NURTURE SHOCK
NEW THINKING ABOUT CHILDREN
by Po Bronson & Ashley Merryman
Reviewed by Jeff Drake, M.A.
If you are a parent like me you are in for a shock. A good one! There is more to your child than meets the eye and there is now some really good research that will not only help you raise your child but will also make your life much easier in the process.
Authors Bronson and Merryman, one a parent of two children, the other working with children in schools, were both “shocked” when they first discovered that using praise to raise a child’s self esteem could easily do the opposite. How, they wondered, could their instincts have been so wrong?
As they point out the instinct to nurture their children Is there, but the “instinct” doesn’t really know what is best and parents need to figure that out. And in chapters on praise, sleep, school performance, sibling rivalry, self control, teen rebellion and others they show us that our instincts are “polluted by a …wishful thinking, moralistic biases, contagious fads, personal history, and old (disproven) psychology – all at the expense of common sense.”
So like all of us with the day to day challenge of raising a child we make thousands of decisions about what is the best way to parent. And most of them we make without really knowing for sure if they truly are the best. We are just guessing. And deep down we know that and it makes us nervous!
Because we don’t want to be wrong (parents more than any other group really want to get it right) we tend to not question conventional wisdom too much because then we would have to make all these thousands of decisions all on our own. So until we are faced with a problem; Johnny won’t eat his peas, Joanie won’t go to sleep etc., we ride blissfully along on the hearsay of what is best.
So why is “praise” no way to increase self esteem. It turns out that it is often just a label as in “Your so awesome Jeremy!”“You played great!” “You are so smart!” A label given by another person that has no way for the child to know what he or she actually did, and can do again, to make get that reaction. I am really awesome, for some reason, but I am not sure what I did, but I sure don’t want to stop being awesome….so I better be careful and not spoil it by making a mistake that will reveal that I am in fact not so great.
By contrast, a child who works hard to achieve something and is noticed for his specific effort is clear that the other person is approving of something that she did, and that she can in fact repeat. It also helps her see the story that it is something she did and can repeat that pays off. Now she can have her own clear goal that is independent of the praise of the adult.
An example that I have heard is that of the hockey coach who stopped giving the team general praise and praised each individual when they checked an opponent. The team’s performance in checking (and winning) went way up.
But for the child who just got a label “You’re so awesome Jeremy!” and has no way of knowing what he did to get it, he do not know what to do keep it. The result is that he won’t want to risk the loss of the label and will actually be more likely to avoid challenges. Having been given a label actually makes a person more insecure because there is no experience to understand how to repeat the behavior that is valued.
Nurture Shock will surprise you with what has been discovered about sibling rivalry, sleep, school performance, getting your child to learn to talk, and have self control. But of course for parents the challenge is not just knowing that praise can be harmful for example, but it is learning to apply that knowledge in the busy day to day coping and stresses of family life.
Parenting is a creative art and it is good to base it upon good science like the topics in this book. But science is only a starting point and I recommend that you buy the book and get together with other parents and to help each other figure out how to use this knowledge so that it will do your children the most good.
