NutureShock – New Thinking About Children – Meet co-author Ashley Merryman

posted by Karen Quinn, The Testing Mom - March 28th, 2011

Karen recently interviewed co-author of  NutureShock – New Thinking About Children – Ashley Merryman.

Listen to Karen’s interview on the 30-Minute Mom radio show. Or you can read the transcribed version of the show below:

• Karen Quinn: Welcome to The 30 Minute Mom on WebTalkRadio.net. I’m Karen Quinn, mother of two and your host. Like you I’m too busy with real life to read all those advice filled parenting books. On this show we talk to experts and parents who have gone before us for insights and advice on how to make the hardest job in the world just a little bit easier.  If you want to know a little bit more about me you can check out my website at KarenQuinn.net where you can read my personal blog or visit TestingForKindergarten.com or TestingMom.com where you can learn about the work I do with children. I open up this show every week saying that I’m too busy to read all of those advice filled parenting books. This is really true. I am busy and I know you are too. But I do manage to get in a few of these books every year. One of my absolute favorites is NurtureShock – New Thinking About Children, which has just come out in paperback. I am thrilled that we are going to be speaking with one of the co-authors today, Ashley Merryman. I love this book and I’m going to tell you why. Each chapter takes on a parenting or education belief that we rely on to raise our kids. Many of these beliefs are flawed. It’s upsetting to find out how many of our old tried and true notions are unsupported by science. For example, we think praising our kids is good. It turns out that telling kids they are smart causes them to underperform. We think shows like Power Rangers are bad, so we steer our kids to programs like Arthur. It turns out that these safe shows cause more schoolyard cruelty than the violent ones.
  I’m so happy that Ashley Merryman is joining us today. She is the co-author of NurtureShock, as I said before, with writer Po Bronson. She is a journalist whose work has appeared in the Washington Post and New York Magazine. She also runs a tutoring program for inner city kids in Los Angeles. Ashley, thank you so much for being here today.
• Ashley Merryman: Thanks for having me.
• Karen Quinn: I have so many questions for you, as I had told you before. Let me start by saying that what I hope our audience can walk away with is first just a taste of the different parenting myths that you challenged in NurtureShock. Second, some ideas about changes that they might want to make in the way they’re bringing up their kids based on some of the discoveries you’ve made. I know it kind of sounds farfetched to talk about reading a book can change the way you bring up your kids, but I actually was talking to a mother today. I told her that I was going to be interviewing you. She said she had read NurtureShock and that it had caused her to change the way she was bringing up her daughter. She talked about the chapter on praise. She said that she used to always tell her daughter how smart she was because she didn’t want to focus on how cute and pretty she was. She was trying to focus on her brains and accomplishments. Now she praises her for trying hard and doing her best. I wonder if you can talk about what you learned about the paradoxical impact of praise when you were writing the book?
• Ashley Merryman: Sure, but just a little bit of a disclaimer to people who maybe haven’t seen any of my writing about kids. NurtureShock is not a parenting advice book. For people who read it expecting that, they might be a little frustrated.
• Karen Quinn: You’re right. It’s not an advice book. It’s information that changes the thinking that you may have been doing about the way you are bringing your child up.
• Ashley Merryman: Right. Our interest is sort of presenting the science of child development and saying, “These are the findings we’ve seen.” We leave it up to each reader, each individual parent to decide that, “This resonates with me and I think I want to change my behavior.” A lot of people read it and say, “This confirms everything I ever thought.” People have different reactions to it.We learned from the scientists that if someone says, “I read this and it doesn’t apply to me,” I’ve seen scientists who’ve studied kids on a particular issue for 20-30 years and a parent will come up and say, “You’re totally wrong about this with my kid,” the researchers don’t say, “You’re only the parent of one kid and I have thousands of kids I’ve worked with.” What they say is, “Really? What’s going on in your household? I’d love to hear it.” There’s an enormous amount of respect in the scientist’s community for parent’s experiences. I never want to feel like people are thinking that I have the answer for you. I have ideas that may cause you to reappraise what you’re doing, or not.
• Karen Quinn: Right, that makes sense.
• Ashley Merryman: There are books out there, some great books, about the bullet point tips on what to do. That’s not exactly what we’re doing.
• Karen Quinn: That’s what I liked about it, really too, because it really made you think. It wasn’t telling you to do this. It made you think about how this applies to me. I think that’s great.
