salts and even more important vitamins. Its immune-friendly properties prevent ear, respiratory, and gastrointestinal infections. And in a result that surprised just about everybody, studies around the world confirmed that breast-feeding, in short, makes babies smarter. Breast-fed babies in America score on average 8 points higher than bottle-fed kids when given cognitive tests, an effect still observable nearly a decade after the breast-feeding has stopped. They get better grades, too, especially in reading and writing.

How does that work? We’re not really sure, though we have some ideas. Breast milk has ingredients a baby’s brain needs to grow postnatally but can’t make on its own very well. One of these is taurine, an amino acid essential for neural development. Breast milk also contains omega-3 fatty acids, whose benefits on pediatric cognition we discussed in the Pregnancy chapter (“Eat just the right foods”). The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that all mothers breast-feed exclusively for the first six months of their babies’ lives, continue breast-feeding as their kids start taking on solids, and wean them after a year. If we as a country wanted a smarter population, we would insist on lactation rooms in every public establishment. A sign would hang from the door of these rooms: “Quiet, please. Brain development in progress”.

For the longest time, we couldn’t figure out the words coming from our 9-month-old son. Whenever he took a car ride, he would start saying the word “dah, repeating it over and over again as we strapped him into his car seat, “Dah dah dah, goo, dah dah, big-dah, big-dah”. It often sounded like a child’s version of an old Police song. We couldn’t decode it and would just respond, a bit sheepishly, “Dah?” He would
emphatically reply, “Dah”. Sometimes our response made him happy. Sometimes it didn’t do anything at all. It wasn’t until we were tooling down the interstate one fine sunny day, moon-roof wide open to the clouds, that we finally figured it out.

Josh saw an airplane flying overhead and shouted excitedly, “Sky-dah! Sky-dah! My wife suddenly understood. “I think he means airplane!” she said. She asked him, pointing to the sky, “
Sky
-dah? Josh cheerily replied, “Sky-dah!” Just then a big noisy semi-truck passed us, and Josh pointed to it with concern. “Big-dah, Big-dah”, he said. My wife pointed at the truck too, now shrinking in the distance. “
Big
-dah?” she asked, and he responded excitedly, “Big-dah!” Then “dah, dah, dah”. We got it. For whatever reason, “dah” had become Joshua’s word for “vehicle”. Later, Josh and I watched a ship cross Puget Sound. I pointed to the container vessel and guessed, “
Water
-dah?” He sat up, staring at me like I was from Mars. “
Wet
-dah,” he declared, like a mildly impatient professor addressing a slow student.

Few interactions with children are as much fun as learning to speak their language. As they learn to speak ours, heaping tablespoons of words into their minds is one of the healthiest things parents can do for their brains. Speak to your children as often as you can. It is one of the most well-established findings in all of the developmental literature.

The linkage between words and smarts was discovered through some pretty invasive research. In one study, investigators descended upon a family’s home every month for three years and jotted down every aspect of verbal communication parents gave their children. They measured size of vocabulary, diversity and growth rate of vocabulary, frequency of verbal interaction, and the emotional content of the speech. Just before the visits were finished, the researchers gave IQ tests. They did this with more than 40 families, then followed up years later. Through exhaustive analysis of this amazingly tough work, two very clear findings emerged:

The more parents talk to their children, even in the earliest moments of life, the better their kids linguistic abilities become and the faster that improvement is achieved. The gold standard is 2,100 words per hour. The variety of the words spoken (nouns, verbs, and adjectives used, along with the length and complexity of phrases and sentences) is nearly as important as the number of words spoken. So is the amount of positive feedback. You can reinforce language skills through interaction: looking at your infant; imitating his vocalizations, laughter, and facial expressions; rewarding her language attempts with heightened attention. Children whose parents talked positively, richly, and regularly to them knew twice as many words as kids whose parents talked to them the least. When these kids entered the school system, their reading, spelling, and writing abilities soared above those of children in less verbal households. Even though babies don’t respond like adults, they
are
listening, and it is good for them.

