The new book “NurtureShock: New Thinking About Children” is getting a lot of attention for challenging the conventional wisdom about child rearing. I’ve caught snippets of co-author Po Bronson on NPR, Campbell Brown and Babble.com.

It sounds like a jolting compilation of scientific research about children and child rearing over the past 10 years. 
Topics include how babies develop language, whether intelligence tests in kindergarten are accurate predictors of future academic success, why siblings fight, why sending kids to ethnically diverse schools is not enough to ensure that kids will form friendships across racial lines and why modern, involved parents are not producing nicer children.

Perhaps the most important is the impact of sleep deprivation on kids (getting less than eight hours of sleep doubled the rate of clinical depression in high school students nationally) and the effects of letting children stay up even 15 minutes past bedtime.

Read more here.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 7th, 2009 at 10:47 pm and is filed under Parenting News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.