(1) How reliable are testing methods for kindergarten-age students as indicators of future achievement? (2) Will talking a lot to your baby help her to develop language skills? (3) How effective is telling the story "The Boy Who Cried Wolf" at dissuading lying among children? (4) Is praising your children for their intelligence good for them?

The answers to these questions might surprise you, as they did me. I came across these questions and the answers to them in NurtureShock: New Thinking About Children, a book I happened to find on the bestsellers shelf of Fully Booked a few days ago.

NurtureShock, by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman, is not your typical parenting book. It reads like a Malcolm Gladwell work (The Tipping Point, Outliers) for parents. Bronson and Merryman describe some of the latest research on child and adolescent development which shatters many beliefs widely-held by parents, teachers, and education policy-makers. The studies they cite are diverse: they demonstrate how your child's friendships shape his relationships with his siblings, how getting an hour more sleep each night can benefit your daughter in more ways than you can imagine, and how a relatively new pre-school program in the US has been churning out amazing results by changing educators' understanding of what pre-school is for.

I've only finished reading two-thirds of the book, but it has already opened my eyes to a lot of mistaken presumptions I'd had about parenting. It has also provided evidence-based support for some of the notions about education I had intuited before, such as the importance of teaching young children how to think and how to become learners, rather than teaching them to memorize letters and numbers.

If you've already read the book and want more from the authors, they maintain a blog at Newsweek.com.

Now, as for the questions I enumerated at the start of this post, here are the answers:

(1) Very unreliable. The correlation between tests taken before kindergarten and achievement tests taken two years later is 40%. And the success rate for identifying gifted children based on tests taken at kindergarten is even worse: for every hundred students who are identified as gifted in kindergarten, only 27% of them will still deserve that label five years later. You're better off flipping a coin.

(2) It isn't talking a lot to your baby that most helps her develop language skills. Rather, it's responding to your baby when she tries to communicate--such by touching her immediately whenever she babbles, or naming objects that she is looking at--that helps the most.

(3) Also very unreliable; after hearing the story, some kids lied a little more than usual. "George Washington and the Cherry Tree" is a better story to tell your children.

(4) No; children who are praised for their intelligence tend to become underachievers later on in life. Children perform better when they are praised for working hard.

Share