• Ashley Merryman: I also think that hopefully when you hear – everybody has advice on how to raise a kid, right? Not that you should, but you could throw a rock on the street and hit somebody and they could tell you how to raise their kid. Throw another rock and somebody else could have completely different opinions. How do you figure out which one of those opinions to listen to? Hopefully by looking at what the scientists are asking that will give you other questions in terms of the next time you hear that polka dots are the key to academic achievement. You could say, “Let’s actually look at some of that and put that in context and see what we should be doing if we really need to throw out zebra stripes for polka dots.” I hope it was okay to give that disclaimer.
• Karen Quinn: I appreciate it.
• Ashley Merryman: I don’t want people to –
• Karen Quinn: I think that’s actually a great disclaimer to make. I think that’s the way to read the book, is, “What does this say to me?” It helps you question a lot of things, like you said. You can start asking questions like, “What’s behind this advice?”
• Ashley Merryman: Exactly. I think that ultimately that’s more valuable than a particular piece of advice, even if it’s that one piece that’s golden. To keep going forward and look at other things I think is exciting. I do that for the way I work with my tutoring kids. The science actually changed that. Po changed the way he parents and the way he coaches his soccer teams. We do that all the time.Obviously the real catalyst for the book was that Po and I came across the research of Carol Dweck. Columbia University actually paid one of those big survey companies to ask people whether it’s important to praise kids for intelligence and say things like, “Honey, you’re so smart.” 85% of American parents agreed that it was important to do that kind of praise. But Carol said, “Is it right? Is that true?” In the series of lab experiments that she’s done for, now about 20 years, and replicated this data from preschool students all the way to Columbia Ivy League med students, that kind of praise like,  “You’re so smart, you’re so talented, you’re so special, you’re so wonderful,” doesn’t actually increase achievement.What it actually does is it backfires. It’s not that it’s ineffective. The problem is it’s too powerful. Kids become really invested in this idea of, “I’m smart, I’m special.” They don’t want to do anything that would jeopardize that label. If a kid comes home and has an A on their test, you go, “Oh my gosh honey, you’re so smart. You got an A.” Tomorrow they may come home with a quiz and they got a B. What are you going to say? “Honey, apparently you’re not quite as smart as you were yesterday, but oh well. It’s all right.”

  Where does the kid take that and what does he do with that? These kids get too invested. In fact, in one study that Carol did she actually found that kids who had been praised for intelligence told her that when the quiz got hard they’d be more willing to cheat the next time. Why cheat? “Well, I could have done it if I wanted to, but I don’t really care so I just copied the guy next to me’s answers. It doesn’t reflect badly on me. It’s the fact that he was stupid and he got questions wrong. I could have if I’d wanted to.” It’s about pushing that being on the spot to copying someone else and saying, “I could have done it if I had wanted to, but I didn’t want to.” Jennifer Crocker has found that consistently over praised kids can’t pick majors when they hit college because they don’t want to proclaim, “This is my area of focus,” and then a year or two down the road realize they’re really not that good at it.

• Karen Quinn: What instead does she say that parents should be saying to their kids instead of, “You’re so smart?” I have to say I was observing some kids being tested very recently and I was watching the teacher who when the kids would come up with the answers she kept saying, “You’re so smart, you’re so smart.” I kept thinking about your work and your book and I almost wanted to say, “You shouldn’t be saying that.”
• Ashley Merryman: I totally would have.
• Karen Quinn: I didn’t want to do it but I was thinking maybe I should.
• Ashley Merryman: I would have been like, “Stop!” I probably would have just exploded. Actually, truly, my tutoring kids are obsessed with being smart. They’re all convinced they’re not smart. They all think that smart is the key. What I tell my tutoring kids, I sort of defang the whole smart label. I say, “You are smart. You are not smart. I don’t really care. What I care is that you do the work and you learn the material. God forbid you trip and break your leg; you don’t want me fixing it. I’m smart but I didn’t go to medical school. I don’t care if you’re smart. I want you to do the work. I want you to learn and understand.”I try to debunk the idea for kids that smart ultimately means anything and understand that there’s a glamour over that label that I try with my tutoring kids to brush aside. What parents and teachers should be doing is more focused on what Carol Dweck calls process praise. It’s the ability to not just think, “that’s great,” but give me feedback that lets me replicate this better next time.My favorite example is if you think of the four year old who’s drawing colors. I totally would have done this before I had read Carol’s work and all of the literature. There’s actually a new study that came out of pediatrics today about how much of a problem this is. I was reading it when I was supposed to call and talk to you.
