"NurtureShock: New Thinking about Children"

NurtureShock is my new favorite book (at least until my next new favorite). I just recently finished it, and I don't exactly agree whole-heartedly with everything in it, but that's okay.

But here's what I love about it. It doesn't take social wisdom as gospel, and it backs up its statements with research. I'm a self-proclaimed information junkie, so I eat up anything that's supported by numbers.

Case in point: What's the primary cause of obesity in children? Television, obviously.

Wrong. It turns out that kids who are obese don't spend any more time in front of a screen than slim children. Really?

Really.

This book will shake up your ideas of children and raising them.

Want one reason to read the book? After reading the chapter on sleep with my children, they all willing agreed to go to bed without coming up with reasons why they should stay up. They started discussing among themselves the most advantageous bedtime and working out strategies to get everything done before they needed to be winding down.

How's that for a recommendation?

This is along the same lines as Freakonomics, which I enjoyed - but not nearly as much. NurtureShock is likely to have a much larger impact on the way I parent.

"Hold on to Your Kids"

A long time ago - oh, I don’t know, several years, I guess - I stopped reading parenting books. After all, I’d read scores of them. I figured, what was the point? Either I agreed with what they said (so why waste my time?) or what they were touting didn’t mesh with my parenting strategies (so why waste my time?). My kids were older and I was pretty comfortable with what had become my parenting style - nothing I read was likely to shake things up.

Then I decided to become an API leader. As part of that process, I had to read three books, all of which had been published since I stopped reading: Hold On to Your Kids(Gordon Neufeld and Gabor Mate), Attached at the Heart(Barbara Nicholson and Lysa Parker), and Nonviolent Communication(Marshall Rosenberg).

So far I’ve finished only one of them, Hold on to Your Kids, and - as much as I hate to admit it - I’m delighted that I was required to read it.

Hold on to Your Kids is not just another parenting book. It’s not just another attachment parenting book. It gives good, solid evidence why staying close to our children and being their “compass point” is so much better than following society’s present-day norm of allowing peers to be our children’s guide. Over the past few generations, our “norm” has flip-flopped so that now we have an entirely skewed vision of what is, indeed, normal and healthy.

Over the last not-so-many years, our society has seen a shift in who should be the center of our children’s lives. Not that long ago, parents or other guiding adults were the anchors that kept our kids centered. But in recent times, that anchor has shifted to the peer group, and that has caused all sorts of problems. The authors explain not only what the problems are but also why they occur, and they give ways to solve the problems and bring our children back to us.

Absolutely missing in peer relationships are unconditional love and acceptance, the desire to nurture, the ability to extend oneself for the sake of the other, the willingness to sacrifice for the growth and development of the other. When we compare peer relationships with parent relationships for what is missing, parents come out looking like saints. The results [of having peers be the guiding force] spell disaster for many children.

Although I would have heartily agreed with the book’s premise before reading it, I would not have had any solid basis on which to place that opinion. So I was thrilled to see the authors give specific reasons why my ideas are right. hehe

Bear with me while I give a long quote, because it ties right into homeschooling and the inevitable “socialization” question:

The belief is that socializing - children spending time with one another - begets socialization: the capacity for skillful and mature relating to other human beings. There is no evidence to support such an assumption, despite its popularity. If socializing with peers led to getting along and to becoming responsible members of society, the more time a child spent with her peers, the better the relating would tend to be. In actual fact, the more children spend time with one another, the less likely they are to get along and the less likely they are to fit into civil society. If we take the socialization assumption to the extreme - to orphanage children, street children, children involved in gangs - the flaw in thinking becomes obvious. If socializing were the key to socialization, gang members and street kids would be model citizens.

The book is definitely worth reading, even though it’s sometimes like wading through a bog. I wish it had been written in a more approachable tone and edited back a bit (there’s quite a bit of repetition), but it’s worth slogging through nonetheless. (Maybe “slogging” is too strong a word.) The information is important enough that in a perfect world it would be accessible to a whole bunch of people, but with its depth it probably loses a goodly number of readers. Too bad.

