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!