NurtureShock: new thinking about children - By Po Bronson & Ashley Merryman Page 0,2

don’t consider themselves very maternal. The moment after birth, when the baby’s first handed to his mother, maternal instincts magically kick in, right along with the hormones. As a mother, you will know what to do, and you will continue to know for the next eighteen years. This fountain of knowledge is supposed to come as part of a matched set of ovaries and a desire to wear expensive high heels.

Thanks to this mythos, we use the word “instinct” to convey the collective wisdom gleaned intuitively from our experiences raising kids. But this is an overgeneralization of the term. Really, the actual instinct—the biological drive that kicks in—is the fierce impulse to nurture and protect one’s child. Neuroscientists have even located the exact neural network in the brain where this impulse fires. Expecting parents can rely on this impulse kicking in—but as for how best to nurture, they have to figure it out.

In other words, our “instincts” can be so off-base because they are not actually instincts.

Today, with three years of investigation behind us, Ashley and I now see that what we imagined were our “instincts” were instead just intelligent, informed reactions. Things we had figured out. Along the way, we also discovered that those reactions were polluted by a hodgepodge of wishful thinking, moralistic biases, contagious fads, personal history, and old (disproven) psychology—all at the expense of common sense.

“Nurture shock,” as the term is generally used, refers to the panic—common among new parents—that the mythical fountain of knowledge is not magically kicking in at all.

This book will deliver a similar shock—it will use the fascinating new science of children to reveal just how many of our bedrock assumptions about kids can no longer be counted on.

The central premise of this book is that many of modern society’s strategies for nurturing children are in fact backfiring—because key twists in the science have been overlooked.

The resulting errant assumptions about child development have distorted parenting habits, school programs, and social policies. They affect how we think about kids, and thus how we interpret child behavior and communicate with the young. The intent of this book is not to be alarmist, but to teach us to think differently—more deeply and clearly—about children. Small corrections in our thinking today could alter the character of society long-term, one future-citizen at a time.

The topics covered in this book are wide-ranging, devoted to equal parts brain fiber and moral fiber. They relate to children of every age from tots to teens. It could not be further from a paint-by-numbers approach. Specifically, we have chapters devoted to confidence, sleep, lying, racial attitudes, intelligence, sibling conflict, teen rebellion, self-control, aggression, gratitude, and the acquisition of language. The prose throughout is our mutual collaboration.

Along the way, we will push you to rethink many sacred cows—too many to fully list here, but some highlights include the following: self-esteem, Noam Chomsky, Driver’s Ed, the idea that children are naturally blind to racial constructs, emotional intelligence, warning kids not to tattle, educational cartoons, the early identification of the gifted, the notion that television is making kids fat, and the presumption that it’s necessarily a good sign if a child can say “no” to peer pressure.

We chose these topics because the research surprised us—it directly challenged the conventional point of view on how kids grow up.

However, once we parsed through the science and reviewed the evidence, the new thinking about children felt self-evident and logical, even obvious. It did not feel like we had to raise children “by the book.” It felt entirely natural, a restoration of common sense. The old assumptions we once had seemed to be nothing but a projection of wishful thinking. Once we overcame the initial shock, we found ourselves plugged into children in a whole new way.

ONE

The Inverse Power of Praise

Sure, he’s special. But new research suggests if you tell him that, you’ll ruin him. It’s a neurobiological fact.

What do we make of a boy like Thomas?

Thomas (his middle name) is a fifth-grader at the highly competitive P.S. 334, the Anderson School on West 84th in New York City. Slim as they get, Thomas recently had his long sandy-blond hair cut short to look like the new James Bond (he took a photo of Daniel Craig to the barber). Unlike Bond, he prefers a uniform of cargo pants and a T-shirt emblazoned with a photo of one of his heroes: Frank Zappa. Thomas hangs out with five friends from the Anderson School. They are “the smart kids.” Thomas is