by sneezypb

Book: Brain Rules for Baby

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I loved the Brain Rules book. The original discussed why the brain works the way it does (including the studies) and gave specific activities one can do to boost the efficacy. An example: the brain is a major consumer of oxygen, so scientists have found that intense exercise improves function by getting more oxygenated blood to the brain.

I need to re-read it as it has been a decade. I recently got the baby one.

Some quotes:

Having a first child is like swallowing an intoxicating drink made of equal parts joy and terror, chased with a bucketful of transitions nobody ever tells you about.

This is 1,000% true.

As a scientist, I was very aware that watching a baby’s brain develop feels as if you have a front row seat to a biological Big Bang. The brain starts out as a single cell in the womb, quiet as a secret. Within a few weeks, it is pumping out nerve cells at an astonishing rate of 8,000 per second. Within a few months, it is on it’s way to becoming the world’s finest thinking machine.

Some notes I took.

  1. Perception begins at weeks for most senses. And memory persists after birth, but stimulation too early is harmful and later not going to make a genius.
  2. Everything is a balancing act. During pregnancy especially weight, nutrition, stress, exercise.
  3. Chronic or acute stress passes those hormones through the placenta and children seeing it stunt brain growth observing it. Husbands need to keep their wife not stressed. Happy is the ideal, but at least not stressed. This can be 8 IQ points.
  4. Exercise can reduce pushing time and reduce the time baby is without oxygen and reduce stunted brain development.
  5. Kinds of intelligence:
    1. Record information, aka crystallized intelligence.
    2. Improvisation
    3. Desire to explore
    4. Self-control
    5. Creativity
    6. Verbal communication
    7. Decoding nonverbal communication
  6. Ingredients for happy kids:
    1. a demanding but warm parenting style ( responsiveness & demandingness)
    2. comfort with your own emotions
    3. tracking your child’s emotions (don’t ignore & don’t helicopter)
    4. verbalizing emotions (describe emotions)
    5. running toward emotions (emotions are reflexive; behavior is a choice; be consistent with rules on behavior; turn intense feelings into teachable moments)
    6. two tons of empathy
  7. Behavior modification basic principles.

Overall, I really enjoyed the book. The thing I liked the most about the original was he named a rule and went on about why it is important and the research justifying it. This book lacked that simplistic and novel model, which put me off.

 

 

by sneezypb

Driving Music

Andy Grammer

Andy Grammer

You may have heard of Andy Grammer. I mainly know him as the son of Red Grammer. (I did meet Andy in 2007 when he had just put out The World is Yours and was building up interest and playing the venues who would recognize his name and support him.)

Red has several albums of children’s songs released when my brother was young. They were staples of taking him to daycare and family trips and designed to for singing along. We listened to the Can You Sound Just Like Me? and Teaching Peace cassette tapes over and over. And knowing he was going to play somewhere nearby meant we had to go.

The last time the kiddo was in daycare, a handful of times I stayed home with her and drove her to mom’s office to nurse. She was hungry on those occasions so I sang to her to calm her down. Now that I am taking her to daycare every day, I am sensing her getting bored. And she doesn’t appreciate NPR. My wife plays music when they are together, so I am sure that is what was the normal.

So, I am going to compile a playlist of my favorite Red Grammer songs for her to listen to when I am driving.

by sneezypb

Daycare

Daycare is new. Today was the fourth real day. There was a transition period where Fleur got to spend a few hours acclimating to the place. She liked it with Mama there. I am getting clinging and tantrums leaving her there by herself.

The first day, I stayed for almost half an hour letting her get comfortable. She wanted to stay at my feet, but she also wanted to play with toys and investigate what the other kids were doing. She would drift away from me to get a toy, but she would come back. Same with day two. On both days, she only got upset when she realized that I had left the room. My telling her bye, I love you, asking for a hug was ignored because she was intent on something else.

Yesterday and today, she was not going to let me go. Yesterday, it was trying to stay with me as much as possible. Today, it was not letting me put her down. (Also, I screwed up in bribing her with that her cousin would be there who arrived at the same time only for them to be separated.)

elphants standing on brown soil

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One childless advocate of corporal punishment said this shows she is spoiled. (But, also that she is intelligent in that she figured out the pattern and increasing the resistance earlier and earlier.) In Elephant Parenting, I basically said that I aspire to nurture, protect, and encourage rather than being the ultra-strict disciplinarian. So naturally, I am right in the middle of an issue and am conflicted about it.