• Karen Quinn: I want to read it. What does it say?
• Ashley Merryman: The problem with that four year old drawing is I would have gone up to her a few years ago and said, “Oh my gosh honey, that is just the prettiest picture ever. You are such a talented artist.” I would have meant this with all the love in the world. But think about it from the four year old’s perspective. “Really? I was just coloring. This is the prettiest picture ever? Oh my gosh, what did I do? I can’t make the prettiest picture ever the next time I draw. It’s going to be second best because I can’t top the prettiest thing ever. I peaked and I’m four.”What we want to do is say, “Honey, I really like the way you used different colors this time.  You stayed on the paper. You didn’t draw on the table. I love that.” Now the kid can say, “Next time I draw she liked when I used different colors and I stayed on the paper.” It’s simple and it tells her that this is what I need to do for that success. That was actually the point of this new pediatric paper. That even sort of a generic, “Good job,” is not really praise. It’s encouragement. It’s more cheerleading. “Good job,” doesn’t help you figure out how to improve. It doesn’t even help you figure out how you were successful today.One of the studies – it’s not actually praise but I think it shows an interesting difference. It’s something that I learned from the developers of the pre-school program Tools for the Mind. Elena Bodrova explained to me that your A student does not get 100% every time. When your A student walks out of a test and you say, “Honey, how’d you do?” They’ll say, “Well, I think I did pretty well. I had trouble on question number three. Questions five, seven and eight I know I got right. Nine and ten I think I got at least half of it but I’m not completely sure.” Your C student walks out of that same quiz to, “Hey honey, how’d you do?” “I don’t know.” They could get 100% or they could get zero. Either way they’re genuinely surprised. They haven’t developed that sense of self-awareness and how am I doing.

  If you don’t develop that sense of self-awareness you can’t ask for help. You can’t say, “I need to study this more,” because you don’t know if you’ve mastered it or not. The process praise helps kids then develop, “These are the things you need to look for.” Sometimes I have parents that are nervous and are saying, “Should I praise my kids when they come home with a B+ and not an A?” I say, “Why don’t you ask the kid? Why don’t you say ‘How do you think you did?’” They know the actual grade. In terms of does that grade reflect their understanding or effort during the test or the project?

• Karen Quinn: That’s so interesting and it does start when your kids are much younger. I do remember my kids went to a nursery school where it was sort of a Bank Street type of school. I remember the teachers praising kids the way you were just describing which was, “I love how you used the red color. It’s light and it’s dark.” It was comments about how they did it. I used to be so impressed with how they’re not saying it’s good but they’re just commenting on the process itself. It starts there and I guess as kids get older and older you can focus on more of the specifics like you’re talking about, whether it’s their handwriting or some math that they’re doing, but being specific about what you’re praising.\
• Ashley Merryman: And everything doesn’t have to be praise.
• Karen Quinn: Yeah, just comments.
• Ashley Merryman: I’m not one of those people who says, “Never praise. Never punish.” I think that’s crazy. Kids want feedback and they want reaction. But you don’t have to praise everything they do. If a kid gets 100% on every quiz and they come home with 100% again and you know they didn’t study because it’s the material they learned last month, you don’t need to go crazy over the 100%. In fact, Carol Dweck would suggest to say, “Honey, I think you’re bored. I’m worried that you’re not learning and challenging and doing stuff so let’s find something new for you to think about.”
• Karen Quinn: Wow, yeah.
• Ashley Merryman: It’s a very different think than I certainly was doing for a while.
• Karen Quinn: I wouldn’t even have thought of that.
• Ashley Merryman: Alana explained to me about the As and the Bs and how Tools of the Mind is really about focusing that awareness of, “Am I doing well?” An older kid in tutoring would hand me an essay. I used to grab my red pen or blue pen or whatever I had. I would circle the misspelled words and I would tell them that they missed a comma by the quotation, and all that. They would have to write the words that they misspelled five or ten times. They’d learn the words.Now what I do because of Alana’s work is they hand me an essay and I say, “Hmm, something looks funny to me in the fifth line, this line right here. Do you think there’s something funny in that line?” “Oh, yeah, I don’t think I spelled surprise right.” “That’s right sweetie, you left out that first r in surprise. I’m glad you saw that write on the top what it is corrected. Look a couple lines down, there’s still something funny in this other line.” “Oh look, I misspelled surprise again. I left the r out.” Further down the page they go, “Oh, here I spelled surprise correctly. Here I missed it.”It’s teaching them how to look for those things and correct them. Ultimately empty praise is only, up until the age of seven kids believe praise to begin with. By 12 they start thinking praise is completely the opposite. They have video tapes of teachers praising kids and they ask the 12 year old, “How is that kid doing in class?” “He’s doing really badly.” “Do you want us to replay the tape? The teacher just said how great the kid was doing.” “No, that’s what they tell you when they’re worried about you. If you’re really doing well they leave you alone.” Wow. “If you’re really doing well they tell you this isn’t up to your normal standard of work and they may actually criticize you.” It turns out that the, “Yea, you’re so great,” may actually be giving kids this message that you have done all we expect from you and you can now give up, that we think you’ve done as much as you could so good job honey, you did really well.
