NURTURESHOCK. By Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman. Twelve, 2009. 352 pages.
NurtureShock is a wonderful collection of essays on child development that carries more weight than you might think. On an initial glance, it appears to be another example of what Adam Hanft, in a review of Steven Johnson’s Where Good Ideas Come From, called ‘pattern porn’.
Hanft defines the genre as "non-fiction characterized by a seductive thesis that is supported by an ingenious arrangement of scientific support—manipulatively cherry-picked, in the eyes of some critics—and lush anecdotal juxtapositions that are voyeuristically irresistible."
You’ve seen them on the display racks—those books attractively encased in stripped-down graphics and catchy titles: Blink, Drive, How We Decide, and…NurtureShock.
But NurtureShock, despite its package, shuns the seductive thesis. Instead, Bronson and Merryman’s main goal is that readers avoid thinking in black and white. If we start with the assumption that there is one right way to bring up children, they warn, we are falling for the "Fallacy of the Good/Bad Dichotomy"—the ‘tendency to categorize things as either good for children or bad for children.’
Thinking that antibiotics can only be good because they kill bad bacteria might lead to overuse and problems with resistant bacteria. In the same way, looking at lying solely as a negative trait in children is not entirely helpful.
We learn how to lie. It’s part of development—a necessary part. Lying requires intelligence and social sense. There’s probably a connection between lying and "theory of mind"—the ability to think about what others are thinking about.
But NurtureShock is not a screed for allowing kids to lie, cheat, steal and engage in self-destructive behavior. The authors assure us they are "still telling kids to 'play nice' and say thank you." What they want is objectivity—to steer us toward a balanced approach in developing cognition and citizenship, based on research.
They believe that "good stuff and bad stuff are not opposite ends of the spectrum," but "are what’s termed orthogonal—mutually independent." When we look at children, the "many factors in their lives—such as sibling interaction, peer pressure, marital conflict, or even gratitude—can be both a good influence and a bad influence."
The other assumption Bronson and Merryman urge us to avoid is the "Fallacy of Similar Effect"—the idea "that things work in children in the same way that they work in adults."
If we’re really going to base the rearing of children on evidence, we have to really be careful about confirmation bias—thinking that we already know what studies will show. To examine the way kids learn we have to free ourselves of preconceptions based on our adult experience.
In many cases, the best and simplest solution is not quite as simple as it looks. For example, Bronson and Merryman point out that the experts mostly agree that trying to force-feed language skills to babies through videos such as the infamous Baby Einstein DVDs just doesn’t work.
Why? Babies need to look at adults talking to learn to segment, to tell where one word stops and another begins. Lip reading is part of speech learning.
Don’t stop there, though, because learning to talk is not a passive activity. Caregivers need to encourage language production by the child, not just "push massive amounts of language into the baby’s ear." They need to be more than live versions of Baby Einstein. "If…you think a baby isn’t contributing to the conversation," Bronson and Merryman note, "you’ve missed something really important."
One sign of good non-fiction is that it makes you want to find out more. I wish Bronson and Merryman had gone beyond babies in their discussion of language development. I work with elementary school and high school kids who have weak expressive language.
Like the babies in NurtureShock whose language development is lagging, I believe this is because they do not have enough conversation where they are expected to make sounds—in this case sounds consisting of specific and clear vocabulary. Too much of adult communication with children is one-sided, and in other venues—school, books, and digital devices—there is lots of input but little output.
Bronson and Merryman’s look at language development—"Why Hannah Talks and Alyssa Doesn’t"—is just one of ten essays in NurtureShock. The essays, while tied together by their focus on research into child development, are each valid as stand-alone pieces. Indeed, three of the chapters in the book were published that way, in New York magazine. It’s really an anthology, rather than a thesis with one central theme.
The first chapter—"The Inverse Power of Praise"—garnered quite a bit of attention when it appeared in 2007. It gets to the other connection between all of these essays: avoiding the "fallacies" previously mentioned. Besides the fact that viewing praise as not necessarily a good thing is counterintuitive, praise is effective with adults. So common sense tells us to praise our kids. Research by Carol Dweck and others have shown a danger in doing so.
Bronson and Merryman are searching for what we don’t readily see, what common sense doesn’t tell us, but scientists do.
Children are getting an hour less sleep than they did thirty years ago, and that lack of sleep is reflected in performance.
Avoiding the issue of race because we want kids to understand we’re all equal results in the opposite outcome.
By demanding that kids look us in the eye and speak the truth, we train proficient liars.
Channeling kids into gifted programs based on testing when they're five shuts out gifted students who don’t test well at that young age. I.Q. changes.
Siblings fight not in competition for attention, but for booty. Our Freudian legacy—that brothers and sisters are "locked into an eternal struggle for their parents’ affection" is misguided. "It turns out that Shakespeare was right, and Freud was wrong," say Bronson and Merryman. "Sibling rivalry may be less an Oedipal tale…and more King Lear."
Social skills are not just about being nice. Aggression and manipulation are cards that play well for the popular kids.
We’re right in observing that teenagers think differently than their parents—way differently. But pictures of moody and negative youths need to be tweaked. The authors quote Temple University psychologist Laurence Steinberg: "The popular image of the individual sulking in the wake of a family argument may be a more accurate portrayal of the emotional state of the parent, than the teenager." It seems that teens get something positive from such a battle, and then are often better at letting it go.
The chapter titled "Can Self-Control Be Taught?" especially resonated with me. Bronson and Merryman’s answer is yes, and they illustrate their case with the work done by Elena Bodrova and Deborah Leong in their Tools of the Mind program, based on the ideas of Lev Vygotsky. Bodrova and Leong’s book is at the top of my list of the best books about child psychology.
NurtureShock now enters that list. Bronson and Merryman have assembled ten provocative essays that present up-to-date research and will prompt experts and non-experts alike to think more deeply about children and learning. Highly recommended.
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