 Michael Gurian discusses NURTURE
THE NATURE with educators and parents.An
Interview with Michael
Gurian: About Nurturing the Nature
By Michael F. Shaughnessy Senior Columnist EdNews.org 6/13/07 Michael Gurian is author of The Wonder of Boys, The Wonder of Girls, The Good Son, Boys and Girls Learn Differently, and The Minds of Boys. He is cofounder of the Gurian Institute and is well known in the fields of family development, education and gender studies. He has appeared on Today, Good Morning America, CNN and in the New York Times, USA Today, Time, Newsweek and in other periodicals. In this interview, he responds to questions about his latest book. 1) Your latest book, "Nurture the Nature", seems to indicate that parents should stay away from fads and trends and rely on good old fashioned common sense. Am I off base on this? You're right. Parents need to trust their instincts. I think there are two good roles for experts: 1) if a child is sick, disabled, or hurt, the expert and professional can help with treatment. 2) if a child is developing without trauma, the expert can best help the family by providing relevant and inspiring research, science, developmental information, warnings and practical tips. NURTURE THE NATURE fulfills, I hope, the second area of expertise. It provides parents of children from newborns to twenty-five year olds (adolescence is going longer these days!) with developmental information based in brain science. This information can inspire and help parents do what they do best: use their instincts and common sense to raise their children to success. 2) What is your biggest concern about "social trends parenting?" The Social Trends Parenting System that all of us as parents (myself included--I'm the father of two) can easily fall prey to is causing significant and chronic stress to kids and families. We have around 1 million children six and under on anti-depressants and anti-anxiety medication. Our kids are hurting. Social trends push us to push our kids away from nature, the outdoors, family, and their own talent base into every possible new activity that MIGHT help them. Kids aren't sleeping enough, they're becoming overstressed, they're not playing in the sandbox, they're not relating enough to parents and mentors...the basic needs of a child's brain development can become undernurtured, and the child's stress level rises dangerously (as does the family's). The twenty years of research in NURTURE THE NATURE, including not only statistical data but stories from parents who have "turned off" social trends parenting, shows that a child's success and internal safety does not require us to over-schedule or over-stimulate, nor does it require us to become media/expert dependent for parenting. Our child's personality, temperament, learning and emotional styles, talent set, and strengths and vulnerabilities are in large part "nature"--inborn. If we focus on each child's unique core nature, we can be instinctual and intuitive about what activities and trends fit THIS child, OUR child. NURTURE THE NATURE provides a number of practical tools to help parents and teachers turn away from social trends and toward the child's needs. 3) I have to agree with many of your fine points in the book- that kids spend too much time in front of the TV. on the computer and on ipods. But, how do we tell parents that it is better for kids to be reading, playing sports or working some part time job? There are a number of ways to approach this, a number of angles. One is to point out the new brain-based research on the effects of media on the brain. For instance, we now know that if an early adolescent is playing lots of video games, the reward centers in his or her brain will light up with a feeling of accomplishment. But its illusory accomplishment--really, the child has done nothing of worth, accomplished very little. This same child may not be doing homework, not relating to family, not developing mentorial relationships through honest work, not doing chores. Seeing how the brain can be fooled by electronics helps parents set better limits. Electronics are fine, but need clear developmental limits. Another approach is to look at life-purpose. NURTURE THE NATURE spends a lot of time looking at mission, motivation, direction, and purpose. Each child's nature wants to make a purposeful journey toward goals, toward service, toward the development of intelligence, toward success, and toward love. In my own home, I ask my teenagers, "What purpose does t his program inspire in you?" While it's fun to be entertained (and sometimes kids just need TV, Ipods, the Internet) for education or downtime, for sure, but still, entertainment without purpose, or entertainment-against-purpose is not healthy. 4) Your book offers TEN TIPS for nurturing the nature of your new born. Your book offers help for parents from birth to age 19. I guess my question is, why we do not as a society, have some type of training for parents. We have adolescents pass a written and a road test before we let them drive, but anyone can procreate, bring life into the world, and then wreck havoc with the child's nature. NURTURE THE NATURE goes all the way to 25 because adolescence is so extended in our culture. Many of our youth still need us to "parent" them into their twenties. Navigating independence and life-success can move slower for some kids, so the NURTURE THE NATURE material pushes into the twenties. Parents have deep and good instincts about how to read their child's signals and raise their kids. Parents also don't want anyone to tell them what to do. So, we will probably never "license" parents. And yet, you're so right that it would be great if we offered every parent a "course on parenting." One of my intentions in NURTURE THE NATURE is to provide a resource and course, a kind of workbook for parents. It doesn't cover everything, but I hope it fills in the gap where a course could be. I have to admit, I'm learning about parenting everyday. Even