Lovely Little Shelf

The Book: NurtureShock: New Thinking About Children, by Po Bronson & Ashley Merryman

The Story: Not to say that these two piggybacked, and maybe the two books have nothing to do with each other, but I think that the best way to summarize this book is to say that it is pretty much Freakonomics about kids.

The two authors are both parents and they just asked some interesting questions about how parents and teachers interact with kids and what the results are.

There are ten different chapters that are all pretty much stand-alone essays that cover a broad range of topics: praise, sleep, race, lying, intelligence testing, siblings, rebellion, self-control, childhood friendships, and language development.

What I Thought: In short, I thought that this was totally fascinating. The first chapter hooked me, then I was in ’til the end.

In the first chapter, the authors looked at studies on praising kids. They looked at telling kids “you’re smart” vs. “you put a lot of effort into that.”  Maybe you guys see where this is headed, but it was fascinating to me not only how much better praising effort is, but how truly detrimental telling a kid repeatedly “you’re smart” can be.  Kids who are praised in this way are less likely to try at things that they don’t do well at the first time and even less likely to learn more in subjects that the excel at.  Hmmm.

And from there, every chapter had me going “Hmmm…”  The chapter about race was pretty enlightening and talked about how kids start to notice different skin tones from the time that they are infants, but generally parents shy away from talking about race in any way until kids are 9 or 10, and even then they only talk about it in the broadest terms.  This gives kids 10 years to form their own assumptions about what race is and what it means.  Just talking to kids about race openly from the time that the are 3 or 4 seems to do a world of good, but just isn’t something that white parents currently practice.

And on and on.  The chapters about lying and siblings were other high points for me, but I have to say, I took something out of each chapter.

I realize that nothing here is concrete, great science.  It is armchair science at best, but I think that it causes readers to think about things in a new, fresh way.  There is a lot to take away from this.

I’ve already recommended this to several of my friends who are educators or parents, but I don’t think that you’d have to be either to really get a lot out of it.

(As a side note: I want to point out that this is another book published by Twelve Publishers, which I’ve talked about a little bit before.  Just wanted to say that they’ve steered me in the right direction once again.)

Conclusion: Like I said, especially if you liked Freakonomics, are an educator, or a parent, I command you to read this.  If you fit into two or three of these categories, I’d say buy your own copy.  It’s that good.