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Title: NutureShock: New Thinking about Children
Authors: Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman
Genre: Pop psychology
Thingummies: 5
Synopsis: Freakonomics for parents.
Thoughts: I picked up this book because Carolyn Hax, an advice columnist from the Washington Post who I generally think highly of, kept plugging it. (At some point I'll probably also get around to reading The Gift of Fear, which is her other favorite, but it's less directly applicable to my life right now.)
This is yet another in the line of pop science books with stark white covers featuring a single offbeat object, with a one word, off-beat title. (The subtitle is a little more descriptive than some of its siblings.) I think we have Freakonomics to blame for this trend, but while some of them have been fairly useless, this is a particularly good entry in the genre.
The authors, who are parents themselves, started looking into psychology research that's been done with kids in the last decade or so and discovered that scientists are pretty aware that a lot of our childraising myths are totally bunk. Apparently we've learned a lot about everything from why kids lie (and what it means) to how babies learn to talk (and how parents' reactions help or hurt this) to why praising your kid for being smart is a shitty idea. (Kids can't do anything about whether they're smart or not, only whether they work hard. Kids who think they succeeded because of an inherent quality they have no control over have no feedback for improvement and tend to subsequently give up on anything they don't succeed at immediately. It's better to praise things they do rather than what they are--telling them they're awesome because they worked really hard or used a specific skill they've been working on not only tells them how to improve even more, it gives them confidence to tackle tasks even when they initially fail.)
There's some things here that are kind of horrifying, such as the fact that the tests used to sort kids into "gifted" programs are applied way too early and are generally not repeated, so normal kids get over-accelerated and gifted late bloomers (and an awful lot of gifted kids are late bloomers) are left behind with no recourse. We've known this for years, apparently, but almost no school district applies it. Other things we've known and ignored for years--starting high school an hour later in the morning, so teenagers get more sleep, has been shown to improve verbal SAT scores by 50 some points, math SAT scores by 150 some points, reduce teenage auto accidents by 25%, and seriously decrease the levels of depression in the student body. It's not that teenagers are lazy--it's that kids' brains genuinely process sleep differently than adults (they spend 40% of sleep in a cycle adults spend 4% of sleep in) and their biorhythms make it biologically impossible for them to get as good sleep going to bed earlier.
One frustrating thing is that a lot of the info here is interesting but not easy to apply. There's not much a parent can do about what age a school tests for gifted programs or what time classes start. And apparently lying is something that happens a lot more than parents think, but there's not much guidance here on what to do about it. But knowing the most productive way to respond to babies babbling or how to praise kids so they feel good instead of just making you feel good or knowing just how important it is to make sure bedtime is strict is all pretty valuable. And the descriptions and explanations invoke real science while still using common sense (and freely admitting the issues of ideals in the real world).
It's a really interesting book on a topic that's awfully fraught. They balance things nicely, not telling parents that they're awful people but giving some clues about why your child might react to things in certain ways as well as some helpful strategies for how to effectively deal with those problems. And it gives you some insight into your own childhood, to be honest. Well worth the read, even if you don't necessarily have kids right at this moment.
Authors: Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman
Genre: Pop psychology
Thingummies: 5
Synopsis: Freakonomics for parents.
Thoughts: I picked up this book because Carolyn Hax, an advice columnist from the Washington Post who I generally think highly of, kept plugging it. (At some point I'll probably also get around to reading The Gift of Fear, which is her other favorite, but it's less directly applicable to my life right now.)
This is yet another in the line of pop science books with stark white covers featuring a single offbeat object, with a one word, off-beat title. (The subtitle is a little more descriptive than some of its siblings.) I think we have Freakonomics to blame for this trend, but while some of them have been fairly useless, this is a particularly good entry in the genre.
The authors, who are parents themselves, started looking into psychology research that's been done with kids in the last decade or so and discovered that scientists are pretty aware that a lot of our childraising myths are totally bunk. Apparently we've learned a lot about everything from why kids lie (and what it means) to how babies learn to talk (and how parents' reactions help or hurt this) to why praising your kid for being smart is a shitty idea. (Kids can't do anything about whether they're smart or not, only whether they work hard. Kids who think they succeeded because of an inherent quality they have no control over have no feedback for improvement and tend to subsequently give up on anything they don't succeed at immediately. It's better to praise things they do rather than what they are--telling them they're awesome because they worked really hard or used a specific skill they've been working on not only tells them how to improve even more, it gives them confidence to tackle tasks even when they initially fail.)
There's some things here that are kind of horrifying, such as the fact that the tests used to sort kids into "gifted" programs are applied way too early and are generally not repeated, so normal kids get over-accelerated and gifted late bloomers (and an awful lot of gifted kids are late bloomers) are left behind with no recourse. We've known this for years, apparently, but almost no school district applies it. Other things we've known and ignored for years--starting high school an hour later in the morning, so teenagers get more sleep, has been shown to improve verbal SAT scores by 50 some points, math SAT scores by 150 some points, reduce teenage auto accidents by 25%, and seriously decrease the levels of depression in the student body. It's not that teenagers are lazy--it's that kids' brains genuinely process sleep differently than adults (they spend 40% of sleep in a cycle adults spend 4% of sleep in) and their biorhythms make it biologically impossible for them to get as good sleep going to bed earlier.
One frustrating thing is that a lot of the info here is interesting but not easy to apply. There's not much a parent can do about what age a school tests for gifted programs or what time classes start. And apparently lying is something that happens a lot more than parents think, but there's not much guidance here on what to do about it. But knowing the most productive way to respond to babies babbling or how to praise kids so they feel good instead of just making you feel good or knowing just how important it is to make sure bedtime is strict is all pretty valuable. And the descriptions and explanations invoke real science while still using common sense (and freely admitting the issues of ideals in the real world).
It's a really interesting book on a topic that's awfully fraught. They balance things nicely, not telling parents that they're awful people but giving some clues about why your child might react to things in certain ways as well as some helpful strategies for how to effectively deal with those problems. And it gives you some insight into your own childhood, to be honest. Well worth the read, even if you don't necessarily have kids right at this moment.
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no subject
Date: 2012-08-14 12:28 am (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2012-08-14 04:14 am (UTC)From:This is so ridiculously true for me. At some point I got it into my head that having to work hard at something meant you weren't good enough to just do it. That is probably emphatically not the message that kids need to learn, but I feel like I was explicitly told, at some point, "oh, you don't need to work hard at this, you just get it", in a tone of pride - maybe not by my parents, but by a teacher or someone that I looked up to.
no subject
Date: 2012-08-14 04:54 am (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2012-08-14 11:51 am (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2012-08-14 11:54 am (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2012-08-14 10:45 pm (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2012-08-14 10:50 pm (UTC)From: