The book Nurture Shock is making big waves in parenting and education circles. Authors Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman are not afraid to tip parents' and teachers' sacred cows. They use science to question the received wisdom about issues such as self-esteem, self-control and IQ. Merryman recently told us about her book and its implications for schools.

Public School Insights: Let me begin a little outside your book. One of the things that first prompted my e-mail to you was your comments on the success versus failure of public schools and how the narrative that is being told about public schools right now might actually hurt the prospects for success. Could you explain that a bit?

Merryman: There is this constant drumbeat that American schools are failing our kids—that our schools are a disaster and kids aren’t finishing school. That kids aren’t prepared when they get to college, if they get to college. That they must do remedial level work. That they can’t read or write or anything like that.

It’s not that I think that schools can’t improve. Certainly they can. For kids at the bottom socioeconomically, and kids who we would label perhaps at-risk, schools definitely are a problem. And I have been tutoring inner-city schools for almost 11 years now, so I know the school that makes the front pages. My kids go to them.

But I wonder if sometimes when we hear some of the reformers say that [public education] is such a mess we just need to throw it out and start over…Is that actually a productive conversation to have?

I think [focusing on educational disasters] is a great thing to do in a political speech. It gets people upset and saying, “Gosh, we’ve got to do something.” But I am more interested in what people are actually doing. And I think sometimes when we say we have to throw it all out because the schools are so terrible, [the problem] becomes too overwhelming. It’s a problem that we can’t fix. The fact that you and I are going to volunteer at our local elementary school…Well, what’s the point? Because it’s just too small a contribution for too large a problem.

So I was suggesting in my column that if we focus on the success of kids, which is actually the normative behavior, perhaps we can use that to further improve where we are going. Everybody loves a winner, right?

So focus on that success, even in the at-risk situations. Maybe that is sort of a way to improve without feeling sort of overwhelmed by the scale of the problem.

Public School Insights: But given that there are certain cities like Detroit, Michigan, for example, where not even half the students graduate….

Merryman: I live in LA, which is about at 30% and is considered one of the worst in the country.

Public School Insights: Yes. So can we really focus on the successes of the only 30%--or perhaps even fewer than 30% because the question of what those kids are doing once they graduate also looms large? Is there a way of creating a really strong sense of urgency there, while asking how we spread success to the more than 70% who aren’t succeeding?

Merryman: Perhaps rather than saying “We need to start over” we need to say that “Okay, most kids in suburbia get through. What is it those schools that [urban] schools don’t have? And how can we improve them?”

We have white flight in public schools. A lot of that is because the upper echelon of SES in our communities won’t even consider having their kids go to public schools, even if their neighborhood school is perfectly fine, because they are so convinced that public schools are collapsing. They think that the best answer is to check out of the system. And we want them in the system.

I also think that when you are talking about the really at-risk kids, when you are talking about inner-city Detroit or inner-city Los Angeles, then you are not just talking about education. To get those kids lives to change, they need health care. They need more adults in their lives. They need food, more than once a day—if they are lucky it’s the free lunch from school.

So there’s the whole battery of things that would need to be fixed in those schools to really change kids lives, things that go way beyond, “Is this textbook two years old or five years old?”

I think another issue is that sometimes the reformers say, “We are doing something completely different here and it works,” and that may be absolutely true. But the reason it works is because they are dealing with a population of kids that need such special care, and it is not going to scale out to kids who are doing well in the traditional system—but you don’t need to throw the traditional system out.

I hate to be as cliché as “Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.” But I think that argument is going on in some of the reform conversations.

Public School Insights: Let’s get to your book, NurtureShock. It really tells people that, as parents, maybe their instincts aren’t right. Which seems to be the opposite of what we have heard so often about our parenting abilities.

Merryman: I think it says that what we think are instincts are really not instincts at all.

“Instincts” are neurologically driven. We know where in the brain the maternal instinct lies…We can map it. And along with that is a desire to protect the child and nurture the child. But that’s where instinct really stops.

The rest of it is pretty much learned behavior, and what we think of instincts has a lot to do with how we were raised—the cultural zeitgeists and ideas at the time. We were trying to clear away the zeitgeists and actually look at what the science is doing.

An example of that is the science that we have uncovered on praise and building self-esteem. It is taken for granted that you have to build a kid’s self-esteem. That has certainly been a cultural main idea of thought for about the past 20 years—maybe 30 at this point. But that is not an instinct—it’s not a biological or evolutionary concept. It’s a strategic concept that was adopted and it turns out there is little scientific evidence to support it. Oops!

Public School Insights: So we are mistaking our learned behavior for instinct. As you know, issues of self-esteem have been staples of education discussions for decades.

