NurtureShock: New Thinking About Children

Any false statement—regardless of intent or belief—is a lie.

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

The result is that sleep-deprived people fail to recall pleasant memories, yet recall gloomy memories just fine.

When the child—who’s put up with as much as he can handle—finally comes to tell the parent the honest truth, he hears, in effect, “Stop bringing me your problems!”

Students turn to cheating because they haven’t developed a strategy for handling failure. The problem is compounded when a parent ignores a child’s failures and insists he’ll do better next time. Michigan scholar Jennifer Crocker studies this exact scenario and explains that the child may come to believe failure is something so terrible, the family

kids are developmentally prone to in-group favoritism; they’re going to form these preferences on their own.

common among new parents—that the mythical fountain of knowledge is not magically kicking in at all.

Race and hairstyle had both become part of the identity formula.

the ability to repeatedly respond to failure by exerting more effort—instead of simply giving up—is