• Karen Quinn: That’s what kids are hearing?
• Ashley Merryman: That’s exactly what kids are hearing.
• Karen Quinn: I want to be able to talk about at least one or two more topics, but first let me remind everyone that we are listening to The 30 Minute Mom on Web Talk Radio. I’m Karen Quinn and we are talking with Ashley Merryman, co-author of NutureShock – New Thinking About Children. By the way, if you like what you’re listening to, tell your friends. All you have to do is go to WebTalkRadio.net, click on “Shows” and click on The 30 Minute Mom where you can send a link to the show via Facebook, Twitter or email to all your friends who would enjoy listening.   I wanted to – I have so many questions. You have so much great information. One of the chapters that I thought was so interesting was the chapter on children’s aggression and television, and the fact that kids who watch Arthur and Clifford, which are the shows that I love myself and used to try to get my kids to watch those shows as opposed to Power Rangers and Star Wars. It turns out that the kids watching the family friendly shows that you think are so safe are the ones who are more aggressive than the kids watching the shows that have violence in them. I wanted to see if you could tell us a little bit more about that.
• Ashley Merryman: Yeah. This is work primarily being done by a researcher in Buffalo named Jamie Ostrov. I think Jamie had the same expectation that you did. But looking at the data he found that actually the kids who were watching educational television were actually more relationally aggressive than those who were watching Star Wars or Power Rangers, what we would consider the entertainment/violent shows. Then taking apart what we know about those shows and what we know about children’s developmental psychology and their comprehension, what the researchers like Jamie and others have realized is that kids like Power Rangers but they don’t apply the lessons in Power Rangers to real life. They don’t think that the appropriate way to respond to an argument with your best friend on the playground is to turn into a giant dinosaur like Transformers or karate chop monsters. They aren’t actually modeling this as actual problem solving behavior.
  That’s one thing. That’s one explanation of what’s going on in terms of the lack of effect on violence of these television shows. They may act them out in play, but they understand that this is play and this is fantasy. Other shows like Arthur and Little Bill and a few of the other ones that everybody was looking at, it turns out especially for a two or three year old there are a couple things going on. One is that a three year old may simply not have the attention span to wait the entire 27 or 28 minutes to see the happy ending. If there is a happy ending where everybody becomes friends – they had a fight in the park but then they’re friends at the birthday party by the end – the kids may be in the kitchen getting a snack by the times the birthday party happens.That may be an issue. Even if the kids are actually watching the whole show they don’t process the rift healing story in the same way we do. They look and they see each scene as an individual behavior and they learn those behaviors. So they learn that you should hug your friends at the birthday party, just like it was in the TV show. They also learn you should be mean to your friends in the park. They emulate each one of these behaviors. They don’t draw a moral lesson to make up with your friends and be nice and ignore the rest of it. All of it throughout is something that they learn. In finer research Jamie found that kids were more social watching shows like Little Bill and Arthur but they’re also more aggressive. It’s not either-or. They actually walk out doing both.
• Karen Quinn: They learn everything. They learn all of the behaviors.
• Ashley Merryman: They learn all of the behaviors. They model all of them. Actually very similar research happened in Lori Cramer’s work with siblings. She was developing a sibling program where she was teaching kids in a lab setting how to get along. One year she decided to do a comparison group instead of a control group. A comparison group meant she was sending the families home with video tapes and books that modeled the same sorts of things she was talking about in the sibling class. Within about two weeks she had to cancel the comparison group because the parents were calling and complaining about how their kids’ sibling rivalry and torturing each other was at a new height that they had never seen before, because all of these books were teaching the kids how to torture each other.
• Karen Quinn: Wow. What should parents do in terms or letting them watch shows like that or read books that are teaching that?
