Foreword by Lucy Jo Palladino, Ph.D. Acknowledgments Introduction: A New View for Our Children Genetics and Differences 1993: The Hunter Gene Distractibility Impulsivity Risk-Taking Where Have All the Hunters Gone? Indigenous Hunters Today The Agricultural Revolution Our Society’s Hunters The Edison Gene The Crisis-Survival Gene Hunters Before the Holocene Adapted to Adversity and Change Part 1 The Past 1 The World of the Edison-Gene Child The Ancient World The Salt Pump The Great Ice Age Heated by the Great Conveyor Belt 2 The Dawn of Civilization What Made Us Human? The Bacteria That Took Over the World The Human Bottleneck Before the Bottleneck 3 Three Ways Humans Were Killed Off by Weather Warming by the Sun Vulcan’s Hammer Survivors: AIDS Chimps and the Black Plague Creativity Saves the Day ADHD and Creativity The Beads: Clue to the First Edisons Part 2 The Present 4 Anatomy of a Diagnosis How Edison-Gene Children Are Different Are They Disordered? Anthropology Meets Psychology • From Hunters to Inventors 5 The Mystery of Novelty-Seeking Behavior The “Novelty Gene” The Novelty Gene and ADHD 6 Genes Move Around and Turn On and Off The Genetics of Behavior Turning on Genes Codominant Genes Turning on Edison Characteristics 7 Other Genes and Influences Neurotransmitters and Personality Characteristics The Reasons for Genetic Variations Culture and Genes 8 Scientists Find the “Adaptive” Edison Gene But Some Say It’s a Disease Is It a Disorder? Novelty Seeking 9 The ADHD Gene and the Dawn of Human Civilization The Time Machine The News Hits the Streets The Edison Gene and Democracy 10 Brain Development and the Edison-Gene Child Sense of Self A Process that Mirrors Evolution The Reptilian Brain The Limbic Brain The “New” Brain The Unique Prefrontal Brain The Brain Develops After Birth, Too The First Pruning of the Brain The Impact of Stress The Brain in the Birth Period The Brain in the Toddler Period The Brain in the Early Childhood Period The Brain in the Teenage Period The Brain in the Early Adult Years Adult Memory of the Stages of Brain Development Intuition versus Information The Loss of Intuition The Tragedy of Lost Potential Invasion of the Lizard People? Are We Stuck in a Loop? Triggering Events Raising Fully Human Children Schools May Be the Key School as Torture Condemnation School as Work Comorbidities Applying Comorbidities to Edison-Gene Children Breaking the Loop Offering a New Story 11 The Edison Gene, Drugs, Exercise, and Nutrition Nutritional Deficiencies Are Rampant Environmental Toxins Nutriceuticals Yerba Maté: Nature’s Ritalin Drugs for Edison-Gene Children Medications Bite Back Burning Out Brain Cells? Do Drugs Help Over the Long Term? The Loss of Play EEG Neurofeedback Exercise: The Optimal “Treatment”? 12 Providing Discipline and Structure for the Edison-Gene Child Nurturing the Hunters Reward/Punishment versus Inclusion/Interdependence Separating Person from Behavior Break the Pattern with a Positive Message Watch for Islands of Success The Importance of Mastery Turn Off the Television 13 Alfred Adler’s Principles for Raising Children Promote Mutual Respect Encourage Foster Security Avoid reward and Punishment Use Natural and Logical Consequences Act Instead of Talk in Conflict Situations Use Withdrawal as a Counteraction Withdraw from the Provocation, Not from the Child Don’t Interfere in Children’s Fights Fighting Requires Cooperation Take Time to Teach Essential Skills and Habits Never Do for a Child What He Can Do for Himself Don’t Overprotect Avoid Being Overly Responsible Distinguish between Positive and Negative Attention Understand the Child’s Goal A Habit Is Maintained if It Achieves Its Purpose Minimize Mistakes Try a Family Council and Have Fun Together The Edison-Gene Family 14 Educating the Edison-Gene Child Learned Helplessness Reframing Identity = Success in Learning Government Studies Pronounce on Medication They Ignored the Environment The Study Proved Ritalin Doesn’t Improve Learning But It Makes the Teachers Happy Lighting a Fire for Learning Education and Testing Corporations How Modern Education Came About German Schools Come to America American Education and the Catholic Problem Backlash Against the Authoritarian Model of Public Education Maria Montessori Rudolf Steiner Free and Alternative Schools Homeschooling and Internet Schooling But What About Socialization? Why Homeschooling Works for Edison-Gene Children The Edison Gene through the College Years Find a Mentor or a Coach 15 Edison-Gene Girls and Women Be a Good Girl Cinderella in a Hostile World Cultural Barriers Cultural Programming and Expectations Healing the Wounds Spirituality and the Edison-Gene Child Edison-Gene Mystics The Hunter’s Reality The World of the Hunter’s Dreams Dreaming with the Natives Learning to Know Understanding the Real World Wild People and Tame People The Loss of True Wisdom When Access to Personal Spirituality Is Lost Part 3 The Future 17 How Edison-Gene Children May Change the World Glimmers of How Culture Works What Causes Culture? The Biology of Culture Primal Human Cultures Cultural and Genetic Selection 18 Is Human Evolution Finally Over? As Good As It Gets We’re Going Downhill It’s the Fault of Those People with ADHD! Are We Standing Still? Distant Bottleneck Events 19 One Generation to Save the World Climate Flip-Flops to the Next Ice Age A Global-Warming Bottleneck Afterword: Yesterday’s Child by Janie Bowman Notes Index

