Po Bronson · 336 pages
Rating: (20.8K votes)
“The more controlling the parent,” Caldwell explained, “the more likely a child is to experience boredom.”
― Po Bronson, quote from NurtureShock: New Thinking About Children
“In taking our marital arguments upstairs to avoid exposing the children to strife, we accidentally deprived them of chances to witness how two people who care about each other can work out their differences in a calm and reasoned way.”
― Po Bronson, quote from NurtureShock: New Thinking About Children
“educational television had a dramatic effect on relational aggression. The more the kids watched, the crueler they’d be to their classmates. This correlation was 2.5 times higher than the correlation between violent media and physical aggression.”
― Po Bronson, quote from NurtureShock: New Thinking About Children
“When we changed the channel from violent television to tamer fare, kids just ended up learning the advanced skills of clique formation, friendship withdrawal, and the art of the insult.”
― Po Bronson, quote from NurtureShock: New Thinking About Children
“Children key off their parents’ reaction more than the argument or physical discipline itself.”
― Po Bronson, quote from NurtureShock: New Thinking About Children
“Might our culture-wide perception of what it means to be a teenager be unwittingly skewed by the fact they don’t get enough sleep?”
― Po Bronson, quote from NurtureShock: New Thinking About Children
“Parents often fail to address early childhood lying, since the lying is almost innocent—their child’s too young to know what lies are, or that lying’s wrong. When their child gets older and learns those distinctions, the parents believe, the lying will stop. This is dead wrong, according to Dr. Talwar.”
― Po Bronson, quote from NurtureShock: New Thinking About Children
“(Even for adults, seeing someone’s lips as he speaks is the equivalent of a 20-decibel increase in volume.)”
― Po Bronson, quote from NurtureShock: New Thinking About Children
“And the rule still holds true: more diversity translates into more division between students.”
― Po Bronson, quote from NurtureShock: New Thinking About Children
“She found that obese kids watch no more television than kids who aren’t obese. All the thin kids watch massive amounts of television, too. There was no statistical correlation between obesity and media use, period.”
― Po Bronson, quote from NurtureShock: New Thinking About Children
“Darling found that permissive parents don’t actually learn more about their child’s lives. “Kids who go wild and get in trouble mostly have parents who don’t set rules or standards. Their parents are loving and accepting no matter what the kids do. But the kids take the lack of rules as a sign their parents don’t actually care—that their parent doesn’t really want this job of being the parent.”
― Po Bronson, quote from NurtureShock: New Thinking About Children
“Thomas (his middle name) is a fifth-grader at the highly competitive P.S. 334, the Anderson School on West 84th in New York City. Slim as they get, Thomas recently had his long sandy-blond hair cut short to look like the new James Bond (he took a photo of Daniel Craig to the barber). Unlike Bond, he prefers a uniform of cargo pants and a T-shirt emblazoned with a photo of one of his heroes: Frank Zappa. Thomas hangs out with five friends from the Anderson School. They are “the smart kids.” Thomas is one of them, and he likes belonging. Since Thomas could walk, he has constantly heard that he’s smart. Not just from his parents but from any adult who has come in contact with this precocious child. When he applied to Anderson for kindergarten, his intelligence was statistically confirmed. The school is reserved for the top 1 percent of all applicants, and an IQ test is required. Thomas didn’t just score in the top 1 percent. He scored in the top 1 percent of the top 1 percent. But as Thomas has progressed through school, this self-awareness that he’s smart hasn’t always translated into fearless confidence when attacking his schoolwork. In fact, Thomas’s father noticed just the opposite. “Thomas didn’t want to try things he wouldn’t be successful at,” his father says. “Some things came very quickly to him, but when they didn’t, he gave up almost immediately, concluding, ‘I’m not good at this.’ ” With no more than a glance, Thomas was dividing the world into two—things he was naturally good at and things he wasn’t. For instance, in the early grades, Thomas wasn’t very good at spelling, so he simply demurred from spelling out loud. When Thomas took his first look at fractions, he balked. The biggest hurdle came in third grade. He was supposed to learn cursive penmanship, but he wouldn’t even try for weeks. By then, his teacher was demanding homework be completed in cursive. Rather than play catch-up on his penmanship, Thomas refused outright. Thomas’s father tried to reason with him. “Look, just because you’re smart doesn’t mean you don’t have to put out some effort.” (Eventually, Thomas mastered cursive, but not without a lot of cajoling from his father.) Why does this child, who is measurably at the very top of the charts, lack confidence about his ability to tackle routine school challenges? Thomas is not alone. For a few decades, it’s been noted that a large percentage of all gifted students (those who score in the top 10 percent on aptitude tests) severely underestimate their own abilities. Those afflicted with this lack of perceived competence adopt lower standards for success and expect less of themselves. They underrate the importance of effort, and they overrate how much help they need from a parent.”
