Free Brain Rules for Baby by John Medina Page A

grounds for the divorce. Her husband responded, “I have to admit that nine times out of 10, I would rather watch the Reds than have sex, but that’s no disrespect to Emma”.
    Given all of these findings, it seems any couple contemplating children should undergo a psychiatric evaluation, then choose voluntary sterilization. What are we going to do?

Seeds of hope
    There is hope. We know four of the most important sources of marital conflict in the transition to parenthood: sleep loss, social isolation, unequal workload, and depression. We will examine each. Couples who make themselves aware of these can become vigilant about their behavior, and they tend to do better. We also know that not every marriage follows this depressing course of events. Couples going into pregnancy with strong marital bonds withstand the gale forces of baby’s first year better than those who don’t. Those who carefully plan for their children prior to pregnancy do, too. In fact, one of the biggest predictors of marital bliss appears to be the agreement to have kids in the first place. One large study examined couples where both parties wanted kids versus couples where only one did. If both
partners wanted the child, very few divorced, and marital happiness either stayed the same or increased in the baby’s first year of life. All conflicted couples where one partner had caved (usually the man) were either separated or divorced by the time the child was 5.
    The data behind this come from the Journal of Family Psychology study mentioned previously. The full quote gives much more hope: “In sum, parenthood hastens marital decline—even among relatively satisfied couples who select themselves into this transition— but planning status and pre-pregnancy marital satisfaction generally protect marriages from these declines.”
    Marriages do not suffer evenly in the transition to parenthood; some not at all. But as LeMasters and later researchers showed, that is not the majority experience. The social consequences were great enough to warrant investigation. Researchers began to ask: “What do couples fight about when a baby comes home? And what does that conflict do to the baby?”

Babies seek safety above all
    What researchers found is that the emotional ecology into which a baby is born can profoundly influence how his or her nervous system develops. To understand this interaction, we have to address the almost unbelievable sensitivity a baby has to the environment in which he or she is being raised. It is a sensitivity with strong evolutionary roots.
    Hints of this vulnerability first came from the lab of Harry Harlow, who was observing monkey baby behavior at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. That his findings can apply to human infants illustrates how deep these evolutionary roots can go. Harlow looked like virtually every other scientist of the 1950s, complete with nerdy, Frisbee-sized glasses. By his own admission, he was preoccupied with “love”, though he had a strange way of showing it—both professionally and personally. He married his first wife,
who had been his student, divorced her after two children, married a psychologist, saw her die of cancer, and then, in his final years, remarried his former student.
    Harlow also designed a series of groundbreaking experiments with rhesus monkeys that was so brutal, some scholars credit Harlow for inadvertently creating the animal rights movement. These experiments involved isolation chambers and metallic surrogate mothers. Harlow himself would use colorful language to describe his research, calling his chambers “pits of despair and his surrogate mothers “iron maidens”. But he almost single-handedly uncovered the idea of infant emotional attachment. This in turn laid the groundwork for understanding how parental stress influences a baby’s behaviors.
    Harlow’s classic attachment experiments involved two of these iron maidens—doll-like structures serving as maternal stand-ins.