NurtureShock promises to use the latest research on child development to explain some of the mysteries of childhood-and to explain where parents and teachers make mistakes.  Teachers should already be familiar with a lot of the material in NurtureShock-although it’s so engagingly presented and packed with recent scientific research that that they might want to read it anyway.

Luckily, NurtureShock never spends too much time on any one topic.  It jumps around from chapter to chapter.  This book could have been published as a series of essays.  The best chapter is the one on race, which poses a very interesting question:

When we tell children that everyone’s equal, do they understand that we’re talking about skin colour?

The answer, it appears, is no.  They don’t.  According to the authors, children aren’t colourblind -they know that there’s something important about skin colour and that adults don’t like to talk about it.  The book calls for frank talk that is sure to make some squirm-but I was amazed by the study where primary-aged children, were asked if their parents “Liked Black People”-only 14% said yes.  I taught grade 1/2 on my practicum-and I can’t help but wonder how they’d answer if they were asked about me.

The chapters on sleep (children need more) and lying (no, you can’t always tell-although teachers do better than any other group) are also very poweful-but they didn’t have the same impact on me.  I think they could have stood to go into more detail with the scientific studies-and of course, as a teacher, I want classroom applications-but that would have to be a different book.  Both enjoyable and informative, NurtureShock is a worthy purchase.

Rating:  ★★★★★