― Po Bronson, quote from NurtureShock: New Thinking About Children
“Merry Christmas to all, and y'all sleep tight.”
― Po Bronson, quote from NurtureShock: New Thinking About Children
“All the studies point in the same direction: on average, children who sleep less are fatter than children who sleep more. This isn’t just here, in America—scholars all around the world are considering it, because children everywhere are both getting fatter and getting less sleep.”
― Po Bronson, quote from NurtureShock: New Thinking About Children
“siblings between the ages of three and seven clash 3.5 times per hour, on average. Some of those are brief clashes, others longer, but it adds up to ten minutes of every hour spent arguing.”
― Po Bronson, quote from NurtureShock: New Thinking About Children
“In one study, Cummings found that children’s emotional well-being and security are more affected by the relationship between the parents than by the direct relationship between the parent and child.”
― Po Bronson, quote from NurtureShock: New Thinking About Children
“This variable, how a parent responds to a child’s vocalizations—right in the moment—seems to be the most powerful mechanism pulling a child from babble to fluent speech.”
― Po Bronson, quote from NurtureShock: New Thinking About Children
“According to an extensive study comparing identical twins to fraternal twins, headed by University of New Mexico’s Dr. Philip Dale, only 25% of language acquisition is due to genetic factors.”
― Po Bronson, quote from NurtureShock: New Thinking About Children
Po Bronson
Born place: in Seattle, Washington, The United States
Born date January 1, 1964
See more on GoodReads
“And I told him, if I am so hard to love, then let me run wild.
My love is not a testament to my surrender. I will show you just how much I love you, with the inward draw of every breath—the collective sigh of the world and all its despair. But I will never give you what you want in chains.”
― Lang Leav, quote from The Universe of Us
“Le Guin’s Rule: One person cannot do two fulltime jobs, but two persons can do three fulltime jobs — if they honestly share the work.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, quote from The Birthday of the World and Other Stories
“A verse came to mind, one that has comforted Kari before. It was the shortest verse in the Bible: Jesus wept. If he cried over Jerusalem, if he cried over the death of Lazarus, surely he was crying now over the death of her dreams, the death of her marriage.”
― Karen Kingsbury, quote from Redemption
“Science is possible only where situations repeat themselves, or where you have some control over them, and where do you have more repetition and control than in the army? A cube would not be a cube if it were not just as rectangular at nine o'clock as at seven.
The same kind of rules work for keeping the planets in orbit as in ballistics. We'd have no way of understanding or judging anything if things flitted past us only once. Anything that has to be valid and have a name must be repeatable, it must be represented by many specimens, and if you had never seen the moon before, you'd think it was a flashlight.Incidentally, the reason God is such an embarrassment to science is that he was seen only once, at the Creation, before there were any trained observers around.”
― Robert Musil, quote from The Man Without Qualities: Vol. 1
“It is a strange notion that the acknowledgment of a first principle is inconsistent with the admission of secondary ones. To inform a traveler respecting the place of his ultimate destination, is not to forbid the use of land-marks and direction-posts on the way. The proposition that happiness is the end and aim of morality, does not mean that no road ought to be laid down to that goal, or that persons going thither should not be advised to take one direction rather than another. Men really ought to leave off talking a kind of nonsense on this subject, which they would neither talk nor listen to on other matters of practical concernment. Nobody argues that the art of navigation is not founded on astronomy, because sailors cannot wait to calculate the Nautical Almanack. Being rational creatures, they go to sea with it ready calculated; and all rational creatures go out upon the sea of life with their minds made up on the common questions of right and wrong, as well as on many of the far more difficult questions of wise and foolish. And this, as long as foresight is a human quality, it is to be presumed they will continue to do. Whatever we adopt as the fundamental principle of morality, we require subordinate principles to apply it by: the impossibility of doing without them, being common to all systems, can afford no argument against any one in particular: but gravely to argue as if no such secondary principles could be had, and as if mankind had remained till now, and always must remain, without drawing any general conclusions from the experience of human life, is as high a pitch, I think, as absurdity has ever reached in philosophical controversy.”
― John Stuart Mill, quote from Utilitarianism
Sword of Destiny
The Annotated Alice
Blood Meridian: Or t...
New Grub Street
Fifteen DogsBookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.
Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.
