Nuture Shock: A review at 10%

My dad got me this cool contraption, called a Kindle. It was a bit of a congratulations gift, on my success at GMU thus far, I suppose. Anyway, I've been going crazy with it! (I read The Help, by the way, and LOVED it!) I recently bought Nuture Shock: New Thinking About Children by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman. It's regarding the way we raise our children, how we praise them and what we allow or disallow for them. I must admit, it's a bit of a struggle for me. But there's enough in it to make it worth continuing.

Firstly, the first seven percent of the book makes me feel like they made their point, I get it, and now they're just hammering a dent around the nail. But, just when I'm to the point of putting it down, I come across the next subject and the process begins again. Perhaps it is because it reminds me of how my psychology textbooks are written, but the style's not my favorite.

Some things I found fascinating, and worth sharing are as follows... (to make sure I don't mess the meaning behind their writing, I am going to attempt to quote, more than paraphrase.) The following are regarding the value of sleep in children's growths. They are highlights of the book from my Kindle.

- Highlight on Page 34 | Loc. 447-48  | Added on Monday, September 12, 2011, 11:00 AM

Tired children can’t remember what they just learned, for instance, because neurons lose their plasticity, becoming incapable of forming the new synaptic connections necessary to encode a memory.

- Highlight on Page 32 | Loc. 427-28  | Added on Monday, September 12, 2011, 10:52 AM

“A loss of one hour of sleep is equivalent to [the loss of] two years of cognitive maturation and development,” Sadeh explained.

- Highlight on Page 33 | Loc. 432-35  | Added on Monday, September 12, 2011, 10:53 AM

Dr. Monique LeBourgeois, also at Brown, studies how sleep affects prekindergartners. Virtually all young children are allowed to stay up later on weekends. They don’t get less sleep, and they’re not sleep deprived—they merely shift their sleep to later at night on Fridays and Saturdays. Yet she’s discovered that the sleep shift factor alone is correlated with performance on a standardized IQ test. Every hour of weekend shift costs a child seven points on the test. Dr.

- Highlight on Page 35 | Loc. 465-67  | Added on Monday, September 12, 2011, 11:05 AM

Kids’ sleep is qualitatively different than grownups’ sleep because children spend more than 40% of their asleep time in the slow-wave stage (which is ten times the proportion that older adults spend). This is why a good night’s sleep is so important for long-term learning of vocabulary words, times tables, historical dates, and all other factual minutiae.

- Highlight on Page 35 | Loc. 468-70  | Added on Monday, September 12, 2011, 11:05 AM

Perhaps most fascinating, the emotional context of a memory affects where it gets processed. Negative stimuli get processed by the amygdala; positive or neutral memories gets processed by the hippocampus. Sleep deprivation hits the hippocampus harder than the amygdala. The result is that sleep-deprived people fail to recall pleasant memories, yet recall gloomy memories just fine.

So, it seems that sleep is far more important than we act. We may "know" how important it is, but how many times do we say "ok" to staying up for one more "Tom & Jerry" to avoid the bedtime fits? These reports definitely give me more of a desire to get more sleep of an adult, wondering what exactly I think I am capable of! 

Please, don't skip the nap or wake them up prematurely each morning unless necessary for their rhythm and not for your time schedule. Let those facts and lessons sink into their permanent memory and increase their intellectual capabilities!

Touching on Human Development

This semester is loaded with Psychology. I have taken on nine credits worth of Psychology courses. Human Development, Psychological Factors in Aging, and Personality Theory. Now, two classes have one presentation and all three have two- three exams and that's it. HEAVY STUDY CLASSES. Great, what was I thinking?? And to boot, it all has very little to do with everything I've worked before- on early childhood education. So, I'm feeling a little out of my element.

Today, between church letting out and my birthday dinner with my dad and company, I watch my boyfriend hashing it out with the tree roots growing under his garden while reading up on my Human Development Text. I love how common sense it is, and how our society still needs it to be spelled out to them!

For example, as I've been saying since "Mosaic" (my old young adult group) was first incorrectly referred to as "a single's ministry," God cannot give you the man/woman you need until you've figured out who you- and that determines what's left that you need/want. Until you are who you are and confident in it, you can't know what you're in need of or what can be added to the life you're choosing.

In my text (Lifespan Development by Denise Boyd and Helen Bee), they reference the neo-Freudian Erik Erikson's work. "In the first of the three adult stages, the young adult buildso n the identity established in adolescence to confront the crisis of intimacy versus isolation. Erikson defined intimacy as 'the ability to fuse your identity with someone else's without fear that you're going to lose something yourself' (Erikson, in Evans, 1969). Many young people, Erikson thought, make the mistake of thinking they will find their identity in a relationship, but in his view it is only those who have already formed (or are well on the way to forming) a clear identity who can successfully enter this fusion of identities that he called intimacy. Young adults whose identities are weak or unformed will remain in shallow relationships and will experience a sense of isolation or loneliness."

Huh. Fascinating stuff, right?

I love that definition of intimacy. I may have to frame it...

So, in all this that I believed and preached before, I wish Erikson jumped off the page years ago and slapped me in the face with this paragraph!

Needless to say, this chapter is making me look hard at my generation and my own particular developments. The three adult stages being 1) identity versus role confusion. 2) intimacy versus isolation. 3) generatively versus stagnation- "primarily the concern in establishing and guiding the next generation" (Erikson).

I may be getting more out of this semester than I had so passively thought.