First, I have to remind myself not to overreact. This is relatively common for the first few weeks. We are not even done with the first week. I think I am discouraged because the trend is getting worse not better, but maybe this is part of the process. She needs to see that her displeasure isn’t going to change the outcome. At the same time, I need to continue the soothing and encouragement.

Second, I need to keep the schedule, routine, and describing them. She understands routines and helps me with familiar processes all the time. I was thinking last week maybe I need a more attention getting goodbye ritual where she understands better that I am going.

Third, the lingering is probably more upsetting and encouraging the undesirable behavior. Instead of hanging out longer in reaction to the crying about it, just do the goodbye ritual and get the teacher to take her. Let the teacher comfort her and help build that bond?

by sneezypb

Study: The rough sound of salience enhances aversion through neural synchronisation

Why is is that children’s screams affect us so much? Crying is one thing. But, a scream gets adrenaline revved up and someone is going to die. These researchers looked at why.

They define how the physical properties of a scream differ from other similar sounds. It fits in 30–150 Hz, is loud, and has fast repetitive flicker like effects. These combine to capture attention due to the unpleasantness.

They used iEEG electrodes to measure brain activity. They looked at a small number of patients.

One of the areas that lit up is used in processing language and emotional context. While the superior temporal gyrus is in a part of the brain associated with sound, when analyzing facial expressions, we also leverage this area to understand emotions.

Arnal, LH, Kleinschmidt, A, et al. “The rough sound of salience enhances aversion through neural synchronisation” Nature Communications volume 10, Article number: 3671 (2019)

by sneezypb

Deferred Imitation

monkey eating bananas

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Fleur likes to take a smartphone and walk around the room talking to an imaginary caller with familiar gesticulations and intonations. When the behavior showed up, it was curious as it was not something my wife had just recently done.

Deferred imitation is just the imitating of a behavior some time after it happened.

I know that I have to always behave around the toddler. I know that things I do and say will be repeated. The trick is that the things she repeats me doing may not be for audience that is just myself. Or even my wife or Galahad. She may do it for daycare workers, extended family, or friends.

Not all of them may find an imitated behavior adorable. Especially the daycare who might not want Fleur showing children in the class scandalous behavior only for them to repeat it for their parents.

I have to think about the downstream cause-and-effect of the deferred imitation for each and every behavior I exhibit around my copycat.

 

by sneezypb

Multitasking

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Read Multitasking is making parents lose it with their kids. Here’s how to break the cycle. and empathize. In a nutshell, trying to multitask household work, work work, and helping with the children’s homework increases stress which the author takes out on her kids.

There is a blog post that made me fall in love with the writing of Michael Lopp. Incrementalists & Completionists discusses how these two philosophies battle in software development. It frames my discussions with coworkers about system architecture. I very much am happy with getting something that works out the door to the client and circling back later to improve it.

So, my approach to household tasks has become far more incremementalist than I tended to do as a bachelor. Pretty much because I never really expect to have more than 5 minutes to do something except when the kiddo is asleep. The real challenge for us is Fleur wanting the security of Mama while cooking. I’d hoped this article would help, but it only really says to singletask without concrete advice on doing so other than recognize multitasking is bad and try not to do it when you can.

by sneezypb

Study: Rethinking Stress: The Role of Mindsets in Determining the Stress Response

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This caught my eye because I’ve read about the growth mindset often over the past several years. And, I feel that how I responded to stress in my professional life is responsible for my achievements.

Study 1: I found the use of the invention of a Work Performance Scale adapted from a Role-Based Performance Scale interesting. I’d like to compare the two. But, offhand, it is self-reporting, which I dislike for the tendency of the taker to say what they think is wanted not what they think. (And even if they put they think, our view of ourselves is skewed from inner dialogue biases and justifications.) They decided the data shows that stress mindset is a distinct variable among others already determined for stress. They probably overly generalize to health and well-being when their measure was just on work performance.

This additional variable thing seems to trigger warning bells about confirmation bias in my head. It strongly confirms my existing worldview in that I’ve seen people who take on challenges head-on and others who squander the opportunity.

I just skimmed the rest from here. Study 2 appears to try to determine if it works similar to growth-fixed mindsets. Study 3 appears to look at positive and negative feedback with stress mindsets.

Crum, AJ and Salovey, P and Achor, S. “Rethinking Stress: The Role of Mindsets in Determining the Stress Response.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2013, Vol. 104, No. 4, 716 –733. DOI: 10.1037/a0031201