NurtureShock: New Thinking About Children,part 1: praise,sleep,race,liars

[anemone]

This book give you (the reader) supposedly shocking insights into the nature of children. Indeed, so far it's interesting, though "shocking" wouldn't be my term. It's based on research, but I don't have the same solid confidence in that research that I do in the research for "What's Going on In There". I suspect it's been dumbed down for a wider

Comments

[sidheag]

Vittrup's PhD thesis describing the research referred to is available here:
https://repositories.lib.utexas.edu/bitstream/handle/2152/2930/simpsonb80466.pdf
There are various things one could say about it, but one thing that struck me is: much is made of the parents' non-compliance with the instructions to have "in depth conversations" about race with their children every night for 5 nights (in the thesis an appendix shows the topics parents were told to discuss each night: there are 4 or 5 of them per night, they are compound things, and it didn't count as in depth discussion if they mentioned each topic and the child responded with some remarks or questions). I really think the control group should have been given similar instructions to discuss the weather and the researcher should have looked at compliance with them - because frankly these instructions seem totally unrealistic given my experience of what [ETA parentally-initiated] conversations with a 5-7yo are like, and after looking at what was actually asked, I'm no longer remotely inclined to think that the parental non-compliance says anything about their attitude to race.

[sidheag]

C had a book from school at one point about Obama's election that had some discussion (albeit less in depth than we'd already had) about why it was important that he was the first black president; the specific book is surely not useful information even if I could remember it, but that might be an area to look at. We have a copy of What a Wonderful World which someone recommended to me when I asked a similar question; unless you pick it up and run with it it'll fall foul of the "vague mentions of everyone being equal" criticism, but it's a lovely book (and the song was probably the first ever that C kept asking for repeatedly).

[anemone]

Thanks for the pointer--I hadn't thought to look at what these conversations were supposed to be and whether they'd make sense to have.

The book looks like it will be good, too. I think the only book we have with black characters are the Clifford books (though most of our books feature animal characters, so this is not as much bias as it seems), and I've honestly never thought to mention race.

[sidheag]

I had a very shocking conversation with my very dear friend gemmaj (whose parents are Chinese, and who suffered serious racism growing up) along the lines of "colourblind is nonsense you MUST discuss race" some years back. I still think that some of what she said to me was based on a misconception about C's environment, and that article makes it rather clearer. It might be true that Helen gets enough information about race that she has formed her own stereotypical conclusions. I really, even when I look around thinking about it, think that C did not (and does not, but now he's at an age where I'm comfortable discussing it). Looking at our friends and his schoolmates, although they're obviously not statistically representative of the UK population, he meets people of many ethnicities and he does not get any message that ethnicity is salient. And looking around Edinburgh, we also don't have the kind of segregation by occupation or part of town that seems to be common in the US. No TV input. I don't see how he'd have formed racial stereotypes and I've never been able to discover any sign that he has. When I want to discuss "we're all the same under the skin" far more fruitful cases to discuss are gender and class (not by name - that's the area that's unspeakable here, and noone would think it appropriate to name it to young children! - but by "those people on the bus who say 'fuck' twice in every sentence are probably perfectly nice people, it's just that they come from a group where it's normal to talk like that"). To talk about race, I first have to tell him what stereotypes exist. And now I do, but I don't agree that it would have been useful to do that before I was quite sure that he was capable of a sophisticated understanding of "stereotype".

[anemone]

What I found was very interesting is that children apparently don't need external input about racial bias to come to racist conclusions. Take the experiment in which they put half the class in red shirts and half in blue shirts, and students came to think kids with their shirt color were better. I suspect this wouldn't happen if one of the groups was very small, though.

I'm not sure what exposure Helen has to stereotypes, but we do have skin color divisions in occupations here (and presumably in neighborhoods, since occupation determines income which determines where you can afford to live)--cafeteria workers & janitors at IBM are largely Spanish-speaking, administrative assistants at IBM disproportionately black compared to the researchers, and the daycare workers are disproportionately black compared to the students they care for, etc.