Nurture Shock

“NurtureShock,” with its Toffleresque title, promises to revolutionize parenthood with “New Thinking About Children.” The key, outlined in 10 deftly organized chapters, is to ignore common assumptions about children in favor of the latest social science, much of it counterintuitive. Let them sleep in, say the prevailing studies on teenagers and sleep.

Based on a pair of Bronson’s high-profile cover stories for New York magazine, which applied similarly brazen titles (“Learning to Lie,” “How Not to Talk to Your Kids”) to academic research of the past two decades, the book is perhaps less revolutionary about parenthood than it is revelatory about books on parenthood.

Ann Hulbert, author of “Raising America,” could easily lend a hand. As Hulbert made clear in her 2003 history of parenting advice, each generation of parents falls sway if not to a singular sanctified Dr. Spock, then to a bevy of conflicting sages. Whereas others may call upon medical training, paternal wisdom or been-there-done-that mother­hood, Bronson and Merryman, having “parsed through the science and reviewed the evidence,” appeal to scientific reason - just as, Hulbert writes, experts more than a century ago first urged the scientific and systematic study of children.

In a chapter on overpraise, the authors describe laboratory studies in which children, having taken an initial test and then been praised for their intelligence, fared worse in follow-up rounds, while children who were instead commended for their effort challenged themselves further and performed better over all. Frequent and oft-undeserved rewards in the form of praise, the authors caution, deprive a child of motivation and discourage persistence. It can be “dangerous” if a child sees praise as a reward and “could easily lead to discouragement,” the author, Rudolf Dreikurs, noted.

Pretending race doesn’t exist leaves young children to form their own - often racist - opinions. A chapter on early childhood testing delivers similarly distressing and critical news. Bronson and Merryman do parents a service by calling attention to studies that seldom make their way into the media. No doubt we’ll worry about that later.

You should have to read the book. Get it HERE

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