NurtureShock
Authors: Po Bronson,Ashley Merryman
Copyright © 2009 by Po Bronson
All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced,
distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written
permission of the publisher.
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Chapters 1, 2, and 4 originally appeared in
New York
magazine in abridged form.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to
New York
magazine for permission to include these chapters in edited and expanded form.
First eBook Edition: September 2009
ISBN 978-0-446-56332-1
CONTENTS
1: The Inverse Power of Praise
3: Why White Parents Don’t Talk About Race
5: The Search for Intelligent Life in Kindergarten
7: The Science of Teen Rebellion
8: Can Self-Control Be Taught?
10: Why Hannah Talks and Alyssa Doesn’t
Selected Sources and References
Why Do I Love These People?
What Should I Do With My Life?
The Nudist on the Late Shift
The First $20 Million Is Always the Hardest
Bombardiers
Cary Grant is at the door.
D
uring the late 1960s, visitors to the Magic Castle—a private nightclub in Hollywood, California, run by professional magicians—were
often delighted to see that the club had hired a Cary Grant look-alike as its doorman. As they’d step up to the portico, the
door would be swung open by a dashing man in an impeccably tailored suit. “Welcome to the Castle,” he charmed, seeming to
enjoy his doppelgänger status. Once the guests were through the lobby, they would titter over just how much the doorman resembled
the iconic actor. The nightclub is mere yards from the Chinese Theatre and the Walk of Fame. To have the best Cary Grant impersonator
in the world holding the door for you was the perfect embodiment of the magic of Hollywood in all its forms.
However, the doorman pretending to be Cary Grant wasn’t an impostor after all. It was, in fact, the real Cary Grant.
Grant, a charter member of the Castle, had been intrigued by magic since he was a kid. Part of the Castle’s appeal to Grant
and many other celebrities, though, was that the club has an ironclad rule—no cameras, no photographs, and no reporters. It
gave stars the ability to have a quiet night out without gossip columns knowing.
Grant hung out in the lobby to be with the receptionist, Joan Lawton. They spent the hours talking about a more profound kind
of Magic—something Grant cared more deeply about than the stage.
Children.
Lawton’s work at the Castle was her night job. By day, she was pursuing a certificate in the science of child development.
Grant, then the father of a toddler, was fascinated by her study. He plied her for every scrap of research she was learning.
“He wanted to know everything about kids,” she recalled. Whenever he heard a car arrive outside, he’d jump to the door. He
wasn’t intentionally trying to fool the guests, but that was often the result. The normally autograph-seeking patrons left
him alone.
So why didn’t guests recognize he was the real thing?
The context threw them off. Nobody expected the real Cary Grant would appear in the humdrum position of a doorman. Magicians
who performed at the Magic Castle were the best anywhere, so the guests came prepared to witness illusions. They assumed the
handsome doorman was just the first illusion of the evening.
Here’s the thing. When everything is all dressed up as entertainment—when it’s all supposed to be magical and surprising and
fascinating—the Real Thing may be perceived as just another tidbit for our amusement.
That is certainly the case in the realm of science.
In the immediacy of today’s 24-7 news cycle, with television news, constant blogging, press releases, and e-mail, it feels
as if no scientific breakthrough escapes notice. But these scientific findings are used like B-list celebrities—they’re filler
for when the real newsmakers aren’t generating headlines. Each one gets its ten minutes of fame, more for our entertainment
than our serious consideration. The next day, they are tossed aside, lipstick asmear, as the press wire churns out the science
du jour
. When they’re presented as quick sound bites, it’s impossible to know which findings really merit our attention.
Most scientific investigations can’t live up to the demands of media packaging. At least for the science of child development,
there have been no “Eureka!” moments that fit the classic characterization of a major scientific breakthrough. Rather than
being the work of a single scholar, the new ideas have been hashed out by many scholars, sometimes dozens, who have been conducting
research at universities the world over. Rather than new truths arriving on the wings of a single experiment, they have come
at a crawl, over a decade, from various studies replicating and refining prior ones.
