Progressive parents don’t spank. Corporal punishment is considered a relic from an age when parents told their children to do something “because I said so!” brandishing a stiffened hand, their faces frozen in a bug-eyed expression of authoritarian menace. In Denis Leary’s No Cure for Cancer (1993) he says “My parents used to beat the living shit out of me, okay? And looking back on it, I'm glad they did, and I'm looking forward to beating the shit out of my kids! Aren’t you? For no reason whatsoever!” No! Don’t ever do that, Denis! Treat your children equitably, and they’ll learn to resolve their conflicts without violence. Or will they?

Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman’s new book Nurture Shock seems to have the unstated premise of turning conventional notions of parenting and childhood development upside down. The co-authors aren’t experts in the field. They’re journalists. They don’t have a theory to push. The book consists of research by experts from North American academic institutions, and their conclusions are uniformly surprising. Here are a few:

“Everybody wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die.” – Peter Tosh

We’re a culture of babies. Our knowledge has been sprinting upward on an exponential curve, but our wisdom sighs and chuffs up a modest incline, pausing frequently for a deep fried snack and a nap. We don’t mind the planned obsolescence of new gadgetry; it gives us an excuse to upgrade to that snazzy newer version everyone else already has. We know our clothes come from sweatshops and our meat comes from factory farms, and these things are terrible, and someone should really do something about them. But we still want cheap food and clothes. Because we’re used to them. And we like them. And we want more. Because we’ve got a serious infection of narcissism.

“In case you hadn’t realized, it has somehow become uncool to sound like you know what you’re talking about? Or believe strongly in what you’re, like, saying? Invisible question marks and parenthetical ‘you know’s and ‘you know what I’m saying’s have been attaching themselves to the ends of our sentences? Even when those sentences aren’t, like, questions? Declarative sentences, so called because they used to, you know, like, declare things to be true, as opposed to other things that are, like, totally... not?” -  Taylor Mali 

Why do some people end ordinary statements with question marks? 

Taylor Mali, who delivered the above quote on the HBO show Def Poetry in 2002, is best known as a comedian and slam poet. He was also a high school teacher (as he describes in another spoken word piece, which has racked up over a million youtube hits) and his website’s gig calendar lists more teaching work than anything else. It’s feasible to think he noticed the relentless rising inflection in his students’ voices - the “like”s and “y’know”s he sprinkles throughout the piece have a flavour of youth. Perpetual uncertainty doesn’t strike me as radically out of place in a group of youngsters facing a tall, muscular, slam poet champ of a teacher.