This is a book that you can leave on your bedside table and pick up when you can read a page or two at a time. No need to sit down and digest the whole thing at once. But I do think it’s worth the effort.

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If you enjoyed this post, you might like "Parent/Teen Breakthrough."

Dangerous Books

Wendy's comment on my post yesterday on cooperative games got me thinking about some of our favorite books. These four books not only were big hits with the kids (meaning they sat down and read them and used them) but they also were my texts for a co-op class I taught a while back.

They're "must haves" for every homeschooler.

The Dangerous Book for Boys

This is simply a great book. In our co-op class of the same name, we made bows and arrows, go-carts, water bombs, secret inks, and lots more "boy stuff." And the girls liked it too, of course. That was the biggest class in the history of our co-op, if I'm not mistaken, and it was great fun.

The Daring Book for Girls

Another simply great book. Along the same lines as Dangerous Book, this one has lots of similar - but different - projects, not all girly. We made cootie-catchers, friendship bracelets, and god's eyes; we played tag and jump rope; and we made bandanas and saris.

How To Be The Best At Everything (The Boys' Book)

How To Be The Best At Everything (The Girls' Book)

These two books are great too and are in the same vein as the Dangerous and Daring books.

There is a bit of overlap between the books, but not enough to worry about. The Best at Everything books are smaller and more portable, but the Dangerous and Daring books have great illustrations.

These days they have lots of other extensions of these books, but we've definitely gotten our money's worth out of these four.

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If you enjoyed this post, you might like Lazy Dazy Summer.

Anno's Mysterious Multiplying Jar

This skinny book, Anno's Mysterious Multiplying Jar, is deceptive. It looks like a little-kid book, but it holds a wealth of information. From these 44 pages, my kids learned and understood - in 15 minutes - the basic concept of factorials. It held all three of my children enthralled ... even the oldest, who at the time was 12, and the youngest, who was 8.

The illustrations are luxurious, and the author has a way of explaining math. Anno's books are a delight for the eye and the brain, and if you can find them (many are out of print and sell for big bucks) - any of them - buy them!

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If you liked this post, you might enjoy "Running the Numbers"

"Parent/Teen Breakthrough"

I recently started reading a book called Parent/Teen Breakthrough: The Relationship Approach. I don't even remember where I heard about it. It's an old book - almost twenty years old - but it still has a lot to offer.

I'm not very far into it, but it has an interesting and refreshing way of looking at parenting kids when they become teens. The authors' premise is that, when kids begin to enter puberty, they switch from wanting to be nurtured, to thinking about becoming independent from us and getting ready to leave home, even if it's a subconscious thought.

In response, as parents, we must shift our focus from controlling and molding our children, to developing respectful, loving relationships with them. The more we control, the more they fight back, simply because their whole being is focused on becoming independent. The solution instead is to treat your child more as a peer and less as a problem to control. This is the first step to developing the relationship that you'll have with your adult child for many decades to come.

I'll write more about this book once I finish it, but for now I simply wanted to make a mention of it. It has some really good ideas about how to talk to your teens and preteens.

My only problem with the authors' approach is that I believe that we should be treating our children with this respect from birth instead of waiting until they reach puberty. My thought is that if you start out with your relationship with your child being mutually respectful, the teen years become much easier to handle, because you've already established that trust and respect.

However, I can't speak from experience yet, because we're just now beginning to enter this phase. So far, our pre-puberty period has been pretty easy - much easier than toddlerhood. It could be that we simply haven't gotten to the difficult stage. My sincere hope is that we've laid the groundwork for the relationship that this book talks about.

Unfortunately with parenting our children, we only know if we've done a good job once it's far too late to make any changes. No do-overs, ya know?

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If you liked this post, you might enjoy APing Older Children: I'm Always behind the Curve.