The result is that many important ideas have been right under our noses, building up over the last decade. As a society, collectively,
we never recognized they were the real thing.
Why our instincts about children can be so off the mark.
M
y wife has great taste in art, with one exception. In the guest bedroom of our house hangs an acrylic still life—a pot of
red geraniums beside an ocher-toned watering can, with a brown picket fence in the background. It’s ugly, but that’s not its
worst sin. My real problem is that it’s from a paint-by-numbers kit.
Every time I look at it, I want to sneak it out of the house and dump it in the corner trash can.
My wife won’t let me, though, because it was painted way back in 1961 by her great-grandmother. I am all for hanging on to
things for sentimental reasons, and our house is full of her family’s artifacts, but I just don’t think this painting contains
or conveys any genuine sentiment. There was probably a hint of it the day her great-grandmother bought the paint-by-numbers
kit at the crafts store—a glimmer of a more creative, inspired life—but the finished product, in my opinion, kind of insults
that hope. Rather than commemorating her memory, it diminishes it.
Painting by numbers skyrocketed to success in the early 1950s. It was
hugely
popular—the iPod of its time. It was marketed on the premise that homemakers were going to have a vast surplus of free time
thanks to dishwashers, vacuum cleaners, and washing machines. In three years, the Palmer Paint Company sold over twelve million
kits. As popular as the phenomenon was, it was also always surrounded by controversy. Critics were torn between the democratic
ideal of letting everyone express themselves and the robotic, conformist way that expression was actually being manifested.
The other day, I was trying to remember how I felt about the science of child development before Ashley Merryman and I began
this book, several years ago—when all of a sudden that painting of potted geraniums popped into my head. I had to go home
and stare at that ugly painting for an evening before I could figure out why. Which I ultimately realized was this:
The mix of feelings engendered by paint-by-numbers is similar to the mix of feelings engendered by books about the science
of children. This is because the science has always carried with it the connotation that parenting should be “by the book.”
If the science says X, you’re supposed to do X, just like paint-by-numbers instructed hobbyists to use Cornsilk and Burnt
Umber for the handle of the watering can.
So if a few years ago, someone had told me, “You really ought to read this book about the new science of kids,” I would have
politely thanked him and then completely ignored his recommendation.
Like most parents, my wife and I bought a few baby books when our son was born. After the first year, we put them away, until
three years later, when our daughter was born and the books once again graced our shelves. Until our daughter turned one—after
that, we no longer had any interest in the books.
Most of our friends felt the same way. We agreed that we didn’t parent “by the book,” nor did we want to. We parented on instinct.
We were madly in love with our children, and we were careful observers of their needs and development. That seemed enough.
At that same time, Ashley and I had been co-writing columns for
Time Magazine
. Living in Los Angeles, Ashley had spent years running a small tutoring program for inner-city children. She has been something
like a fairy godmother to about 40 kids, a constant presence in their lives from kindergarten through high school. Guided
by her instincts, Ashley has had no shortage of ideas about how to steer the kids in her program. She has never lacked inspiration.
All she felt she needed was more tutors and some school supplies.
In that sense, neither Ashley nor I were aware of what we were missing. We did not say to ourselves, “Wow, I really need to
brush up on the science of child development, because I’m messing up.” Instead, we were going fairly merrily along, until
we sort of stumbled into writing this book.
We had been researching the science of motivation in grown-ups, and one day we wondered where kids get their self-confidence
from. We began to investigate this new angle. (The story we ultimately wrote ran on the cover of
New York Magazine
in February of 2007, and it’s expanded here as Chapter 1 of this book.) What we learned surprised us and was simultaneously
disorienting. Prior to that story, our instincts led us to believe, quite firmly, that it was important to tell young children
they were smart, in order to buoy their confidence. However, we uncovered a body of science that argued, extremely convincingly,
that this habit of telling kids they’re smart was backfiring. It was in fact undermining children’s confidence.
We changed our behavior after researching that story, but we were left with a lingering question: how could our instincts
have been so off-base?
According to lore, the maternal instinct is innate. Women are assured it doesn’t matter if they spent their twenties avoiding
babies, or if they 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.