Brain Rules for Baby by John Medina

cognitive abilities—and are blessed with many intellectual gadgets capable of extending those abilities. They understand that size stays constant even when distance changes the appearance of size. They display velocity prediction. They understand the principle of common fate: The reason the black lines on the basketball move when the ball bounces is because the lines are part of the basketball. Infants can discriminate human faces from nonhuman faces at birth and seem to prefer them. From an evolutionary perspective, this latter behavior represents a powerful safety feature. We will be preoccupied with faces most of our lives.
    How did babies acquire all of this knowledge before being exposed to the planet? Nobody knows, but they have it, and they put it to good use with astonishing speed and insight. Babies create hypotheses, test them, and then relentlessly appraise their findings with the vigor of a seasoned scientist. This means infants are extraordinarily delightful, surprisingly aggressive learners. They pick up everything.
    There’s a funny example of this. A pediatrician was taking her 3-year-old daughter to day care. The good doctor had left her stethoscope in the back seat and noticed that the little girl began playing with it, even inserting the ear pieces correctly. The pediatrician got
excited: Her daughter was following in her footsteps! The little girl grabbed the bell of the stethoscope, then put it to her mouth and declared in a loud voice: “Welcome to McDonald’s. Can I take your order please?”
    Yes, your children are constantly observing you. They are profoundly influenced by what they record. And that can quickly turn from funny to serious, especially when mommy and daddy start fighting.
Bonding with you provides safety
    If survival is the brain’s most important priority, safety is the most important expression of that priority. This is the lesson Harlow’s iron maidens teach us. Babies are completely at the mercy of the people who brought them into the world. This understanding has a behavioral blast radius in infants that obscures every other behavioral priority they have.
    How do babies handle these concerns? By attempting to establish a productive relationship with the local power structures—you, in other words—as soon as possible. We call this attachment. During the attachment process, a baby’s brain intensely monitors the caregiving it receives. It is essentially asking such things as “Am I being touched? Am I being fed? Who is safe?” If the baby’s requirements are being fulfilled, the brain develops one way; if not, genetic instructions trigger it to develop in another way. It may be a bit disconcerting to realize, but infants have their parents behaviors in their sights virtually from the moment they come into this world. It is in their evolutionary best interests to do so, of course, which is another way of saying that they can’t help it. Babies have nowhere else to turn.
    There’s a window of several years during which babies strive to create these bonds and establish perceptions of safety. If it doesn’t happen, they can suffer long-term emotional damage. In extreme cases, they can be scarred for life.

    We know this because of a powerful—and heartbreaking—story from Communist Romania, discovered circa 1990 by Western reporters. In 1966, in an effort to boost the country’s low birthrate, the dictator Nicolae Ceausescu banned both contraception and abortion and taxed those who were childless after age 25—whether married, single, or infertile. As the birthrate rose, so did poverty and homeless-ness. Children were often simply abandoned. Ceausescu’s response was to create a gulag of state orphanages, with children warehoused by the thousands.
    The orphanages soon were stripped of resources as Ceausescu began exporting most of Romania’s food and industry to repay the country’s crippling national debt. The scenes in these orphanages were shocking. Babies were