as a professional, I'm constantly wanting to get "coursework" that helps me understand the developing natures of each of my kids. 5) The SCHOOL seems to be the preeminent place that tries to shape all kids into quiet, docile, subservient, submissive pupils who read, write, spell and do math. What kinds of things do teachers need to learn from your book? What messages do we need to give teachers and schools? The NURTURE THE NATURE approach is being used in a lot of schools. On www.gurianinstitute.com, teachers can see the training work we're doing with this methodology. It's very teacher friendly. It helps teachers look at the particular learning styles of each child. Our primary angle on this has been the gender learning style--boys and girls learn differently, and there are many practical ways to capitalize on learning differences. For instance, when teachers see the PET and SPECT (brain scans) that show how differently boys' and girl's brains process information, memorize data, even read and write, they innovate for each gender. They provide more physical movement for the boys, for instance, and more concrete manipulatives for the girls. While it's impossible, of course, for every teacher to teach every moment to every different learning style, it can be crucial for teachers to gain deeper understanding of a child's core nature and learning style, especially in order to help about 1/3 of a class. Our work in schools shows us that in a class of 30 middle school students, around 5 to 7 boys and around 1 to 3 girls are having learning difficulties that relate directly to their learning needs (their neural ways of processing) being unclear to teachers. It's very much this seven to ten children for whom the nature-based approach becomes crucial. 6) In a sense, a boy or a girl who is parented by a single parent is only exposed to the core nature if you will, of that one parent. How does this affect their later growth and development? Single parents are doing awesome work. They are trying to do the jobs of two parents, and their kids are growing up in homes of love and dynamic growth. At the same time, as nearly every single parent has told me, they wish they had more help. They instinctually know that their boys and girls, ESPECIALLY in pre-puberty and into adolescence (from about 9 to the late teens) need a multi-faceted parenting system. The instinct of single parents fits with the brain research we have looked at from all over the world. Different people stimulate different parts of the brain in different ways. A child's emotional style, for instance, can become a mismatch with mom's emotional style during puberty, but it can be a better match with dad's (and vice versa). Or, a child's developmental course can get derailed from closeness to mom or dad and therefore need two or more mentors to help it grow, move forward, find success. The concept NURTURE THE NATURE works with is the idea of a "parent led team." The single parent is the leader of the team, but she or he seeks out a team of four or five others who will be in close and constant contact. The team approach can help single parents close gaps in parenting, especially of adolescents. 6) Let me paraphrase Viktor Frankl, who once said "We must be alert- alert in a two fold sense- since Auschwitz and Dachau, we know what man is capable of and since Nagasaki and Hiroshima, we know what is at stake" Why are we so intent on shaping and molding our kids into a certain type of child? Don't we want caring individuals who care about others and are responsible? I think parents push kids into molds today because we've bought into a fear-based approach to child raising. We fear that if we don't mold kids to fit a social trend, the child will fail later. For instance, we think, "My son isn't reading at three years old. There's something wrong." Or: "My daughter is shy, she won't succeed." Or we think: "My twelve year old seems to have low self-esteem right now, have I done something wrong? Will he become violent? Will she be left out of her peer group?" We are constantly asking questions about our children that perpetuate our own fears. Throughout history, the healthy child has been the child whose core nature and sense of service and life-purpose have been honored and developed in a family system. Parents, mentors and communities have provided nurture, discipline, love, attention, and opportunity to develop a child's gifts, help the child find a useful and honorable role in the world, and help the child succeed in accomplishing his or her vision within a community. I hope NURTURE THE NATURE makes the case well that parents don't have to be afraid their child will not succeed just because he or she is different from another child or an expert or media trend. In fact, the key to success lies in family systems and schools directing children via targeted activities and learning systems that fit a child's core nature. The practice of consistent discipline, love, attention, education and health needs such as play, sleep, and healthy exercise and food all instinctually fall into place when the family and school understand the unique needs and nature of THIS child. This can feel like a somewhat revolutionary philosophy, but it is not difficult to put into place. Schools and homes all over the country are already doing it, and creating practical innovations that lead to success. It is quite a relief for parents and schools to leave behind the cookie cutter approach. Kids learn better, they are better behaved, and they spend more time working toward service and life-purpose than in busy-work or high stress activities that, in the end, only make them become inattentive and unmotivated in school, unable to communicate well at home, and even lose their own health. 7) Do you have a web site or where can readers get a copy of the book? www.gurianinstitute.com is a good one, and also readers can go to amazon.com or barnesandnobles.com
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