• Ashley Merryman: The American Academy of Pediatrics says there is no television that’s beneficial until the age of three, to begin with. The issue isn’t how much benefit there is, it’s only how much harm whether it’s psychological in terms of language development or any kind of learning. There’s no data that shows that kids learn vocabulary, especially up to the age of three, off of television. There’s no evidence that any television is beneficial for preschool.At three or four or five the important thing to do is never let your kid watch television without you there. If you’re watching television you have to actively be narrating and commenting. In fact, they actually have done some studies where they tried to do one of those episodes that was, “Here’s a conflict, here we make it up.” They interstitially inserted comments of grown-ups looking at a direct address to the kid in the camera saying, “That was really mean. You shouldn’t do that.” Then they would go back to the plot. That actually works. The kids were not relationally aggressive because they had heard right after somebody pinched somebody, “Don’t pinch people.” The TV shows were so boring for the adults in the room that they couldn’t air them.
• Karen Quinn: Oh my gosh. But if a parent –
• Ashley Merryman: The mother watching the TV show found it completely unwatchable.
• Karen Quinn: Right. But you can do it as a parent. And you should do it, it sounds like.
• Ashley Merryman: You can.
• Karen Quinn: Not every scene maybe.
• Ashley Merryman: If you see a kid being mean to another kid, you need to right then say, “That was mean and you shouldn’t be mean.” But you have to really, actively concentrate on saying that. Rather than watching the TV show and thinking, “I should comment on that,” you actually probably need to do it in the other way which is, “I am watching the show for opportunities to comment.” Have that be the organizing principle. Most research shows that both parents and children, when the television is on, conversation drops to nearly nothing.
• Karen Quinn: So often you’re going to let your child watch a show to give you a break, as opposed to sitting there and watching it with them.
• Ashley Merryman: Right. The Tools of the Mind people think that’s a terrible idea. They hate it so much. They hate it. If you need to cook and you have a three year old who wants to be around your feet, rather than parking them in front of the television what the Tools of the Mind researchers say is to grab a pot and a wooden spoon and sit them in the corner and say, “You make spaghetti too.” Then they watch you and they’re doing something safe. They’re thinking and they’re watching you and they’re learning and working on their imaginative play and empathy. These shuttling kids off at times when we’re doing something deprives those kids of learning about those interactions. They learn from watching about how we respond to things, how we juggle things, how we manage things. If we keep saying, “It’s too hard for you now,” they’re missing out on a lot of opportunities.
• Karen Quinn: That’s a great suggestion. That really is. Tools of the Mind, can you tell us a little bit more about that?
• Ashley Merryman: Sure. It’s a preschool program that was originated by, as I mentioned before, Elena Bodrova and Debbie Leong, who are based at a university in Denver. What they’ve done is they developed it originally for preschool but now they have kindergarten and sort of some first grade. Every moment of the day is meant to develop kids’ self control. Self control, people always say, “I really want my kids to be under control when he’s messing around.” I say, “Stop messing around.” “I really want him to be able to stop messing around.” People think that’s self control. Actually, ideally you don’t ever want to have to say, “Stop messing around.” You really would rather have the kid who is so engrossed in his Lego’s that he’s not messing around.Self control isn’t about obedience. Self control is about self-direction and focus and attention. The researchers with Tools of the Mind are having a preschool curriculum that in every moment of the day develops that. It develops the ability to focus, have attention, have perspective. Most famously, the way to develop that is through play. They’ll decorate the whole preschool as a fire station and the week before they did that they had a field trip to a fire house. They watched a video about the fire house. Firemen came and talked to them about what it was like to be a fire fighter. Then they say, “You guys, it’s a fire station. Who are you going to be?” They actually write down, even two and three year olds, “I am going to be the fire fighter,” or,  “I am going to be the 9-1-1 operator,” or, “I am going to be the…” They’ll draw a little picture of them being a fire fighter or a 9-1-1 operator.For 45 minutes they have to act out that role. This isn’t to say that kids never have recess in Tools of the Mind. They still have recess. They still have time to mess around. But in this structured environment they’re being asked to be someone else. If you think about it, the kid who you’re like, “I wish they could just learn how to control themselves, they’re completely wild and running around the room,” we all know those kids. Ask that kid to play hide and seek. Can you find him? Right?
• Karen Quinn: No.
