Review: Nurture Shock: New Thinking on Children by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman
I should start out this review with a disclaimer. I don’t work with kids. I’m not a parent. I once was a kid my very own self, but so were we all. So I am not really qualified to talk about what it’s actually like to raise kids.
Nonetheless, I find the process of child-rearing fascinating in a detached, I-don’t-really-know-if-I-really-want-to-do-that kind of way. Which was what led me to pick up Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman’s fascinating Nurture Shock: New Thinking about Children. The authors basically assert that much of the thinking parents have had about children in the last few decades might be more harmful than helpful. They back these assertions up by talking to lots of scholars, and there’s quite an extended section at the back on notes and resources.
Some of their premises are fairly counterintuitive. They say that praising kids for being smart actually encourages them to do less well than they might already. I found this a bit hard to swallow until I thought about it. I remember a teacher telling me once that I was good at math. This seemed like a patently false statement to my fourteen-year-old self. I was not good at math. I hated math! Math was hard! So maybe I understood the core concepts, but they didn’t come easily to me, so how could I be good at math? At the time I would have much rather done something I did excel at, like an English assignment. The result was that I hated classes where I actually had to study when I was in high school, because I felt I shouldn’t have to study. I was, after all, smart. This proved detrimental to me when I first attended college, and it’s only been in recent years, having returned to school, that I’ve picked up on better study habits. Maybe if someone had tried Bronson and Merryman’s suggestion, that of praising kids for specific things they did well and praising their effort at doing them, I would have been more successful.
Some of their other assertions made more sense to me. The authors talk about how teens release melatonin later at night than do adults and younger children, and that they would benefit from having school start an hour later. I know that I certainly would have. I also thought the section on the Tools preschool program was fascinating in its approach.
I found this to be a fascinating book and a surprisingly quick read. I’m not sure it will work for many parents, and I don’t know if I’d feel differently about what I’ve read if I had kids, but I think it provides lots of food for thought.
Final Grade: B.
P.S. The authors have a website, which looks very interesting!
P.P.S. I got this from Bookshare.
I think I read an article about this. I remember thinking it was interesting about not praising kids for being smart. High school was a bit of a nasty surprise for me after doing no homework for nine years.
You say that because you don’t have kids you are not qualified to talk about what it’s like to raise kids? I beg to differ! One of the biggest problems today is this attitude that there’s no such thing as good advice (especially from those who are not in the same club). These kids are destined to become part of a larger society. As a teacher of primarily international students, with some exposure to American students, I can honestly say that the American students are whiny, lazy, and egomaniacal in many instances. They are not hard workers. They don’t want to do what they don’t “like.” This comes from a culture of parents telling their kids “you don’t have to do that if you don’t want to…” etc. I could go on and on. Treating them as if they have come into the world to be made as comfortable as possible is going to backfire in a major way. The other issue is how fat we’re letting them get. Killing them softly.
I think I agree at least that most parents don’t have a clue on how to raise their child. Children are either spoilt to the core or made into some sort psychotic human beings. I hope to be a mother soon and I look around me and try to understand what not to do. This book definitely seems to have some interesting stuff worth reading. Great going. Do pass on more if you come across some. Thanks.