Until now, you had two main schools of thought on parenting. You had Gina Ford in the blue corner (controlled crying, military-style parenting, absolutely no turning up in Tesco in your pyjamas) and you had Jean Liedloff in the nice, frilly red corner (co-sleeping, slings, unconditional love, man). You knew where you stood and it was almost always on the naughty step.

Now, (yet another) blimming book has introduced perhaps the most terrifying concept of all: that much of what we took, intuitively, to be right about the way we parent is wrong. And not just wrong, but damagingly terrible.

In NurtureShock (subtle subtitle: “Why everything we think about raising our children is wrong”), the American journalists Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman take a systematic sweep through all the relevant scientific data and conclude that most of modern society’s strategies for nurturing children are backfiring. And even though one of the authors lives in California and the other is called Po, they aren’t necessarily crazy.

For example, most of what has become received opinion about a child’s emotional development turns out to be dubious. When Dr Daniel Goleman published his book Emotional Intelligence in 1995, his argument that temperament and social skills could be more important than straight intellect in determining a child’s success promptly became a catalyst for state-sponsored touchy-feeliness.

American schools that had until then used IQ tests to spot gifted children started introducing “EQ tests” as well. Five-year-olds got into the top schools not just because they were academically quick but because they played well with other kids.

In Britain, the nurturing of emotional intelligence became part of the national curriculum in 2005 when the Department for Children, Schools and Families introduced a programme known as Seal (social and emotional aspects of learning).

Schools now use role-playing, discussion and story-telling to teach lessons such as anti-bullying, the hurtfulness of gossip and how to deal with bereavement.

The goal of the scheme is to ensure that “every child should have the support they need to be healthy, stay safe, enjoy and achieve, make a positive contribution, and achieve economic wellbeing”. Primary school children now have circle time and at Wellington, among the poshest of all public schools, they have happiness classes.

This all sounds quite airy-fairy new Laboury, doesn’t it? But only a cold-hearted product of old-school schooling (“bring back corporal punishment, that’s what I say, bah!”) would argue that a bit of emotional investment amid all the SATs tests was a bad idea. All work and no emotional sensitivity makes Jack pretty poor company at a dinner party, after all.

Wrong.

NurtureShock roundly dismisses the idea that emotional intelligence is much use as a measure of success, particularly in young children. Goleman’s hypothesis, it turns out, was not based on any significant evidence.

In an analysis of the ensuing studies, the correlation between EQ and academic achievement was less than 10%. A 2004 study of a prison population even showed that inmates had a higher EQ than the general population. Criminals need to understand their victim. They need to empathise before they attack. They need a mark. “So much for the theory that emotionally intelligent people make better life choices,” argues Merryman.

Similarly, the kids who would do badly in double emotional understanding might not necessarily be the ones destined to fail. “Many kids who turned out to be very good students were still fidgety and misbehaving at age five, while many who were well-behaved at age five didn’t turn into such good students.”

As if this weren’t shocking enough, it turns out that insisting a child always says “thank you” is a bad idea as well. American parents started subjecting their children to “gratitude lists” after the eminent Dr Robert Emmons of the University of California asked college students to keep a “gratitude journal” — listing things they had to be grateful for. After 10 weeks he found they were, on average 25% happier.

Emmons’s findings were widely reported and then everyone — in America at least — ordered their children to do the same. We have yet to suffer this particular brand of positive psychology and one can only hope that it never catches on, but Merryman tells me that parents can even buy computer programs that remind kids to fill out their list.

Trouble is, although it may have worked for students, it doesn’t work for children. They have a different view of gratitude and happiness. Merryman and Bronson’s conclusion, based on further studies, is that asking a child to understand what they have to be happy for will cause them to be less happy. Miserable even.

Because children are keen to establish independence, the time-honoured “finish your vegetables, there are starving Ethiopians” philosophy of child-rearing doesn’t teach appreciation — forcing children to acknowledge they are happy because of a dependence on certain people or objects spoils their sense of independence.

So the next time my sons rip open their wonderful Christmas presents, the ones I’ve been slaving away to pay for, and then run off to play with the wrapping paper, I am not, under any circumstances, allowed to give them a long, stern lesson on appreciation.

Nor is this all.

I have saved the most shocking for last.

You’re not allowed to tell your child how great he or she is. Nope. I’m sorry. You can’t. NurtureShock says so. And you can see why. If Johnny comes home from nursery proudly clutching yet another dreadful potato print and you tell him he’s clever, he’s a prodigy, and you’re going to stick it up in the dining room (with all the others), you’re telling him he is a genius who doesn’t have to try to achieve success.

“It’s okay to offer a compliment if something is really, really good and the compliment is meaningful, but parents who are telling their children they’re amazing for sliding down a slide? That’s a problem,” says Merryman, laughing. “I mean, you’re praising them because gravity took its course.”

In a frankly terrifying study of fifth-graders in a New York classroom, children were set a test. Afterwards, half of them were told, “You must be smart at this.” The other half were told, “You must have worked really hard.”

They were then offered a choice of second test, one easy and one hard. The kids who had been told they had been smart picked the easy test. Those who were encouraged for hard work went for the krypton factor option.

The leader of the study, Dr Carol Dweck, concluded that praise can backfire. “Emphasising effort gives a child a variable they can control. They come to see themselves in control of their success. Emphasising natural intelligence takes it out of a child’s control, and it provides no good recipe for responding to a failure.”

In wider studies, the relentless pressure on a child branded a genius is now being seen as a prime reason for them falling back at school.

Which is all well and good, but can it be fair for me to tell my four-year-old that his toilet-roll sculpture displays signs of hard work? And should I feel bad that the family gave him a round of applause when he said anti-disestablishmentarianism for the first time? It took me ages to teach him that. Ages. And he’s a genius.

If you read NurtureShock, be warned. I suspect it speaks the truth but that truth is so frightening that it takes a while to sink in. It’s still sinking in at Rudd Towers. I have to consult the book every time one of the kids walks in the room. Usually they’ve wandered off before I’ve worked out my correct response.

And I can’t help concluding that my dad might be right. On hearing the subtitle of the book and that two Americans reckon everything we knew about parenting was, in fact, nonsense, he took a deep, world-weary sigh and said, “Honestly, it’s not like we’re reinventing the bloody wheel.” And then he pretended to laugh heartily as my son told him a rubbish joke about snails for the ninth time that morning.

Source: Times Online - http://tinyurl.com/yhf8ojl