Talking to children early in life raises their IQs, too, even after controlling for important variables such as income. By age 3, kids who were talked to regularly by their parents (called the talkative group) had IQ scores 1 1/2 times higher than those kids whose parents talked to them the least (called the taciturn group). This increase in IQ is thought to be responsible for the talkative group’s uptick in grades.

Remember, it takes a real live person to benefit your baby’s brain, so get ready to exercise your vocal cords. Not the portable DVD player’s, not your television’s surround-sound, but
your
vocal cords.

 

Though 2,100 words per hour might sound like a lot, it actually represents a moderate rate of conversation. Outside of work, the typical person hears or sees about 100,000 words in a day. So there’s no need to constantly babble to your baby in some 24/7 marathon.
Overstimulation can be just as hazardous to brain development as understimulation (remember Goldilocks), and it’s important to watch your baby for signs of fatigue. But no language exposure is too silly. “Now we’re going to change your diaper.” “Look at the beautiful tree! “What is that?” You can count steps out loud as you walk up a staircase. Just get in the habit of talking.

How you say those words matters, too. Picture this scene from an instructional DVD, developed at the Talaris Research Institute when I served as its director:

A bunch of big tough men are watching a football game, passing a bowl of popcorn, eyes glued to the set. A baby is contentedly exploring in a playpen off to the side. At a critical juncture in the game, one of couch potatoes growls to the quarterback: “Come on, you can do this. You can do this for me. I need this. There’s a big play, and the guys all jump up and shout. The noise disturbs the baby, and you hear him start to cry. The biggest guy on the couch happens to be the dad. He runs to his little one, picks him up, and holds him in arms the size of tree trunks. “Hi, big guy”, he soothes in a high-pitched voice. “Wanna join the party?” The guys on the couch look at each other, eyebrows raised. “Look at daddy’s boy!” the father continues in his sing-song voice. “How’s d-a-a-a-ddy’s boy? Are you h-u-u-u-ngry?” The dad seems to have forgotten all about the game. “Let’s get some sp-a-a-g-heeeettti”, he continues, marching to the kitchen. The guys on the couch stare at him in disbelief. The game resumes, dad in the background, feeding spaghetti to his happy son.

We have just witnessed the hypnotic effects babies can have on attentive fathers. But what’s going on with the dad’s voice? Turns out parents all over the world talk to their kids this way, a form of speech called “parentese”. It is catnip to a baby’s ear.

Parentese is characterized by a high-pitched tone and a sing-song voice with stretched-out vowels. Though parents don’t always realize they do it, this kind of speech helps a baby’s brain learn. Why? It is much easier to understand a speaker who has slowed down, for one.
Parentese also makes the sound of each vowel more distinct; this exaggeration allows your baby to hear words as distinct entities and discriminate better between them. The melodic tone helps infants separate sounds into contrasting categories. And the high pitch may assist infants in imitating the characteristics of speech. After all, with a vocal tract one-quarter the size of yours, they can produce fewer sounds, at first only at higher pitches.

When should you start doing all this talking? The real answer is that nobody knows, but we have strong hints that the answer is going to be “as soon as they are born”. As we saw with the newborn who stuck his tongue back out at Andy Meltzoff, babies are reliably capable of interacting with adults 42 minutes after birth. And preverbal infants are processing a lot of verbal information, even if they don’t always seem to be taking it in. Even reading to a 3-month-old is probably good, especially if you hold the child close and allow her to interact with you.

Educational psychologist William Fowler trained a group of parents to talk to their children in a particular fashion, following some of the guidelines mentioned above. The children spoke their first words between 7 and 9 months of age, some even speaking sentences at 10 months. They had conquered most of the basic rules of grammar by age 2, while the controls achieved a similar mastery around age 4. Longer-term studies showed that the kids did very well in school, including in math and science. By the time they entered high school, 62 percent of them were enrolled in gifted or accelerated programs. Critical parts of Fowler’s training program need further study, but his work is terrific. It adds to the overwhelming evidence that a whole lot of talking is like fertilizer for neurons.