Merryman: Yes. That kicked off really in 1984. The state of California had a task force created on self-esteem, and could self-esteem be boosted? And the idea was that if we increased kids’ self-esteem they would achieve more.

Self-esteem is one of the most researched topics in all of society. Roy Baumeister did a review of the literature. He and his team looked at over 15,000 studies. And they found that self-esteem increased achievement, leadership, that people had more friends. They were even more attractive.

But Roy looked and he realized that of the 15,000 studies that had found things like that, only about 200 of them were actually good science. The problem with those other 14,000+ studies was that the way they found out that people with high self-esteem achieved is they asked people who had high self-esteem what they thought of themselves. Not surprisingly, people with high self-esteem think they rock.

But when you ask the coworkers or the roommates or the bosses or the college students who were with them, you get a completely different story. It turns out that that people with high self-esteem didn’t achieve more, they weren’t more attractive, and they weren’t nicer be around. They thought they were so fabulous, they never had an impetus to improve.

So it turns out that achievement builds self-esteem, but building self-esteem does not increase achievement—it’s a one-way street, not a two-way.

In fact, one of my favorite experiments that Baumeister had a hand in was one in which a researcher sent his failing students an e-mail saying, “You are doing really badly in my class, but I just want you to know that I think that you are a really good person.”

And the people who got that e-mail…their grades dropped lower. Why did the kids’ grades drop? Because when you go to school you are looking for the professor’s approval. And you work hard to get the professor’s approval.

But this professor’s e-mail’s said, “Notwithstanding the fact that you are doing terribly, I still approve of you.” If you are great and you’re fabulous, then there is no reason to work harder to change that.

Public School Insights: On the other hand, there has been concern recently that students who have been struggling, when presented with consistently failing grades or consistently failing assessment and test scores in a system that places a high premium on test scores, might feel unmotivated. They might check out. Does the research tell us anything about that?

Merryman: I haven’t seen any research that’s directly on point in that. But here is how I would apply the research I that I know to that scenario.

In the self-esteem movement, we tell kids, “You’re smart.” Eight-five percent of American parents think it’s important to tell their kids, “You’re smart.” And it’s not just parents. It’s teachers, it’s other kids in the class—“Ooh, you’re the brainiac.” And that becomes part of the self-image that is really important to them.

It’s not that the praise is ineffective. It’s extremely effective. But what happens when you encounter failure? If you focus on who they are as smart people, when they fail, the lesson that they perceive is “so I am not really smart.” “I’m the dummy” becomes the replacement of the self-image.

What we really want to do is focus on is kids working hard, and letting them know that if they work hard they can improve themselves. Letting them know their destiny is in their own hands.

I haven’t seen any studies on this…but I wonder if when the kids start out being told “You’re wonderful,” and then figure out they are the dummy, every one of those tests just re-confirms to them, “I’m the dummy.” It’s not about how much they learned or how much they studied, it’s a reflection on his self-image.

The answer there is NOT just to tell them, “No honey, you are not dumb, you’re smart.” Because they won’t believe that anyway. Kids only up to the age of 7 believe in praise at face value. At that point, and a lot of this is because of we over-praise, kids at 7 and older think that the kid who’s praised is actually the one we are worried about.

We don’t actually use praise anymore to recognize achievement. We use it to encourage. I confess that as a tutor I did this. “Oh honey, you did that so well and I know you are going to do even better next time.”

The message there is really not, “Oh, honey, you did well” but “Well, you did borderline satisfactory. Now I am really just looking for you to do better next time.” And that our praise and our approval are conditional.

I think that it may be the kids who are told earlier on that they were brilliant—or told they were dumb, told their school is not a success and we don’t expect anything from you—will live up or down to the cards that they have been dealt.

The answer then is about teaching skills. It’s not about empty praise, that “This test score doesn’t mean anything.” It means, “Honey, this test score doesn’t say anything about you as a person, but it does say that we need to work on your math skills. Because you need those for a job.”

It’s hard with testing, because testing feels like it’s valued as the ends and not the means. But we need to teach kids that learning is the means. It’s about being willing to make a mistake and then learn from it and move on. If you are not making mistakes you are not learning—you’re not trying. And I think that is really where we need to focus.

Public School Insights: That leads to another chapter in your book—the chapter that deals with gifted kids. The question is how soon you can determine whether a child is “gifted,” and how malleable their intelligence becomes after that. There has recently been a greater tendency in some quarters to say that intelligence is fixed, you can measure it early. Much more troubling, some people are suggesting that it is determined by race or socioeconomic status. What have your findings told you about that kind of argument?

