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About 6 years ago, after working in the publishing business for about 10 years, I needed a change. I’d gotten bored and I’d also plateaued (I’m not actually sure which came first). The next big promotion was going to be hard to get and the prospect of doing what I was doing for another ten years in order to achieve something I didn’t even want was less than appealing. So, in addition to seeking advice from friends, I went where I always go. I went to books.

One book in particular was a big help in getting over the mental hurdle that finding meaningful work really was important and that change really was possible. It was a book called What Should I Do with My Life by Po Bronson. I highly recommend it.

I took the plunge. With the support of my wife, I went back to school for corporate communications (aka public relations). I found a great new job at Bullfrog Power — a green energy startup*. The past three years affirmed my decision that communications work really was the right choice for me and I thrived.

But with three young kids, a fast-paced new PR career with ever-increasing responsibilities and a long commute were taking there toll. So I decided it was time for another change. In October 2009 my wife went back to work. I got a new pair of slippers, let out the straps on the Baby Bjorn, and jumped in to my new role as an at-home dad.

Once again, it was time for some advice. I stumbled across a new book called Nurture Shock: New Thinking About Children. When I saw the author’s name — Po Bronson — I was happy to see he’d been thoughtful enough to write a new one just for me, so I picked it up.

Like many parents, (and like Bronson himself) we bought a bunch of books when we were expecting our first child and read voraciously throughout gestation and into year one before becoming overwhelmed and shelving the books in favour of our rapidly developing parenting intuition. In Nurture Shock, Bronson’s key premise (along with co-author Ashley Merryman) is that not only are most of the books on parenting getting things wrong, but what we typically think of as parenting intuition is really just an amalgam of faulty parenting science and lore. According to the authors, “Modern society’s strategies for nurturing children are in fact backfiring — because key twists in the science have been overlooked.”

So where does that leave us?

In our own state of Nurture Shock:  “The panic — common among new parents — that the mythical fountain of knowledge is not magically kicking in.”

Bronson and Merryman, in addition to exposing a lot of faulty science and parenting myths, actually present many practical, scientifically supported examples of new thinking about child rearing that stand to put our perceived intuition on its ear. I’ll leave you with a few examples and delve a little deeper next week.

• Praising your kids too much will do more harm than good: praise kids for effort, not for intelligence.
• Keeping our kids up later so we can spend more time with them leaves them sleep deprived.
• White parents who consider themselves “colour blind” don’t like to talk to their kids about race (and pass their values on).
• Most strategies to encourage kids to be truthful end up making them better liars.
• Siblings aren’t typically fighting for their parents’ attention as much as they are fighting over their toys.
• Driver’s training has been much less successful than graduated licensing in predicting driver success. In the same way alternative methods of teaching toddlers are showing a great deal of promise over traditional practices.

And one final controversial example for you other “Progressive Dads” out there who might be feeling smug about your own parenting approach. I found this one particularly hard to read — I suspect because it’s true.

• The children of involved, Progressive Dads are as likely to be aggressive as those of  those who are distant and disengaged.

* Bullfrog Power started a controversial new campaign this week that you might be interested in checking out.

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