“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 have been overlooked.”

Can you tell if children are lying? Most adults believe they can: they also frequently believe that boys are more prone to lying than girls, and that younger children lie more than older ones. Sadly, none of that is true. Parents do no better than chance at telling whether random kids are lying, and only slightly better than chance with their own children. Gender does not correlate with lying, and younger children actually lie less than older ones. Less is a relative term, though: in household studies, 96% of kids lie, an average of once an hour for six year olds. Threatening punishment doesn’t appear to make a difference: what helps is emphasizing that telling the truth makes parents happy (since that is often the goal of the child anyway), and the value of honesty more generally.

For all that we were all kids once, it turns out our intuitions about what they are like are depressingly poor. Nurtureshock aims to capture some of the counter-intuitive or novel ideas researchers have found from actually working with large numbers of children, rather than just guessing (Ahem, Freud). Seeing their parents fight isn’t bad for children, it turns out, if they also witness a successful resolution. If the parents end the fight without resolving it, or move it upstairs or otherwise out of the child’s presence, on the other hand, children tend to be more aggressive and act out more afterwards.

Nurtureshock tries to cover a wide range of issues, sometimes at the price of oversimplifying. Some of the chapters are also fairly well known, at least to me, such as Carol Dweck’s work on fixed and growth mindsets. Others, though, raise some great points, ones parents may not even have considered, and even if the treatment is probably too brief to satisfy, it can serve as a useful starting point to tracking down more research. After all, research about kids is usually pretty cute, whether of children singing to themselves to resist eating a marshmallow, or managing to stand still for 2 minutes when asked to stay still, or 11 minutes if asked to mimic a soldier. A challenge for both parenting and teaching is that you often don’t see others parent or teach, and so rarely have your intuitions challenged: a little bit of critical reflection can go a long way.