Merryman: There is no neurological evidence supporting the idea that intelligence is fixed.

They learned where things happened in the brain by accident. A guy would get a stake through his head in one corner of the skull to the other corner of the skull, and then he would forget stuff. And they would say, “Wow, memory must be located in that part where the stake took it out.” That is how a lot of neuroscience began. That is how Broca’s area was discovered in terms of where language is in the brain and that kind of thing.

But with the advent of structural MRIs and functional MRIs we are actually becoming more able to actually locate where different activity happens in the brain. We located, like I said before, maternal instinct. We know where rewards are. We figured out that language is in Broca’s area and Bernanke’s area.

The one thing that we couldn’t find in the brain was intelligence. Irony. We found romantic love before we found intelligence.

Neuroscientists really in the past year or two are learning that true intelligence is not about a particular part of gray matter, but the interconnectivity between the areas of the brain.

White matter—which is the venue for these interconnections—starts developing in utero, and it continues until at least 13. Some argue 25. And there are arguments that it continues permanently.

What we are finding is that intelligent kids…we do see them at an early age. We do see that bright kid. But that early brightness is very often socioeconomic background, and not necessarily the early indicators of an Einstein.

In fact, a longitudinal study at NIH found that the brilliant kids were actually three years behind in brain anatomy than the merely smart kids. We don’t necessarily know why, but it could be that the brain of the truly brilliant kid actually develops slightly slower, giving the kid more time to make those neurological connections.

Now, one out of every three of us will have an IQ swing of as many as 15-30 points. Some of us will have multiple IQ swings between 15 and 30 points for the first fifteen, twenty years of our lives.

But we have pre-schools that are testing kids for IQ at 36 months. And advertising it—that’s their claim to fame. That we can spot these early geniuses sooner.

The neuroscientists hate this. The guys who write the IQ tests—and I talked to all of them—hate this.

One guy, Cecil Reynolds, told me that if we were doing to special ed kids the same sort of one-shot assessment we do for giftedness, it would be a violation of federal law. Because in federal law, special ed requires constant reassessment of progress, development and status.

But IQ tests for gifted kids are given in kindergarten. Then the class is filled and they only let you in if there is space available, if they have the money to retest you, and all of those things. And they never reassess the kids who are in the gifted program—once you are gifted, you are gifted for life.

Now, gifted programs vary dramatically. In some places there is a special school. For some kids, it is maybe an enrichment class once a week. So it’s hard to critique gifted programs as a whole, because they just all vary so dramatically. And certainly kids need enrichment, and if kids are doing advanced work they need that opportunity to do that advanced work.

But what is the advantage of this early identification? All the science says if you are doing any real assessment before third grade, you are only finding socioeconomic advantage and not actual intelligence or giftedness at all.

It’s just that once you keep getting into more rarefied environments, then those kids benefit. If gifted program kids get to go to museums, it’s not surprising then they know more about art. So in some ways that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

In terms of what you were saying about socioeconomics and race…Neurologically, there just really isn’t any support for that.

We do see country patterns, where there are sort of national comparative IQs. And westernized more affluent countries that have more education have a national IQ that is higher than another country that would be more developing. But your IQ rises about, I think, eight points for every eight months you are in school. So if you educated that population we would expect that their IQs would go up.

So I don’t really see any real neuroscience supporting any racial or socioeconomic differences. It’s just that as the kid develops, what kind of enrichment they are getting, what kind of environment are they in? And does that have an effect? Absolutely.

Public School Insights: That’s where the business of society in schools comes into play. That is our responsibility, to create those conditions and those environments.

Merryman: Right. And make sure that the kids who don’t have it get more.

I was talking to one scholar, and hopefully this will resonate for you as much as it does for me. He said, “Creating the program Headstart was the worst thing we did.” Not the program itself. He loves the program. We absolutely need to get those kids into early education as soon as we can. He had no problem with that, wished everybody would have that access.

The problem, he argued, was we named it “Headstart.” It told families of the upper and middle classes that child development is a race. And the mentality of early advantage, and when does this kick in, and when it is too late, and we’ve got to start even earlier than before…has led to some of the sort of frantic parenting that has been going on today.

There is no data to support his argument, but I think it’s sort of a fascinating idea. When did we decide that childhood and child development was a race, and that it was a point of bragging that your kid was in gifted programs at three.

Public School Insights: Another chapter of your book deals with the issue of self control and whether we can teach it. This is an important issue. A lot of schools are dealing with discipline. Often when you hear the public speaking about what they think of American schools as a whole, to get back to the very first question we discussed here, they’ll say, “They’re out of control. The kids are out of control.”