• Ashley Merryman: No, you can’t find him. He can control himself if you, say, play a game. It’s the, “Be good,” that’s too hard. He doesn’t know what that is. It’s the kid version of, “Don’t think of the elephant.” All you do is think of the elephant. There was a famous study in Russia where they had three year olds and they said, “Stand still.” Three year olds and five year olds. “Stand still as long as you possibly can. Don’t move.” They lasted maybe two minutes. If they were five they lasted three minutes. They went up to some of the kids and said, because this is cold war Russia, “Act like a soldier.” The kid didn’t bat an eyelash for 11 minutes.
• Karen Quinn: Wow.
• Ashley Merryman: It’s that thinking about other people and disappearing your own self into someone else that becomes such a powerful tool that teaches you empathy and perspective taking. It also teaches you self control, but not by saying, “Control yourself,” but through the experience of having done it.
• Karen Quinn: How as a parent might you apply that? Maybe in your daily, maybe on a Saturday when you’re trying to plan your day you might sit down and make a plan about what you’re going to do together or that kind of thing. That helps a child focus.
• Ashley Merryman: I do that with my tutoring kids when they walk in. If they don’t have homework I say, “Sit down, take two minutes and think about three things you’re going to do in the next two hours.” Make them plan those things and think about them. When they veer off of it I say, “Is that on your plan?” I don’t say, “You’re messing around.” I say, “Is that what you planned to do?” They know.
• Karen Quinn: That’s a great tool. I love that.
• Ashley Merryman: It was funny. I saw that when I was observing a Tools classroom. The play thing they were doing was McDonald’s. This one kid was a fry cook. For a few minutes he got bored. We’re talking three year olds. A third of the class were developmentally disabled. They’re all working together. One of the kids who was supposed to be a fry cook got bored and he leaves and starts walking around looking for a toy car somewhere. Immediate chaos ensued at McDonald’s. They’re missing their fry cook.
• Karen Quinn: You need a fry cook, yeah.
• Ashley Merryman: Suddenly there’s this huge line at the drive thru. The cashier’s saying, “Where are my fries? Where are my fries?” That part was hysterical. The best part was the kid was walking around and the teacher – he started fussing a little bit. The teacher doesn’t scold him, she didn’t raise her voice. She walked up and said, “Is that in your play plan?” He looked up at her and went straight back to being a fry cook. He was totally fine for the rest of the session. It was one of those great tools. We’re not chastising, we’re asking you. You know, fry cooks don’t just suddenly wonder off because people are hungry. Fire fighters don’t just go, “I’m bored, I’m not going to put out the flames anymore.” They’ve got to stay there until it’s over.
• Karen Quinn: Right. That is a wonderful tool. I really liked the chapter about that school. I thought it was so interesting.
• Ashley Merryman: Tools of the Mind actually has a website. If you Google “Tools of the Mind” in quotes and “Metro State” that would take you to Debbie and Elena’s website. They actually have quite a few pages of tips for parents in terms of tools like activities you can do at home. Not just play, but Simon Says and other games to help kids develop their self control
• Karen Quinn: It’s ToolsOfTheMind.com?
• Ashley Merryman: No, it’s not ToolsOfTheMind.com. It’s actually run by the university’s website that they actually are affiliated with. If you do a Google or Yahoo or pick your favorite search engine, search for “Tools of the Mind.”
• Karen Quinn: You’ll find it?
• Ashley Merryman: Yeah, you’ll find it. If you can’t, I’m on Facebook.com and NutureShock.com and Twitter. You can always ask me, “Where is that again?”
• Karen Quinn: That’s right. It’s great to go there and get some tips as a parent on what can I do at home to build self control in my child? It’s such an important quality that we want our kids to have to be able to control themselves like you said. It’s really important. That would be a great site for parents to go to.I would love to keep talking but we’re actually out of time. I want to thank you Ashley for coming on today. I wanted to say to all the parents that her book is NurtureShock – New Thinking About Children. It is a wonderful book. It is so insightful. It was like the tip of the iceberg today, the things we were talking about. There’s so much interesting science out there about raising kids, about education, that will really impact the way you think about how you raise your kids. I highly recommend this book. I’ve underlined many portions of the book. I have little yellow stickies all over it because I go back to it all the time. It’s such a good book. It’s NurtureShock – New Thinking About Children.As a reminder, this is Karen Quinn, The 30 Minute Mom on Web Talk Radio. I’d love it if you’d join us next week when we talk about how to parent a shy child, how to help them warm up, open up and join the fun with Professor Bernardo Carducci, the Director of The Shyness Institute at Indiana University. Until then I am Karen Quinn wishing you all the best for your parenting success.