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Know Your Child
Today's parents are faced with a wealth of exciting but often confusing new ideas about child development and parent-child relationships. In this liberating and enlightening book, Stella Chess and Alexander Thomas, whose pioneering studies have earned them a worldwide reputation, draw on their own and others' research to systematically sort out fact from fantasy about how children develop. In lively layman's language they provide authoritative and timely answers to the questions parents most often ask, such as "How crucial are my child's first three years?", "Can IQ be changed?", and "Is adolescent rebellion inevitable?". Along the way they explode many of the myths that shackle parents and professionals alike.
- GenresParenting
397 pages, Hardcover
First published July 9, 1987
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
March 31, 2021
Guarded recommendation
Reviewed in the United States on May 16, 2020
Front and center, the most useful part of this book is the 9 irreducible axes on which to evaluate a child's personality/temperament.
1. Activity level.
2. Rhythmicity.
3. Approach / withdrawal.
4. Adaptability.
5. Sensory threshold
6. Quality of mood.
7. Intensity of Reactions.
8. Distractibility.
9. Persistence and attention span.
Fabulously easy to read prose. Clear, simple, and not excessively dense or fatty--although it did take me several weeks to read this book.
I ran across it because I was evaluating the sources in another book called "Positive Development" (by an "Educational Doctorate" by the name of Jane Nelsen).
Her book was trash, and in trying to find anything salvageable the current book popped out at me from among the bibliography. (It is on the Basic Books imprint, and when people have something intelligent to say, they can get it usually published on that label.)
Something about which the authors are very clear is that..... A "psychological" diagnosis stops being a diagnosis only when everybody stops believing in it. And as proof, the authors compile working terms that have long since been forgotten because people stopped believing in them too long ago.
(Schizophrenogenic mother. Double bind. Refrigerator parents. Parentectomy.)
The authors also go through the Pantheon of Other Discarded Theories. (Behaviorism and John Watson, Pavlov, etc. Freudian Psychology, by Sigmund Freud.) And this time spent going through this helps us more clearly understand their epistemic foundations. (For the record, that is to create hypotheses that are testable against actual data sets.)
There was also recalled the work of a number of other helpful child development experts whose work has stood the test of time. (Jean Piaget. Lev Vygotsky. Jerome Bruner.)
Compared to a psychologist, a practicing psychiatrist likely has more clinical experience--and a greater likelihood of even having a passing idea that there is a physiological basis for mental problems.
The authors set up the New York Longitudinal Study, and talk a bit about the logic of the study. (What is the difference between a longitudinal vs. Cross-sectional study, and why was that appropriate for their purposes?)
It proceeds in the way that the scientific method suggested it should, which is: i)hypothesis generation, ii) testing, and iii)selection. And that is in distinct contrast to the way that psychology often works. Which, again, is deciding that something is true by definition (ie, tautologically).
The authors did a yeoman's work in getting this together, because it took them five years just to gather their 133-infant-sample. And then the Longitudinal Study continued on for the next 32 years (!)
My feelings alternate between thinking that: i) These authors were onto something, and ii) In the absence of a clear structure-function relationship between the brain and human behavior, some of their hot shot author will come along and demonstrate why these authors are making assertions with only minimal intellectual ballast.
On the good side, they do have *actual data* to work with. And, books that have come along several decades later have echoed much of what these authors have said.
(One such is Brian Caplan of "Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids." He also concludes the 80% of children's outcomes is genetic. Molecular geneticists have also found that there is some basic genetic architecture which may or may not be turned on in response to certain circumstances.)
But on the bad side, this book was written several decades before the sequencing of the human genome. And, now that we have that information available only $500 per total genome.....the molecular geneticists are only beginning to formulate germane questions.
**********
On the *really* bad side.....
If the authors can make well-worded cases to support things that actually turned out to be demonstrably false, then how much of the rest of the book is well-worded but demonstrably false?
Serious problems:
1. The authors use the words "temperament" and "personality" exhaustively throughout the text, but it still just isn't quite clear what they mean.
2. I would say that I was with the authors all the way up until page 362. But, then they told me a little bit too much about who they were: "This shameful situation in our country stands in sharp contrast to the attitudes and practices of most European countries ...... It is time to make the myth of the child-centered society a reality; we need only follow the examples of countries like Great Britain, Sweden, Japan, and yes, even China and Russia."
(Ah, Europe! The Paradise on Earth of all American intellectuals.)
I don't mean to be rude, but: Japan, China and Russia all have some extremely serious population replacement issues--of the type that no country has ever recovered from. But, they do have exemplary "child-centered societies" and we should draw them their example?
I guess they would also have ideal child care arrangements if they could just convince people to have babies.
