American kids have, for decades, lagged behind European and Asian countries in math and science. But our dirty little secret was always that U.S. kids’ creativity kicked global ass.

At least until the 1990s.

Ever since then, it’s been on a steady decline and nobody is sure why. Writing for Newsweek, Nurtureshock‘s Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman, take a look at the crisis and upend assumptions about what creativity is, how it works and who or what might be to blame for its decline. There’s also the interesting history of measuring creativity (who knew!), what and how it has been tested for (hint: not the prettiest oil-on-canvas). Continue reading »

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What was the first thing my partner and I did after finding out I was pregnant? Well, we hugged. And then immediately zipped over to Barnes and Noble, where we sat in a section of the store we didn’t know existed: “Parenting and Children.”

We stayed there for more than an hour, thumbing through books, looking at pictures and searching for information about how to be pregnant. That wasn’t our last trip to the bookstore in the name of getting all things birth, baby and kid right. Eventually, we added Dr. Google to the mix.

Sometimes the books were helpful, sometimes they were just a pain. Eventually, we each found the way we were most comfortable as parents and now we just Google the more advanced parenting topics like “lice” and “Rice Krispy Treats.” Continue reading »

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Tonight, @BabbleEditors will give you the full scoop on Ashley Merryman’s discussion of her buzzworthy NurtureShock at the 92nd Street Y in Tribeca.  The event and our live tweeting start at 7pm. So we’ve got you covered tonight and tomorrow we’ll bring you a full dispatch.

We were so fascinated by this book when it first debuted.  With chapters spanning from “Why White Parents Don’t Talk About Race” to “The Inverse Power of Praise”, co-authors Po Bronson and Merryman had us hooked on their new approach to parenting. Time and again, they proved that the conventional wisdom was anything but.  Here’s Amy Kuras’ conversation with Po Bronson in case you missed it.

So tune in tonight – 7PM – our tweets will be full of tips and insights into one of the hardest jobs in the world. Follow us: @BabbleEditors!

(Event details here.)

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Ahhh yes, the news drought of the holidays is in full swing, begetting stories like this one from the unfortunately-named “The Mommy Files” blog: The Top Parenting Trends of 2009.

Okay, despite my snark, I think this is really more or less on the money. What’s writer Amy Graff’s take on what we were talking about this year?

One was recent — a New York Times magazine article from last week that talks about being married, happily, with issues. The very long article tracks a writer’s journey through various forms of marital therapy, and was actually very interesting in that many of the appraoches seemed to dredge up more problems than they actually solved. Continue reading »

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180 alert!

Less than a year ago, parents were buried under an avalanche of studies that concluded kids don’t make you happy. In fact, these studies showed that people raising kids reported lower levels of happiness — life satisfaction, marital satisfaction, and mental well-being — than their childless counterparts.

Oh, and that lower level of happiness? Never. Goes. Away.

Okay, but now out of the U.K., the Journal of Happiness Studies reports that not only do kids not lower their parents’ level of happiness, they actually raise it — a little bit with the first kid. Even more with the second. And (I’m looking at you, Baby Earl!) significantly more with the third!

There’s a catch, though. Continue reading »

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As a mom who’s feeling just a bit sniffly today after I dropped off my daughter at kindergarten this morning, I’m liking one of the latest entries on the Nurtureshock blog. Namely, that “redshirting” kids or keeping them out of kindergarten an extra year so they’ll do better actually doesn’t help much at all.

Two new studies found that at most, there’s a 4-percentage-point difference in how well the oldest kids do versus the youngest, and much of that can be explained away by who has babies when. Kasey Buckley and Daniel M. Hungerman of the National Bureau of Economic research recently looked at detailed birth certificate data from every child born in the United States from 1989 to 2001. Surprisingly, poor women and wealthy women Continue reading »

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We’re all bombarded with studies, every day, that tell us this thing or that about children’s behavior and our effect, as parents, on what they do. A new book by Po Bronson and Ashley Merriman called NurtureShock sifts through all the conventional wisdom out there and looks at the social science behind it.

Some of the findings are pretty interesting – for example, Continue reading »

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