Merryman: But that is actually a reverse NIMBY—that’s a reverse Not in My Backyard problem. If you ask them, “How is discipline at their kids school?,” the majority of them say that its fine. They say that the school discipline responses are appropriate.

It’s the other kids’ schools problems, but my kids are doing pretty well.

Public School Insights: Which we see again and again in all the polling data we do as well. But then, how do we teach self-control, or is that even the issue we should be confronting here?

Merryman: Right now everyone is talking about Walter Mischel’s experiment with the marshmallow. You put a kid in a room with a marshmallow, and say, “Don’t eat it…We’ll be back, and if you don’t eat it we will give you two marshmallows.” Or we’ll give you an extra cookie—there are whole bunch of different variations of this. And Walter found that if you can not eat the marshmallow at [age] 4, it is predictive of SAT scores.

So now there are frantic parents testing their poor kids with marshmallows all over the country. I don’t think this was Walter’s intent—I have not talked to him about it, but I really don’t think that was what he planned on happening.

So we have this concept of self-control, but I think that the scientists understand it differently than the lay people. Self-control isn’t just abstaining from the marshmallow. What we are really looking for is self-direction and self-regulation. The fact that a four year old or five year old knows that it’s time to sit down and read, and then they know it’s time to run around and scream their heads off during recess. But they don’t scream during reading and sit there quietly during recess.

For a long-time, psychologists and educators did not think self-control could be taught—they thought it was a trait. But, it turns out, that is not actually true. You can teach self-control. But where the failing came was we got it confused with that refraining.

Self-control meant “Pay attention. Sit there. Don’t move.” That is not an effective way to develop it. Because then it is about punishment…and you know the classic story—don’t think of the elephants, and then you tell a story and everyone is thinking of the elephants. Well, you are telling a 5 year old “Don’t stand up,” all they want to do is stand up, right?

So a couple researchers in Denver, Elena Bordrova and Debbie Leong, did a tradition pulling from a Russian scholar Vygotsky, and said how else can we develop self-control and self-regulation? And they are actually doing a lot of it through play.

Where Elena really makes sense to me was she said that there was a famous study done in the Soviet Union, when it was still the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War. A researcher asked these children to stand still, and they could last a minute. Then they asked other kids the same age, the researcher said, “Can you stand like a soldier?”

The kids weren’t breathing for seven minutes at a time. Well, they were breathing, but I mean they were frozen. They weren’t thinking, “Oh my gosh I can’t move,” they were thinking “Wow, I have to look like a soldier—this is what a soldier does.”

And every time I speak to a group of parents about self-control, and they’re all sort of looking at me…saying “Well, I don’t know…MY kid…” I say, “Picture him as the most fidgety, whiny, you think he’s never going to do anything…” Ask that kid to play hide and seek, and you can’t find him, can you? If you just said, “Sit there and be quiet,” he couldn’t do it, but if you told him to play hide and seek, he’d be a mouse.

So what we want to do is develop self-control in ways where the kids are thinking not about refraining from movements or paying attention, but participating in events that are so involving to them emotionally that they are learning those traits without conscious effort.

So for “Tools of the Mind,” which is Elena and Debbie’s program, they have kids go through a scenario. Like they’ll decorate the classroom like a firehouse, and they’ll spend a week talking to the kids about fire stations. Maybe a fireman came and gave a lecture, or they went to a fire station.

Then they have this week where they can play fireman. They say, “Okay, who are you going to be?” And one of the boys says “I am going to be the fireman” and the other kid says, “Well, I am going to be rescued.” The other kid says, “Well, I am going to be the dispatcher, the 911—I tell people where to go.” Then they have to role play that through for a half an hour. And they stay in character.

They are self-controlled because they are paying attention to, are they in character? Are they acting in the same way that they other people who taught them the last week were?” And they are not thinking about themselves.

It’s also a great way to develop empathy, because they are thinking about how other people feel, and what are other people’s concerns. And when you are aware of other people’s concerns, then you start regulating your behavior in a way that will best suit the situation.

At one point a food fight apparently broke out in one of the schools where a Tools program was. And you know, they are all kids—everybody lost it.

Not one kindergartener picked up a scrap of food. They literally sat in the middle of a food fight, food flying over head. And they went back to their teachers, and they said “I can’t believe how out of control those older kids are.”

When you ask the kids, “Is it hard for you to pay attention in class?” They say, “Yes.” Say, “Well, that’s a skill and we are going to learn it. Just like we learn our times tables.” And the kids say, “Okay.”

Public School Insights: And they do?

Merryman: And they do.