3. They also repeat the tired old canard that "women earn $0.63 for every dollar earned by men." This was true in 1939. And it was true in 1986, when this book went to press. And it is still true about 34 years later.
It has been known for a long time that the distribution of females in the professional world is not the same as it is for men.
4. They devote 20 pages to taking apart the notion of IQ. And, if you did not know about g (general intelligence) , you would not find it out from this book. And it's not that they are unaware of factor analysis (that was used to establish g), because they do mention linear regression, multiple regression, and path analysis.
**********
There are 19 chapters over 377 pages of prose, and that works out to just slightly under 20 pages per chapter.
In principle, that is enough to read one chapter over a lunch break or in one sitting. But in practice, it is a bit difficult to see what the authors are getting at in certain of these chapters.
A few unanswered questions:
1. How well did this book age, really? Psychiatry is still a field that is in its infancy, and much of what earlier practitioners believe is later thoroughly refuted. In the same way that these authors take apart some Freud in almost *every single chapter*, how much are their speculation is treated the same way by later authors?
A lot of things have already changed since the writing of this book. (Who thinks that having a gay child is a big deal? Who hasn't heard of joint custody these days?)
The question of the appropriateness of working mothers was still ongoing at the time this book was written. (Who in the world who has questions about that anymore?)
2. Given the extremely incomplete/transitory nature of psychological thought, is a book like this even the right way?
Might it be better to just simply attempt duplicating the child-rearing processes of some successful/long-lived culture? (Chinese/Jewish/Armenian/Mormon, etc).
In those cases, they know how to rear children very successfully, but without quite knowing why.
*********
I've had to synopsize each chapter in one sentence both for the readers benefit and my own.
1. Some bizarre psychological schools of thought (specifically, "blame the mother") lead two authors to develop a more quantitative method to evaluate children.
2. There is some particular genetic architecture that makes a child "just the way he is," and the authors come up with a series of 9 axes on which to evaluate children--and that leads them to classification of 3 overall broad personality types.
3. Parents and children mutually influence one another.
4. Not being aware of a child's temperament can lead to "goodness of fit" problems.
5. Specific practical applications of Goodness of Fit across the 9-axis model.
6. Falsification of MANY other concepts of what is a typical infant's nature ("homunculus"/"tabula rasa"/etc), and movement toward determining the proper theoretical framework for exactly what is an infant--which they ultimately conclude is a human being with some basic programming that needs to be developed through interaction.
7. Children are always learning, but in different ways that are appropriate to differing developmental levels. (Cameos by (Jerome Bruner, Lev Vygotsky, and Jean Piaget.)
8. Cognition and emotion do not develop on two completely separate tracks, and there are still lots of notions (more appearances from Piaget, Bruner, Kagan, Vygotsky et. al) about how they interact with each other--and this is further complicated by the fact that neither cognition nor emotion are even clearly/well defined.
9. Once you cut away all of the Freudian psychoanalytic garbage, human beings have a sense of self from the earliest stages and this must be understood when making decisions with respect to the child's welfare. (The authors never seem to get tired of blowtorching Sigmund Freud.)
10. There is no consistent relationship between parental involvement and sexual orientation, nor are gender roles things to necessarily stress about because there is not really a consistent relationship between those and sexual orientation.
11. Armed with knowledge of temperament: parents must strike a happy medium between trying to change the world for their child and putting the child in a Bed of Procrustes.
12. Children's motion into adulthood through the bridge of adolescence needn't be looked on with fear and trepidation, but parents must be aware of the adolescent's inherent temperament and proceed judiciously with that information always in mind. If there are problems, in 98% of cases they will be visible by the time the child is 8 years old.
13. Throughout the entire range of all types of disability, the worst choice is for parents to deny its existence..... and the best choice is a careful study of the limitations of the child (in consultation with professionals) so as to know what he *can* do.
14. The IQ test is both very controversial and has been misused –– but it does still have some limited practical uses.
15. Parents as teachers or as friends are not mutually exclusive categories, and it requires some judgment to know when to be which.
16. Sibling rivalry is something that is definitely over diagnosed, and whether or not siblings will get along depends on many things.
17. Discussion of sundry family issues: grandparents, divorce, and joint custody, adoption.
18. Discussion of the effects of a mother working outside of the home on child-rearing.
*********
Verdict: Weakly recommended at the second hand price.
I'm going to give this one away immediately for several reasons:
1. Research that has come out just even in the last several years has demonstrated that 80% of what a child can do is genetic.
2. There is more current research into biological basis of behavior.
3. 90% of this book is letting us know that Sigmund Freud's ideas were trash, but I already knew that. (Who doesn't know that these days?)
