NutureShock: New Thinking About Children by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman
Read for: This review from Dreadlock Girl
Wow! I loved this book and I think everyone who has kids or works with kids or ever plans on having kids should read it. So basically this book is about child studies with a twist. They’ve found a bunch of research that actually turns what we are used to thinking about kids completely upside down. They’ve examined studies with results that are quite often exactly the opposite of what was expected and then analyzed those results and follow-up studies to determine why exactly they were so surprising. The different topics covered are intelligence and how it is related to praise and amount of sleep, race, lying, sibling relationships, teen rebellion, self control and language development. Remember a while back when all those Baby Einstein videos were recalled? One of the chapters explains why that happened and why those DVDs have been associated with smaller vocabularies in young children.
I was amazed at the insights into children and the way they learn and develop and I can’t wait to try some of them out on my own children. I found this book to be informative but also really interesting. With all the information they’ve crammed in there, it could have easily become tedious and boring but it wasn’t at all. I also think it was really well researched. I can’t say for sure not being an expert in these fields but everything they said made a lot of sense to me and there is nearly 100 pages of notes and references at the back of the book. I’d love to read more about this kind of children’s research!
