Book Review: NurtureShock: New Thinking About Children by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman

NurtureShock: New Thinking About Children by Po Bronson
Publisher: Twelve
Published In: 2009
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Publisher’s Description:

One of the most influential books about children ever published, Nurture Shock offers a revolutionary new perspective on children that upends a library’s worth of conventional wisdom. With impeccable storytelling and razor-sharp analysis, the authors demonstrate that many of modern society’s strategies for nurturing children are in fact backfiring–because key twists in the science have been overlooked. Nothing like a parenting manual, NurtureShock gets to the core of how we grow, learn and live.

Nurture Shock’s basic premise is to take traditional parenting techniques and ideas and turn them on their heads. For instance the first chapter, called The In Inverse Power of Praise, is about how over praising children can have the opposite effect of what the parent intended. The child’s performance may actually decrease. Each chapter cites studies and research the authors have uncovered to support their conclusions. Most of the authors’ assertions make total sense after they explain the research that’s been done on the subject in question, even though it contradicts conventional wisdom.

My favorite chapter, that I think every parent should read, is Why White Parents Don’t Talk About Race. I have long railed against the notion of color-blindness being a sincere or realistic perspective and this chapter helps explain why. When parents don’t talk about race, it leaves children confused and often thinking any mention of race must be bad because their parents never talk about it.

This book is more about how children’s brains work and doesn’t have that many specific techniques that a parent could just lift out of the book and put into practice. However, if a parent has a better understand of how her child’s brain works and what her thought processes are, then she will be better able to come up with ways of dealing with her child that works for her family.

I think this is definitely one book every parent should have in his/her arsenal.