4. We are taking a strictly empirical approach to raising our children. And that is to say doing what other people have done before for thousands of years. (Orthodox Judaism.)
Reviewed in the United States on May 16, 2020
Front and center, the most useful part of this book is the 9 irreducible axes on which to evaluate a child's personality/temperament.
1. Activity level.
2. Rhythmicity.
3. Approach / withdrawal.
4. Adaptability.
5. Sensory threshold
6. Quality of mood.
7. Intensity of Reactions.
8. Distractibility.
9. Persistence and attention span.
Fabulously easy to read prose. Clear, simple, and not excessively dense or fatty--although it did take me several weeks to read this book.
I ran across it because I was evaluating the sources in another book called "Positive Development" (by an "Educational Doctorate" by the name of Jane Nelsen).
Her book was trash, and in trying to find anything salvageable the current book popped out at me from among the bibliography. (It is on the Basic Books imprint, and when people have something intelligent to say, they can get it usually published on that label.)
Something about which the authors are very clear is that..... A "psychological" diagnosis stops being a diagnosis only when everybody stops believing in it. And as proof, the authors compile working terms that have long since been forgotten because people stopped believing in them too long ago.
(Schizophrenogenic mother. Double bind. Refrigerator parents. Parentectomy.)
The authors also go through the Pantheon of Other Discarded Theories. (Behaviorism and John Watson, Pavlov, etc. Freudian Psychology, by Sigmund Freud.) And this time spent going through this helps us more clearly understand their epistemic foundations. (For the record, that is to create hypotheses that are testable against actual data sets.)
There was also recalled the work of a number of other helpful child development experts whose work has stood the test of time. (Jean Piaget. Lev Vygotsky. Jerome Bruner.)
Compared to a psychologist, a practicing psychiatrist likely has more clinical experience--and a greater likelihood of even having a passing idea that there is a physiological basis for mental problems.
The authors set up the New York Longitudinal Study, and talk a bit about the logic of the study. (What is the difference between a longitudinal vs. Cross-sectional study, and why was that appropriate for their purposes?)
It proceeds in the way that the scientific method suggested it should, which is: i)hypothesis generation, ii) testing, and iii)selection. And that is in distinct contrast to the way that psychology often works. Which, again, is deciding that something is true by definition (ie, tautologically).
The authors did a yeoman's work in getting this together, because it took them five years just to gather their 133-infant-sample. And then the Longitudinal Study continued on for the next 32 years (!)
My feelings alternate between thinking that: i) These authors were onto something, and ii) In the absence of a clear structure-function relationship between the brain and human behavior, some of their hot shot author will come along and demonstrate why these authors are making assertions with only minimal intellectual ballast.
On the good side, they do have *actual data* to work with. And, books that have come along several decades later have echoed much of what these authors have said.
(One such is Brian Caplan of "Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids." He also concludes the 80% of children's outcomes is genetic. Molecular geneticists have also found that there is some basic genetic architecture which may or may not be turned on in response to certain circumstances.)
But on the bad side, this book was written several decades before the sequencing of the human genome. And, now that we have that information available only $500 per total genome.....the molecular geneticists are only beginning to formulate germane questions.
**********
On the *really* bad side.....
If the authors can make well-worded cases to support things that actually turned out to be demonstrably false, then how much of the rest of the book is well-worded but demonstrably false?
Serious problems:
1. The authors use the words "temperament" and "personality" exhaustively throughout the text, but it still just isn't quite clear what they mean.
2. I would say that I was with the authors all the way up until page 362. But, then they told me a little bit too much about who they were: "This shameful situation in our country stands in sharp contrast to the attitudes and practices of most European countries ...... It is time to make the myth of the child-centered society a reality; we need only follow the examples of countries like Great Britain, Sweden, Japan, and yes, even China and Russia."
(Ah, Europe! The Paradise on Earth of all American intellectuals.)
I don't mean to be rude, but: Japan, China and Russia all have some extremely serious population replacement issues--of the type that no country has ever recovered from. But, they do have exemplary "child-centered societies" and we should draw them their example?
I guess they would also have ideal child care arrangements if they could just convince people to have babies.
3. They also repeat the tired old canard that "women earn $0.63 for every dollar earned by men." This was true in 1939. And it was true in 1986, when this book went to press. And it is still true about 34 years later.
It has been known for a long time that the distribution of females in the professional world is not the same as it is for men.
4. They devote 20 pages to taking apart the notion of IQ. And, if you did not know about g (general intelligence) , you would not find it out from this book. And it's not that they are unaware of factor analysis (that was used to establish g), because they do mention linear regression, multiple regression, and path analysis.
