I was scheduled to deliver the Parent Education component tonight at our Inglewood Parent Participation Preschool and decided to review the recent book out NutureShock: New Thinking About Children by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman.  My good friend Barb Smith brought this book to my attention, and it has been great recommendation in terms of how interesting and directly relevant the information is towards the goal of raising happy and successful children.

The term “nurtureshock” is described as the panic common to new parents that “the mythical fountain of knowledge is not magically kicking in.” It’s that gut-pummeling doubt that hits the moment you bring your first child home from the hospital— “They let us keep this thing” — and snowballs from there.  Such feelings of inadequacy, the authors suggest, are justified. But, as they write, “small corrections in our thinking today could alter the character of society long term, one future-citizen at a time.”

This book is essentially a collection of scientific studies that challenge many long held assumptions about children, child development and successful parenting.  The authors relate recent scientific findings to argue that some of the conventional wisdom about parenting and child development is a combination of “wishful thinking, moralistic biases, contagious fads, personal history and old (disproven) psychology. . .”

The authors state that they selected their various topics because the research was surprising and contradicted common parenting assumptions and practices.

About the Authors

Po Bronson is a well known author, primarily from writing novels about Bay Area bond trading and Silicon Valley technology start up companies.

Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman’s New York Magazine articles on the science of parenting won the magazine journalism award from the American Association for the Advancement of Science and a Clarion Award. Their articles for Time Magazine have won the award for outstanding journalism from the Council on Contemporary Families.  The book is an expansion of their articles on science and parenting.

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