Free Brain Rules for Baby by John Medina

turbulence he perceives. If you want your child to be equipped with the best brain possible, you need to know about this before you bring home your bundle of joy.
    When I lecture on the science of young brains, the dads (it’s almost always the dads) demand to know how to get their kids into Harvard. The question invariably angers me. I bellow, “You want to get your kid into Harvard? You really want to know what the data say? I’ll tell you what the data say! Go home and love your wife!” This chapter is about that retort: why marital hostility happens, how it alters a baby’s developing brain, and how you can counteract the hostility and minimize its effects.

Most marriages suffer
    Most couples don’t imagine such marital turbulence when they get pregnant. Babies, after all, are supposed to bring endless, unremitting joy. That’s the idealistic view many of us have, especially if our parents grew up in the late 1950s—an era steeped in a traditional view of marriages and families. TV programs like Leave It to Beaver and Ozzie and Harriet depicted working fathers as all-wise; stay-at-home mothers as all-nurturing; children as surprisingly obedient and, when not,
creating small but manageable crises easily resolvable in 23 minutes. The protagonists were mostly middle class, mostly white, and, it turns out, mostly wrong.
    A bracingly cold glass of water was thrown on this Eisenhoweresque perception by famed sociologist E.E. LeMasters. In 1957, he published a research paper showing that 83 percent of new parents experienced a moderate to severe crisis in the marriage during the transition to parenthood. These parents became increasingly hostile toward each other in the first year of the baby’s life. The majority were having a hard time.
    Such results were the sociological equivalent of claiming that Earth was flat. Conflict wasn’t supposed to happen when a couple had their first baby. Joy was supposed to happen. Prior to these studies, many felt that giving birth was such a powerful positive experience it could actually save marriages—and LeMasters’s data suggested the opposite. He was roundly criticized when he published his findings. Some researchers privately suspected him of fabricating them.
    He hadn’t. As the years went by, more rigorous methodologies (and several longitudinal studies, which include repeated observations over many years) proved him right. By the late 1980s and ‘90s, investigations in 10 industrialized countries, including the United States, demonstrated that marital satisfaction for most men and women dropped after they had their first child—and continued to fall over the next 15 years. Things didn’t improve for most couples until the kids left home.
    We now know that this long-term erosion is a regular experience of married life, starting in the transition to parenthood. Marital quality, which peaks in the last trimester of a first pregnancy, decreases anywhere from 40 percent to 67 percent in the infant’s first year. More recent studies, asking different questions, put the figure closer to 90 percent. During those 12 months, scores on hostility indices—measures of marital conflict—skyrocket. The risk for clinical depression,
for both fathers and mothers, goes up. Indeed, one-third to one-half of new parents display as much marital distress as troubled couples already in therapy trying to save their relationship. The dissatisfaction usually starts with the mother, then migrates to the father. To quote an excerpt from a recent research paper published in the Journal of Family Psychology: “In sum, parenthood hastens marital decline—even among relatively satisfied couples who select themselves into this transition.”
    A British divorce lawyer recalled one illustrative case. Emma’s husband was obsessed with soccer, particularly the Manchester United team (also called the Reds). This condition was made worse with the introduction of a child. Emma actually cited it as