**********
There are 19 chapters over 377 pages of prose, and that works out to just slightly under 20 pages per chapter.
In principle, that is enough to read one chapter over a lunch break or in one sitting. But in practice, it is a bit difficult to see what the authors are getting at in certain of these chapters.
A few unanswered questions:
1. How well did this book age, really? Psychiatry is still a field that is in its infancy, and much of what earlier practitioners believe is later thoroughly refuted. In the same way that these authors take apart some Freud in almost *every single chapter*, how much are their speculation is treated the same way by later authors?
A lot of things have already changed since the writing of this book. (Who thinks that having a gay child is a big deal? Who hasn't heard of joint custody these days?)
The question of the appropriateness of working mothers was still ongoing at the time this book was written. (Who in the world who has questions about that anymore?)
2. Given the extremely incomplete/transitory nature of psychological thought, is a book like this even the right way?
Might it be better to just simply attempt duplicating the child-rearing processes of some successful/long-lived culture? (Chinese/Jewish/Armenian/Mormon, etc).
In those cases, they know how to rear children very successfully, but without quite knowing why.
*********
I've had to synopsize each chapter in one sentence both for the readers benefit and my own.
1. Some bizarre psychological schools of thought (specifically, "blame the mother") lead two authors to develop a more quantitative method to evaluate children.
2. There is some particular genetic architecture that makes a child "just the way he is," and the authors come up with a series of 9 axes on which to evaluate children--and that leads them to classification of 3 overall broad personality types.
3. Parents and children mutually influence one another.
4. Not being aware of a child's temperament can lead to "goodness of fit" problems.
5. Specific practical applications of Goodness of Fit across the 9-axis model.
6. Falsification of MANY other concepts of what is a typical infant's nature ("homunculus"/"tabula rasa"/etc), and movement toward determining the proper theoretical framework for exactly what is an infant--which they ultimately conclude is a human being with some basic programming that needs to be developed through interaction.
7. Children are always learning, but in different ways that are appropriate to differing developmental levels. (Cameos by (Jerome Bruner, Lev Vygotsky, and Jean Piaget.)
8. Cognition and emotion do not develop on two completely separate tracks, and there are still lots of notions (more appearances from Piaget, Bruner, Kagan, Vygotsky et. al) about how they interact with each other--and this is further complicated by the fact that neither cognition nor emotion are even clearly/well defined.
9. Once you cut away all of the Freudian psychoanalytic garbage, human beings have a sense of self from the earliest stages and this must be understood when making decisions with respect to the child's welfare. (The authors never seem to get tired of blowtorching Sigmund Freud.)
10. There is no consistent relationship between parental involvement and sexual orientation, nor are gender roles things to necessarily stress about because there is not really a consistent relationship between those and sexual orientation.
11. Armed with knowledge of temperament: parents must strike a happy medium between trying to change the world for their child and putting the child in a Bed of Procrustes.
12. Children's motion into adulthood through the bridge of adolescence needn't be looked on with fear and trepidation, but parents must be aware of the adolescent's inherent temperament and proceed judiciously with that information always in mind. If there are problems, in 98% of cases they will be visible by the time the child is 8 years old.
13. Throughout the entire range of all types of disability, the worst choice is for parents to deny its existence..... and the best choice is a careful study of the limitations of the child (in consultation with professionals) so as to know what he *can* do.
14. The IQ test is both very controversial and has been misused –– but it does still have some limited practical uses.
15. Parents as teachers or as friends are not mutually exclusive categories, and it requires some judgment to know when to be which.
16. Sibling rivalry is something that is definitely over diagnosed, and whether or not siblings will get along depends on many things.
17. Discussion of sundry family issues: grandparents, divorce, and joint custody, adoption.
18. Discussion of the effects of a mother working outside of the home on child-rearing.
*********
Verdict: Weakly recommended at the second hand price.
I'm going to give this one away immediately for several reasons:
1. Research that has come out just even in the last several years has demonstrated that 80% of what a child can do is genetic.
2. There is more current research into biological basis of behavior.
3. 90% of this book is letting us know that Sigmund Freud's ideas were trash, but I already knew that. (Who doesn't know that these days?)
4. We are taking a strictly empirical approach to raising our children. And that is to say doing what other people have done before for thousands of years. (Orthodox Judaism.)
February 6, 2012
Tune your parenting to suit your children. And don't attack every difficulty as a challenge to be fixed. Helpful anecdotes here and there and a lot of reassuring "You're doing all the right things already, keep doing them."
November 23, 2018
I had a love hate relationship with this one. The first half of the book was a drag, then there were a few really good chapters. I would not recommend this to parents.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews