book review
Nurture Shock Authors: Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman List price: ` 399 Publication: Random House
BY AISHWARYA M Am I praising my child enough? Or am I overdoing it? Is my child getting enough sleep? Am I encouraging my child to lie to me? You will ask these and many more questions as you read ‘Nurture Shock’ by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman. The book gives a new perspective to nurturing that turns several accepted notions upside down. It is unconventional, because it is not a culmination of the opinions of parents, caregivers, doctors and experts. Instead, it is based completely on scientific and quantitative data through research done in labs, recording children’s every word and action. It was spread across control groups of children of different races and cultures, with resultant observations on how they fared over time. For instance: When do you expose your child to the concept of failure? Today, the popular belief is that positive reinforcement is the way to go. To this end, many countries, including India, are abolishing the testing of children in schools until a certain age, lest the child experience failure and cannot handle it. Bronson and Merryman say that by doing this, you are in fact setting up your child for a bigger kind of failure.
46 Parent Circle / January 2012
They conducted an experiment where sets of children were exposed to a very difficult test, in which almost everybody failed. After this, they asked their parents to talk to the child. Some parents glossed over the failure, patted their children and told them that they were doing great. Others told their children in a matter of fact way, that they failed the test, but encouraged them to do better next time. When both sets of children were given tests again, surprisingly, the second set of children performed better than the first set. Similarly, Bronson and Merryman work on nine different areas. Some of them are: Schools test children at a very early age (about 4, when they enter school) to determine whether the child is intelligent or not. Data proves that 70% of the time, they are wrong, because, as the book says, ‘the young minds are just not done yet’! Thus, it advocates testing at a later age (7 or 8). When children sleep even an hour lesser than 10 hours a day, their IQ drops by one class lower than they are. Hmm…! Pushing them for that extra class which eats into their sleep time – not such a great idea! Do we encourage our kids to lie to us? Research says that we do – freely and without guilt – because when children are afraid of the consequences, they take the easy way out. …And so it goes on, a mixture of common sense and surprises. One thing that stands out in the book is that small changes in our behaviour
as parents can make huge positive differences to our children. Thankfully, the book does not prescribe and preach, like most parenting books do. It simply places well-researched facts on the table, leaving us to take from it whatever we think is relevant to our parenting styles. The book’s underlying assumption is that parenting is a science, which can be analyzed to derive a formula for success. We may tend to argue that it is an art – every child is different and, so too is the parent and her/his style of upbringing. But one can conclude after reading the book that like any other good art-science form, we should attempt a grand union – take the scientifically tried and tested techniques from the book and merge them with one’s unique style – thereby getting the best of both worlds!