On My Mind: NurtureShock

NurtureShock: New Thinking About Children by Po Bronson


My rating: 5 of 5 stars
A fantastic read! I want others to talk about the ideas with! I made Taylor read one chapter tonight that I was especially excited about, and he says he'll read the whole thing; I would reread the chapters as he does, to refresh the ideas in my mind. And I'm hoping my book club here in Springville will read it, too!

The authors are the ones who wrote the article "The Inverse Power of Praise," which explained that praising children for being smart, instead of for working hard, actually DECREASED their confidence and willingness to try difficult tasks. This book goes through various topics in child-rearing, and often challenges our assumptions (which are frequently based on "research" highlighted for a moment by the media, ingrained into pop culture, and never clarified or disputed when further studies come out). Chapters cover confidence, sleep, lying, racial attitudes, intelligence, sibling conflict, teen rebellion, self-control, aggression, gratitude, and language acquisition. The authors are journalists, but have unearthed studies in these topics to find which theories really come out on top. I do love psychology, and what it can tell us about human behavior, so this book was fascinating to me! (I think I am a psych junkie -- I get as engrossed in psych studies about human behavior as some people do in People Magazine articles about celeb behavior!)

I think the chapters that most intrigued me (though ALL were engrossing!) were those about were self-control, praise, and language acquisition. As I read chapter 8 ("Can Self Control Be Taught?"), I was so excited had to pull out the computer to see what more I could learn about "Tools of the Mind," the preschool and kindergarten curriculum they highlighted. I want to order a book that teaches the curriculum ("Tools of the Mind: The Vygotskian Approach to Early Childhood Education"), and find a preschool that uses this approach.

In the language acquisition, they discuss why baby language DVDs actually decrease infant's vocabulary. Babies need to see the human face to learn where one word ends and another begins, and the voice-overs used alongside cartoons in such videos doesn't help infants at all. The determining factor in an infants' language acquisition is not even how rich the language that surrounds them. It is how quickly the parent responds the the INFANT'S attempts at language. Infants of "high responders" have vocabularies 6 months in advance of "low responders." In one study, merely by touching a child when she babbled, over the course of 10 minutes, the child began to babble more and with increased complexity, such that the child sounded five months older (in terms of the types of sounds they were experimenting with) after the 10 minute session. So interesting!

And you may have heard about the "inverse power of praise." Even though Taylor and I read the original article almost 3 years ago, we still find it hard to remember: praise the effort, not just being "smart", and make the praise sincere and specific. But I do use that mantra on my high school students in our discussions, too: don't just say, "That was a great insight!" Tell your peer what specifically you liked about their thoughts.

Here is the blurb on "NurtureShock" from its publisher's website: http://twelvebooks.com/books/nurture_sho... Interestingly, Twelve books only publishes one book per month, and strives to develop "communities of conversation surrounding our books." That's a mission I can support!

Read this book! And then talk to me about it!!

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