So far is one of my top 3 parenting books I've ever read. Scientifically backed studies on child development that go against everything you thought you knew was best, well not all of it was new -- but it was all still good.

FYI - this book was not written by child psychology experts, but by two journalists in the child psychology field whose "niche" is to report on studies that have gone unheeded.

There are ten chapters, each reading like its own essay:

1. The Inverse Power of Praise
2. The Lost H More...

Interesting book. There were a lot of interesting ideas, however, I feel more confused about children than I did before. I guess the point is to open your eyes. One theme throughout is that kids are different than adults and need to be understood differently. A few interesting points:

1. Praise specific achievements and praise effort
2. Regular lack of sleep is damaging to children's health
3. Naturally, we tend to racially segregated, so it's wise to take steps to help your kids learn not to be ra More...

Originally a magazine article focusing on the science of parenting, this engaging (and highly readable) book looks at parenting from the realm of science.

Most important research findings:
Things do not work the same for children as they do in adults (and) positive traits do not ward off negative behavior in kids (a good kid still can be dishonest or engage in relational aggression).

In short:
A child who is dishonest is (also) showing signs of intelligence and social savvy. And, while praise wor More...

This book is a well-researched freakonomics of parenting, upending the prevailing myths of childrearing. I'm only two chapters in and am hooked. It's good for starting conversations and makes me rethink my childhood and little things I could now to improve my life.

Things I have changed about my parenting after reading this book:

I have my daughter "read" books back to me after I read them to her.

We make a plan for the day complete with drawings and handwriting practice.

I tell my kids that I can tell they worked really hard on something, instead of just telling them that they are great.

I try to respond more often when my 10 month-old son makes a voiced noise.

I have stopped letting my kids watch Arthur or Clifford.

I had a conversation with my 4-year old abou More...

Not exactly shocking but some interesting studies are discussed. The chapters are conclusion free so you can read about the studies and decide their relevance which I liked. The book was slanted for yuppie extreme parents (e.g. parents with kids on pre-school waiting lists from birth) and it described the world in two races with little mention of ethnic and national origin differences. It did however acknowledge that fathers exist and are interested in raising children which is unusual for paren More...

I don't normally read parenting books. I'm sort of a common sense parent who is suspicious of child-rearing "theories" and more likely to turn to my own mother or my child's teachers for advice than a book. However, my book club selected NurtureShock last month and I wanted to be a good sport. Color me surprised, but I loved this book. I found it insightful, thoughtful and truly valuable. After reading the first chapter I decided that I should probably take notes, and I have actually referred ba More...

this book has changed the way I think about child development. Anytime a book leads me to resolve to make positive changes in my life, I count it as good. This book has inspired multiple resolutions. Among them are resolutions to be more honest to and around my children, to spend more time with my children in imaginative play, to praise their specific accomplishments and effort, and to never judge any child on the results of an intelligence test, but to try to see them all as having equal potent More...

I would consider this book to be the Freakonomics of the children/parenting genre. It is fascinating and fun to read. Almost, all general assumptions are debunked in this book. There is definite food for thought in these pages. I was surprised about many findings, but I enjoyed that.

Topics raised: power of praise, sleep loss, teaching children about race, why kids lie, gifted programs, sibling effect, teen rebellion, self-control, playing well with others, jump-starting infants language skills a More...

Like most parenting books, this one tries to show you all the things you're doing shockingly wrong as a parent. The two ideas that come out as the main points of the book are that we should not assume children react or think in the same way adults do and emotional development is complex in a way that often means good and bad traits/behaviors correspond. In other words, kids sleep differently and understand racism differently than adults and are compulsive liars with violent tendencies toward the More...

So, I ran across this one browsing at the library and decided to grab it and get the "real" dirt on why siblings fight and what a person can do about it (help them enjoy each other, it would seem...also you could have predicted ahead of time what sort of big siblings your existing kids would be). That does sorta explain some things. :-/

The rest was interesting too; Why praise is bad? It's not, but praise effort and hard work rather than traits like "smart". If you tell a kid they're smart, they' More...

I would give this book more of a 3.5 if there were half stars. I like the "NurtureShock" part of the title, but new? It is not ground-breaking, or earth-shattering as the description may have you believe. For one thing, I had read at least one, possibly two of the chapters in the form of articles written for the New York Magazine online. Also, if you have taken a child psych/child development class in the past 5 or so years, not much of the information will be news to you.

The book does, however More...

This book was well written, which I share, even though I disagree with the author's premise. My opinion is that the author is too far on one side of the parenting spectrum. And I'm pretty "middle of the road" with the whole idea of attachment parenting vs. whatever the other side likes to be called. I read Babywise, and I cried, thinking that a parent would honestly let a new baby "cry it out" or in my thoughts, request help from their parent, and not receive it. I figure that a baby is set up f More...

I picked this book up because I had been trying to find better information/studies on some of these subjects. We are thrown so much information nowadays and it very hard to sift through it all and understand what has just been extrapolated and what has actually been thoroughly researched. I'd love to tell you that this is the book that does that but I am not convinced. Although I agree with many of the conclusions based on my own experience with my many children the actual scientist in me can't More...

So there are two reasons you should not trust my review of this book. #1 - as a devoted advice column reader, I know that people without kids (aka me) should never ever give parenting advice. I read this book because I think brains are interesting, not because I have a live experiment to test it out on. #2 - the book itself refers to outdated science based books about child development with a certain degree of scorn and total lack of self awareness that the science in this book will likely event More...

