Po Bronson

After a week of debating with Daniel Goleman, we round up our thoughts. MERRYMAN: Goleman admitted that there was no real data to support his premise when he wrote his book in 1995 – that only now the science is starting to find out the truth.

Mike Lanza writes the Playborhood blog. Having followed our thread on the shoddy science for teaching Emotional Intelligence in classrooms, Lanza had an interesting take: if kids today are lacking in "emotional intelligence," it's not because schools have failed to teach kids to get along.

In 2005, elementary schools in England were told by their Department of Education to include, in their curriculum, a program known as SEAL─which teaches children how to develop their social and emotional skills.

This week, we've hosted Daniel Goleman here to hash out our disagreements over emotional intelligence in children. Dan has been a good sport, and we respect his willingness to engage in this dialogue.

Yesterday, Daniel Goleman was generous enough to let us fire some tough questions at him about Emotional Intelligence. Today, he answers the first four of our questions.  BRONSON & MERRYMAN: You mention Yale Dean Peter Salovey is your friend and co-worker.

First off, we want to thank Daniel Goleman for taking the time to join us here at NurtureShock. We hope the conversation over the next few days leads to a new understanding of emotional intelligence (EI) and Dan's work.

Over the next four days, we will be hosting a guest columnist, Daniel Goleman - author of Emotional Intelligence. Goleman's first column will go up later today.

Because of the holiday weekend, my daughter has the day off from kindergarten, and we'll soon be driving down to the pumpkin maze in Half Moon Bay, California."I'd better buy two pumpkins," she said."Okay.

Over the past week, I've been writing about the importance of motivation in improving the rate at which kids learn. Typically, when we think about such examples, we tend to think in terms of a particular activity that a kid becomes emotionally invested in. (In my son's case, it was Pokémon, now it's sports.) However, motivation is also affected by structural factors—by how a subject, skill, or sport is taught.

Here's one more take on Dr. Walter Mischel's famous marshmallow study, which I analyzed last Friday. If you recall, one third of the pre-K children were able to resist the temptation to eat the marshmallow for a full fifteen minutes.

If I could use subtitles on this blog, this one would read: Why the most famous study of child-distraction is itself a huge distraction.But give me a minute to set this up.Over at The Daily Beast today, I have an essay about how Pokemon changed my son's brain.

It's interesting to see the term "conditional love" reenter the zeitgeist, as Ashley wrote about yesterday. Conditional love, everyone can well remember, is being hot and cold with a child – accepting them only when they are polite, honest, bring home good grades, get into name-brand colleges, and marry well.

In today's Science Times, Jane E. Brody conveys a dozen tips on how to develop infants' and toddlers' acquisition of language. She makes several very important points – the most vital one being don't listen to an iPod while pushing your infant in a stroller, because you can't hear the infant's vocalizations and then respond accordingly.

On Sunday, Paul Tough published an article in the New York Times Magazine about how the Tools of the Mind curriculum for preschools and kindergartens enhance children's self-control.

One of the fashionable ideas in education reform these days is to make middle schools much smaller. Currently, most kids grow up in their friendly neighborhood elementary school, where they know almost everyone's name, and then hit middle school: a big, impersonal environment full of strangers.

Yesterday, we were struck by Tony Dokoupil's piece on Alex Merritt, a young man bullied by his teachers. As Dokoupil movingly reported, the taunts were cruel, and the remarks were almost entirely based on the teachers' allegations that Merritt was a homosexual. Of course, the fact the bullying was spearheaded by teachers – then spread to the student-body – makes the situation seem all the more unforgivable. But it reminded us of the work of University of Arizona professor, Stephen T.

Ten years ago, Joe Allen began studying a diverse group of seventh graders near the University of Virginia, where he's a professor. One of Allen's main concerns was how these kids dealt with peer pressure, and how deeply they felt the pressure to conform to what the crowd was doing.

My posts over the last two days compared how the SAT predicts college success against Emotional Intelligence scores. I received a lot of emails in response, and the vast majority of them were readers telling me their individual story through the statistics that defined their life.

As we noted in NurtureShock, emotional intelligence is having a family feud. The field is commonly described as having its commercial wing and its academic wing; on the commercial side is bestselling author Daniel Goleman, and on the academic side are scholars like the Yale dean Peter Salovey, whose team conceptualized one of the first theoretical models of emotional intelligence.

One of the most popular ideas of our time is the notion that in judging a young person's future success, we've become imbalanced, giving too much credence to whether a child has learned the stuff of textbooks, and too little value to whether that child has learned the stuff of real life.

At my daughter's preschool, there's occasionally a"boo-boo report" in her cubby at the end of the day. Via a series of checked boxes and a half-sentence description, the report cryptically conveys why my daughter might have a bump on her head, a scrape on her hand, or a bite mark on her wrist.The report never mentions the offender by name, but my daughter usually offers all the details the second she sees me.

There's a growing body of science which argues that parents need to talk openly and explicitly about race with their children. When I read this research, and then interviewed the scholars, I was convinced I should be applying it at home with my 6-year-old son, and did so.

We have this image that friendships in schools today are all High School Musical HSMThe odds of a white high-schooler having a best friend of another race are actually only about 8 percent.

In American high schools today, it's taken as a given that extracurricular activities bring students of different races together. What's more, it's on clubs and sports teams that the conditions of Allport's Contact Theory are actually met – students are working together toward a single goal, rather than competing against each other.

You've probably never heard of Gordon Allport. But his research affects the lives of everyone in the U.S., on a daily basis, and it has done so for over 50 years.

Dr. Walter Stephan, a professor emeritus at New Mexico State University,made it his life's work to survey students' racial attitudes after their first year of desegregation.

This week's cover story for Newsweek is an excerpt from our new book, NurtureShock; the article's an abridged version of a chapter titled, "Why White Parents Don't Talk About Race."But the piece is just beginning of our dialogue on race: we'll be continuing the conversation with related posts on kids and race relations all this week. We're very excited about this, and we can't wait for you to join us.

Kids as young as 6 months judge others based on skin color. What's a parent to do?

A follow-up to yesterday's post on redshirting.Looking at Bedard and Dhuey's study, both Malcolm Gladwell and Elizabeth Weil highlighted a particular quirk in the scholars' findings.

Every September, the class of incoming American kindergartners is ever slightly older.In the U.S., kids who start kindergarten must be at least 5 years old.