Subscribe to our Blog
Nurture Shock
We have just added a fascinating book to our library - Nurture Shock: New thinking about children, by Po Bronson & Ashley Merryman. This book applies recent research about kids to current child-raising and child-educating practices - and finds that many of our current instincts are backfiring. It turns out that we are making mistakes on the basis of two key fallacies.
The authors call the first one the Fallacy of Similar Effect: the assumption that things work for kids the same way the work for adults. But they don't at all, in many cases. For example, children are much more affected by sleep loss - and in unexpected ways. For example, children's measured intelligence is not stable, as it is in adults, and this means that we are making a lot of educational mistakes. For example, the new research shows that praising children doesn't necessarily increase their motivation the way it does with adults.
The other fallacy is dubbed the Fallacy of the Good/Bad Dichotomy. We tend to think that things are either good or bad for kids, and that if we could instill supertraits like honesty and empathy in our children they would be impervious to problems. But it turns out that children's dishonesty can be a mark of intelligence and social competence and that lying to parents is a necessary part of growing up. Empathy is now known to be a double-edged sword, since the really popular kids achieve social dominance by attacking others in a subtle and strategic way.
For the next ten days, we will be featuring one of these ground-breaking insights into child-rearing. Stayed tuned for Chapter 1: THE INVERSE POWER OF PRAISE.
Looking forward to the series. On sleep, I always made sure that my children, got enough sleep. In some quarters, they thought I was a bit too rigid on how many hours, but I was just following the same routine my own mother had, 10 hours, seem to be the magic number of hours.
Now for praising children, I only did it when it was justly deserved. I remember getting into a heated discussion with the school with my youngest, and it boiled down to a discussion about standards, and my standards were too high. I think children need structure, and standards that they should meet. Perhaps, it could be the reason why my children have never been behavioural problems in public. If they are anger, they will hold it in until they are at home. As far as I know, when I praise my children, they take notice because it is not a common everyday event, There is some actions, behaviour that is expected, and anything above the standards, are praised. I think my children appreciate it in the long run, because if they were praise for every little thing, they would not be able to tell if I was sincere about it or not.
Looking forward to the empathy part, and the double-edged sword. With my youngest, I am trying to work on the empathy part, to make her more caring about others. That is not an easy job in today’s world, where there is so many things to advert their attention.