12 Providing Discipline and Structure for the Edison-Gene Child Separating Person from Behavior I was in the local food co-op recently, and about four feet from me a two-year-old child in a shopping cart reached out from the cart and grabbed a bag of dried sweetened pineapple pieces. “Mine!” he said, tossing them into the cart. His mother’s reaction was immediate. She grabbed the pineapple from the cart and put it back on the shelf, then turned and glared at her son. “Don’t be a bad boy!” she commanded, wagging her finger in his face. His reaction looked to me like a mixture of pain and pride; the former from mother being unhappy with him, and the latter from some inner knowledge of identity, confirmed by her words. He reached into the cart and grabbed a can of soup, glancing at me, his audience, and prepared to throw it on the floor. Mom intervened by roughly grabbing the can and again demanding that he not be bad, this time giving him a slap on the hand. I found my cookies and moved away as the little boy began looking for a new audience for his behavior. Whenever we react to a person’s behavior--particularly a child’s--we can do it in either of two primary ways. One addresses the individual’s personhood and ties it to his behavior, and the other addresses his personhood and disconnects it from his behavior. This is a critical distinction. People who think they are their behaviors are caught in a continuous loop: in order to define themselves or to feel okay about themselves, they must continually bounce their behaviors off other people. Most people who start with this as children also become early and vulnerable targets for the advertising industry, whose primary message is that you are your possessions or that you are your body. In each parent/child interactive situation in which the child is defined by his behavior, the “I am” center of his personhood becomes disconnected from any state of inner centeredness. Happiness and selfassurance come only with doing or getting and have no relationship to simply being, to “I know who I am, and I’m larger and deeper than what I do or what I own or what my body looks like.” The lack of this important self-knowledge begins with parents or the media telling children that they are their behaviors. Thus the alternative to saying, “Don’t be a bad boy,” is to say, “If you do that, we won’t be able to continue shopping.” For a more severe behavior, it may even be, “I love you so much that I’m not going to let you do that.” It brings the core of the interaction back to the community of parent/child and doesn’t speak at all about the child as a bad or good person. Break the Pattern with a Positive Message The child in the supermarket also reminded me of one of the best lessons in childrearing that Louise and I ever learned. A friend of ours, an NLP (Neurolinguistic Programming) practitioner and psychologist, shared it with Louise back in the early 1980s. One of our children was in the habit of throwing fits in the supermarket, demanding things and shouting loudly when the demands weren’t met. We’d tried both placating and punishing, and neither worked; the behavior just continued. Our friend had a two-part suggestion. “Do something unexpected,” he said, “and do it in a way that reinforces both your love and the idea that life can be fun.” We started by priming our child during the day, talking about how much fun Louise was going to have shopping in the afternoon. “Would you like to have fun with me at the store?” she asked our four-year-old. “Yes!” was the enthusiastic reply. When they got to the store and were going through the aisles, our child began to throw the predictable fit in the predictable place. At that point, Louise had a shopping cart only half full of food. “Oh,” she said, “I thought you wanted to have fun with me here. But if it’s not fun for both of us, it doesn’t work, and it’s not fun for me if you’re throwing this fit.” She propelled the cart--complete with demanding child--to the service counter in the supermarket, where she said to the startled clerk, “I came to the supermarket to have fun shopping with my child, but my child doesn’t want us both to have fun, so I’m going to leave these groceries here, drop my child off at home, and come back alone to finish having fun shopping.” “Okay,” said the clerk, nodding the way people do to the inmates in an asylum. Louise picked up our child from the cart, drove the two of them home, came into the house, and said to me, “Our child wasn’t willing to let us both have fun at the supermarket, so will you baby-sit while I go back to the store to have fun shopping?” “Of course,” I said, watching our child’s astonished expression. “I hope you have a lot of fun!” “I will,” Louise said cheerfully as she went out the door. It was the last supermarket fit we ever experienced, and the story highlights one aspect of how many hunter-gatherer tribal children are raised: interactions are cooperative and positive, even as the adults clearly define the parameters of behavior and the values that underlie those parameters.