Off the Bookshelf: "Lives We Carry With Us" by Robert Coles

I have always admired Dr. Robert Coles.  His work first became well-known in the 1960's when he profiled a young woman named Ruby Bridges, a young African-American girl who was part of the first wave of school desegregation, and whose psychological strength in the face of hatred and terror became a classic case study in childhood resilience.  As a longtime professor of Psychiatry at Harvard, the central focus of Coles' work is moral reasoning, especially in children.  Indeed, I read his Moral Life of Children and The Moral Intelligence of Children when I was in graduate school, and this led me to pick up his most recent work, Lives We Carry With Us: Profiles of Moral Courage (New Press, 2010, 210 pp.)

In Lives, Coles profiles a series of individuals whose "moral voices" he has internalized, either through his personal contact with them, his experience with their writing, and/or his admiration of their lives' work.  Each "life" is a separate chapter, and he illustrates a cast of characters as diverse as Anna Freud, Erik Erikson, and Dorothy Day, to artists like James Agee, Bruce Springsteen, and Flannery O'Connor, to moral giants like Dietrich Bonhoffer and Simone Weil.  His final chapter highlights his most enduring character: the six-year-old Ruby Bridges.  About this little girl who endured "murderously heckling mobs," he writes:
 
A well-developed conscience does not translate, necessarily into a morally courageous life.  Nor do  well-developed powers of philosophical thinking and moral analysis necessarily translate into an everyday willingness to face down the various evils of this world.  I was once helped in this effort at clarification by a  black woman (Ruby Bridges' mother) whom I suppose I'd have to call illiterate.  She pointed out that "there's a lot of people who talk about doing good, and a lot of people who argue about what's good and what's not good."  Then she added that "there are a lot of people who always worry about whether they're doing right or wrong."  Finally, there are some other folks: "They just put their lives on the line for what's right, and they may not be the ones who talk a lot or argue a lot or worry a lot; they just do a lot."

Off the bookshelf: "NurtureShock" by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman

Don't ever tell your kids that they're smart.  Certain types of praise can be damaging.  Modern young people sleep almost an hour less than their peers did thirty years ago, and their IQ's are suffering for it.  96% of high school students lie to their parents, regularly.  Trying to make your child "colorblind" can actually make them less racially tolerant.  Watching Sesame Street can make a child more aggressive than if they watched Power Rangers.

Above are some of the conclusions in "NurtureShock: New Thinking About Children", an engaging work of non-fiction that seeks to summarize some of the counter-intuitive research on child-rearing that has emerged from the fields of psychology, sociology, and anthropology.  I was particularly struck by the chapter on praise and labelling students with the tag of "smart".  In the book, they show compelling examples of how this label can create a psychologically crippling response when the child is faced with challenges that seem initially to be beyond their capacities.  The authors' conclusion is that parents should focus their praise much more on effort and determination, and that this praise should be specific to processes rather than general.  Thus, instead of saying "You played a great game," a child is more likely to have positive efforts reinforced by a comment like: "I like the way you shared the ball, and played aggressively on defense."

Overall, it was a fascinating and interesting read, and I recommend it.