Wow - did i mess up some things with my kids.
And I understand how/why my Dr. Spock loving mother messed up her kids.
And not for any lack of trying to be a great parent.
Though I did learn of one tiny thing I did right when raising my children. I'm not a total loser...

I liked the examples & neuro-biology experiment test results.
The authors give specific examples, and even use themself as a reference or a 'bad example'.
Just trying to do the right thing can be very detrimental to a growing child More...

I am not generally a non-fiction reader and, while I had heard good things about this book, I hadn't been that eager to read it. It wasn't until Will's school (and all of the teachers) started reading it and the principal sent out an email to all the parents suggesting that they read it along with the school's teachers that I finally decided to pick it up. I was glad I did.

This book is NOT a recipe book. It doesn't "finger wag" and tell you how to parent or really have an agenda per se. The main More...

Think Freakonomics meets Malcolm Gladwell, for parenting. Or something like that. Here were my biggest takeaways:

SPEECH AND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION

* Baby DVDs are particularly bad, becasue we don't learn language from disembodied speech (TV or radio), but from real live folks. We need to lipread, and we need to interact.
* Parent responsiveness to baby's babble, expecially turn-taking and babyese, encourages them. (But don't overstimulate or over-reinforce less mature sounds.)
* Object labeling: w More...

My principal at my school suggested that I look into this book, knowing my super-nerdy, knowledge cravings in the basic science of raising kids. I liked this book so much, I just might have to buy it. It confounded everything I thought about praise--now I tell Phineas and my students that they are hard workers, not that they're the best. It's more motivating to them. I learned about teenage rebellion which will help me understand the needs of my mia maids. It taught me about how language is deve More...

In the preface, the authors touch on the role of the media in disseminating scientific discoveries and breakthroughs, noting that “many scientific investigations can’t live up to the demands of media packaging… [in the science of child development] 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.” In this book, Bronson and Merryman examine several different areas of child devel More...

So, you had your 2.2 kids and read all the right books, listened to all the right experts, and now you’re an expert too, right? Think again. After raising four children (only one left to put through college) and sitting down to read an adult book or two, I thought there would be nothing new for me to learn about the joys and tortures of parenthood. And then I read NurtureShock by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman.
This book will challenge everything you thought you knew about raising children. This More...

Nurture Shock is a book that shows why many modern day parenting strategies for nurturing and raising our children are not working. It covers a multitude of topics, from using praise, to why kids lie, "giftedness," racial interactions, sibling relationships, and even teen rebellion. The information is suitable for a wide range of ages - toddlers through teens.

Authors, Bronson and Merryman, systematically go through the topics, citing study after study on the scientific reasons of why kids aren't More...

This is a great book, and is applicable to parenting kids at around 6 months of age and older. I wish I had read it earlier (the day they published it actually)... The study information compiled in this book is fascinating. I like the scientific approach taken by the authors and the researchers. A lot of information in popular culture for the past 30 years is revisited with many different conclusions drawn (with much of the research completed in the last few years). I already do things different More...

I mostly liked this, because I am a big fan of building evidence-based skill sets. Each chapter focuses on relatively recent research in child development, and I think the authors did a fine job with presenting the both the process and the findings. I was sometimes a little put off by an underlying tone that the results are SHOCKING (well, maybe it's not THAT underlying if it's in the title) and they seemed to delight in the possibility that some people would be affronted by such a challenge to More...

(Rebecca this is for you!)
This is a MUST READ for all parents. It's a parenting book based on studies that set out to prove one thing, but ended up proving something different. I'm not a fan of parenting books per se, only because they feel so dependent on the current parenting fad, but this isn't necessarily advocating any kind of parenting styles, it's more of a "Hey, we didn't know kids think like THAT!" kind of book. It covers topics from lying to gifted education to violent television to ra More...

I found it to be as eye-opening as Malcolm Gladwell's books and Freakonomics. I do wish, however, that the authors spent more time discussing what works at the end of each chapter. In other words, don't just tell us why everything we've heard before is wrong, but tell us what we are supposed to do as well.

In particular, I enjoyed "the sibling effect" chapter because I want to do what I can to ensure my girls have a close relationship based on love and mutual respect. I may be especially in tune More...

4.5...I loved this book and want to buy it so I can highlight and take notes on how to raise better children. This is my kind of parenting book...conversationally written but with tons and tons of experiments and studies and numbers. Much of what I learned was not the intuitive kind of stuff and I loved that it spanned every age and stage. A few things that I learned: over-praise creates kids who think life should be easy or who stop when things get hard; it's a must change. We should talk about More...

I am giving this three stars because it was a well-written and provocative book with some (perhaps) useful takeaways to use with my kids. But! Sometimes I wanted to throw it across the room. Because it's like a Freakonomics or maybe Malcolm Gladwell for kid-issues, it's constantly turning common assumptions upside down, often based on the results of A Study. I am never sure how much weight to give A Study, so ultimately I feel more confused than ever about things I should be doing/saying to my c More...

As a nanny for children from the ages of new born to fifteen year olds, the book was a bit of a shocker. I still don't know how I feel about not praising children for their hard work, I understand over praising them will make them have a big head but to not be able to say you did wonderful is going to be hard. I am currently working on that right now but being that Im watching a five month old, I really don't believe that positive remarks are going to hurt her. I believe that up until kindergart More...