One of my very favorite guilty pleasures is watching an episode of Supernanny with my kids. Snuggled under a throw on the couch, we hoot and cackle at the chaos on the screen. I’m sure this can be read as terrible parenting, encouraging my little darlings to be catty and smug. But really, why assume children wouldn’t enjoy reality TV as much as the rest of us? What makes them any less voyeuristic, any less thrilled by the chance to voice their judgmental feelings in a setting where no one will end up offended? Indeed, I would think the genre would hold a special appeal for kids, who have so few truly safe opportunities to extol the failings of the adults in their world.
The other night, we caught an episode in which Supernanny Jo descended on parents who complained that their three sons were violent. Their constant scrapping drove Dad nuts, which he communicated by slapping their heads, jerking them about by the arms, or by flinging them forcefully against the furniture. In between swats, he explained to Jo that the children were aggressive because they played inappropriate video games at a friend’s house. His own caveman behavior he described as his way of backing up Mom, who spent most of her screen time looking scared of the whole lot of them.
“This is too easy,” proclaimed my oldest, 10, during the first commercial break. “They pick these totally out-of-control families because they make good TV. They need to do more normal families.”
Perish the thought. Can you imagine, hour after hour of Supernanny grilling mothers and fathers who have pulled out all the stops trying to do a good job — who have read the books, canvassed their playgroups, second-guessed their oh-so-reasonable impatience — but who still have spawned kids who are periodically aggressive, whiny, manipulative, and eat only beige food? There’d be nary a scintilla of escapism in that, would there?
And yet as it happens the well-intended raising the, um, juvenile, is the topic of the year’s most interesting, compulsively readable book on child-rearing. A compilation of Po Bronson’s and Ashley Merryman’s myth-busting New York magazine articles on the intersection between science and parenting, Nurture Shock debunks much of the conventional wisdom that has informed the current generation of parents. We are, it appears, parenting ourselves into nubs of exhaustion in pretty much the wrong way on pretty much every front.
Unless you belong to a doomsday cult, right about now you are asking yourself why you should keep reading this column. Because, Dear Reader, I made it to the end of the book in a couple of quick sittings and the truth — that we can stop struggling to live up to a hollow ideal — will set us free.
Don’t believe me? Consider my favorite of the social science research findings compiled by Bronson and Merryman: It is true that children exposed to violence on television are more aggressive with their peers. But a much stronger relationship exists between the amount of educational TV a preschooler watches and how mean they are to their playmates. Turns out those “safe” kids’ shows spend a lot of time showing the build-up of conflict or disagreement between characters, and comparatively little on the resolution.
And — and this is priceless — many are aimed at kids who are too little to relate the start of the show, when characters are mean to each other, to the end, when they kiss and make up. So mostly they just come away better schooled in relational cruelty. Or, as Bronson and Merryman put it, “Essentially [the researcher] found that Arthur is more dangerous for children than Power Rangers.”
Children today get an hour less sleep than they did 30 years ago, in part because working parents often feel too guilty to enforce bedtime with kids with whom they’ve spent precious little evening time. But we don’t fully appreciate the impact of that lost hour — or even a lost 15 minutes — on children’s developing brains: “Because much of that work is done while a child is asleep, this lost hour appears to have an exponential impact on children that it simply doesn’t have on adults,” Bronson and Merryman write.
One example the authors cite is that of the Edina public schools, which not long ago changed high school start times from 7:25 to 8:30 and saw a quick rise in the SAT scores of its top performing kids, from an average of 683/605 to 739/761.
And it’s not just school performance that takes a hit; a child’s emotional sturdiness depends on getting enough sleep, too. “Perhaps most fascinating, the emotional context of a memory affects where it gets processed,” the authors explain. “Negative stimuli get processed by the amygdala; positive or neutral memories get processed by the hippocampus. Sleep deprivation hits the hippocampus harder than the amygdale. The result is that sleep-deprived people fail to recall pleasant memories, yet recall gloomy ones just fine.”
Sound like anyone you know? The night after I read the Nurture Shock chapter on sleep, I moved up bedtime. We have a half hour less time together in the evenings, but we’ve made up much more ground than that just by virtue of the reduction in crabbiness.
Other topics tackled in Nurture Shock include sibling rivalry, teenaged defiance, self-esteem, the fundamental flaw in screening “gifted” kids, and the way parents approach children’s lying. In every instance, there’s science to show why the rational approach proscribed by our culture doesn’t work so well.
I promised you there was hope in all of this, didn’t I? Bronson and Merryman make a compelling case that there is. If we can give up seeing good traits, like honesty or kindness, as “Supertraits — moral Kevlar” that protect kids from also having bad traits (or bad experiences), we can gain a much better understanding of our children and their seeming contradictions. It’s not that you want to countenance lying, it’s that there is much to be gained by understanding that inborn “bad” traits are there for reasons.
Recognizing that both sets of traits have their functions might allow us to ease up on the kids — and by extension, ourselves. After all, as the authors conclude, “It’s when children are at their most mysterious that we, their caretakers, can learn something new.”
Beth Hawkins is a Minneapolis writer.
