Brain Rules (Updated and Expanded)

Teach parents first
The current education system starts in first grade, typically around age
6. The curriculum is a little writing, a little reading, a little math. The
teacher is often a complete stranger. And something important is missing.
The stability of the home is completely ignored, even though it is one of the
greatest predictors of future success at school. What if we took the home
influence seriously?
My idea envisions an educational system where the first students are not
the children but the parents. The curriculum? How to create a stable home
life, using Gottman’s powerful baby-nervous-system-changing protocols.
The intervention could even start in a maternity ward, offered by a hospital
(like a Lamaze class, which takes just about as much time). This would be a
unique partnership between the health system and the education system.
And it makes education, from the beginning of a child’s life, a family affair.
A week after birth, parents and tots would engage in a curriculum
designed around the amazing cognitive abilities of infants, from language
acquisition to the powerful need for luxurious amounts of active playtime.
Parents would learn things like how to talk with their babies and what types
of objects help children learn about the physical world. (This is 
not
a call to
implement products in the strange industry that seeks to turn babies into
Einsteins in the first year of life. Most of those products have not been
tested, and some have been shown to be harmful to learning. My idea
envisions a mature, rigorously tested pedagogy that does not yet exist—one
more reason for educators and brain scientists to work together.) Along with
this, parents would take an occasional series of marital refresher courses,
just to ensure the stability of the home. Can you imagine what a child might

---

look like academically after years of thriving in an emotionally stable
environment? The child flourishes in this fantasy.
At the very least, couples (struggling or not) can seek out Gottman’s
research-based marriage intervention. They are readily available to
individuals.
Free family counseling and child care
Historically, people have done their best work—sometimes world-
changing work—in their first few years after joining the workforce. In the
field of economics, most Nobel Prize–winning research is done in the first
10 years of the recipient’s career. Albert Einstein published most of his
creative ideas at the ripe old age of 26. It’s no wonder that companies want
to recruit young intellectual talent.
The problem in today’s economy is that people typically are starting a
family at the very time they are also supposed to be doing their best work.
They are trying to be productive at some of the most stressful times of their
lives. What if companies took this unhappy collision of life events
seriously? They could offer Gottman’s intervention as a benefit for every
newly married, or newly pregnant, employee. It might reverse the negative
flow of family stress that normally enters the workplace at this time in a
person’s life, enhance productivity, and perhaps even generate grateful,
loyal employees.
Businesses also risk losing their best and brightest at this time, a
decision especially hard on women. What if talented people didn’t have to
choose between career and family? Businesses could offer on-site child care
and flexible work schedules simply to retain employees at the very time
they are most likely to be valuable. As this affects women the most,
businesses immediately would achieve more gender balance. My guess is
that such an offering would so affect productivity that the costs of providing
child care are offset by the gains. Not only might businesses create more
stable employees in the current generation, they might be raising far
healthier children for work in the next.
Power to the people

---

Plenty of books discuss how to manage stress, and the good ones all say
the key is to get control back into your life. For individuals, that may mean
leaving a stressful job or an abusive relationship.
Companies could detect work-related problems by developing a
questionnaire based on Jeansok Kim and David Diamond’s three-pronged
definition of stress, to assess whether an employee feels powerless. The
next step would be to change the situation.
It’s no coincidence that stress researchers, education scientists, and
business professionals come to similar conclusions about the effects of toxic
stress on people. We have known most of the salient points since Marty
Seligman stopped shocking those dogs in the mid-1970s. It is time we made
productive use of that horrible line of research.
Exercise
Even if you’re not experiencing the kind of out-of-control stress we’ve
been discussing, you can minimize the stress in your daily life. Aerobic
exercise, several times a week for 30 minutes each, is an excellent way to
shore up your BDNF peacekeeping forces.