Hi class,
Finally, here is information/cliff notes on the book I shared about during a couple of our L & L sessions, particularly regarding the inverse power of praise and how our goal is help our children learn to self-evaluate, self-correct, and, ultimately, self-validate. Plus, how telling our children they are 'smart' can actually cause them to give up sooner and put less effort into an activity. Most effective way to encourage, is to highlight their effort, how much they practiced, how they focused, that they persisted, how hard they tried, etc.
Bottomline, being smart is not a controllable factor, but how much one works, practices, studies, trains, IS something we can control!
"NurtureShock" New Thinking About Children by Po Bronson & Ashley Merryman. Love to discuss with you as you read. It's more like a textbook. You can read from start to finish or pick and choose the chapters that seem more relevant to your child/ren. Please let me know if anyone starts reading. Would be a great parenting book club book 📚
The central premise of this book is that many of modern society's strategies for nurturing children are in fact backfiring - because key twists in the science of child development have been overlooked. Per the authors of the book, the goal of this book is to teach us to "think differently--more deeply and clearly--about children." The book has chapters devoted to: the inverse power of praise, confidence, sleep, lying, racial attitudes, intelligence, sibling conflict, teen rebellion, self-control, aggression, gratitude and the acquisition of language.
WHY kids Lie: early lying experiences and parents reactions affect lying. "The irony of lying is that it's both normal and abnormal behavior at the same time. It's to be expected, and yet it can't be disregarded." Per Dr Victoria Talwar from Montreal, one of the world's leading experts on children's behavior: Children often lie to make us happy and to please us. The researchers suggest reading 'George Washington and the Cherry Tree' because Little George receives both immunity and praise for telling the truth. In this book George confesses to his father that he chopped down the prized tree with his new hatchet, the story ends with his father replying: "George, I'm glad that you cut down that cherry tree after all. Hearing you tell the truth is better than if I had a thousand cherry trees." Apparently reading this story reduced lying significantly in both boys and girls. Per Talwar, it's imperative to teach kids the worth of honesty just as much as they need to say lying is wrong. And the other reason children lie, they learn to lie from us. Pg 87: Based on adults journaling their own lies, "they admit to about one lie per every 5 social interactions" so about one per day on average. Our children learn that honesty often leads to conflict and dishonesty can help avoid conflict.
PG 91: Talwar states that parents often entrap their kids, putting them in a position to lie and testing their honesty unnecessarily. IE: Po Bronson knew 3 1/2 year old daughter scribbled with washable marker on dining table yet asked her in a disapproving tone if she did. Result: daughter lied to him for the first time.
Also, in this chapter, the researchers find that lying is a sign of a "both advanced cognitive development and social skills that honesty simply doesn't require...."
Bad news is, per Nurture Shock, if we just let the lies go, thinking it's a phase that kids will grow out of. It's not ~ the truth is, kids grow into it.
Andrea
Andrea L Gooldy
Parent Educator and Coach
404-932-9393
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