Po Bronson is a great, big puppy dog of a man with grey, sometimes shaggy hair and a broad, fleshy face. (He looks a little like a younger version of our former Washington correspondent Henry Champ.)

He is also a best-selling author of human-interest tales such as What Should I Do with My Life? and Why Do I Love These People?

To me, he is a master stylist who employs short, chiselled sentences with a pleasing, musical cadence.

A big plus is that he has a real interest in psychology, too. He is a bit like Dr. Phil channelling Ernest Hemingway.

Author Po Bronson pets his pooch at a 2005 writer's retreat in San Franciso. (Associated Press)

He is also pretty adept at uncomplicating social science and translating academic studies into plain language, not unlike New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell of Outliers and Tipping Point fame.

Now, Bronson has written a book, along with researcher Ashley Merryman, called NurtureShock: New Thinking About Children.

It's a bit of corrective medicine for the Dr. Spock generation.

Some 'anti-advice' for parents

In a recent interview with guest host Hana Gartner on CBC Radio'sThe Current, Bronson called his latest book some anti-advice for parents.

That's because so much of what they've heard about child rearing is not borne out by the latest science.

Take the myth of self-esteem. Who hasn't laughed at the breakfast table while reading that incarcerated prisoners can score higher on self-esteem tests than most (anxious) high school students?

Still, what parents don't want their children to be steeped in a comforting bath of self-confidence? Self-esteem is supposed to be a psychological vaccine, to help immunize young people from life's difficulties.

Bronson, himself, was no different. He lavished praise onto his kids, partly in an attempt to make up for his own emotionally deficient childhood.

With his eldest child, Luke, Bronson was always telling him that he was ever so smart. But through the work of Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck, Bronson discovered that praising our children for being oh so smart is the wrong thing to do.

You think you're making them feel empowered and it certainly makes them feel special.

But the lesson they learn is that "either you're smart or you're not," as Bronson told Gartner so concisely. And it's the kind of lesson that can backfire.

When praising children

The problem in praising too much for supposedly set traits like intelligence or brilliance is that it can make kids both intellectually lazy and emotionally vulnerable.

Eventually, every child has to come across some task, some piece of schoolwork, some life situation that is really, really difficult.

This can paralyze a child who feels he is a miniature Einstein, endowed with a superstar intellect.

Dweck's solution is that parents should praise children for specific work or diligence. Praise for operational method, so to speak.

Bronson took Dweck's advice and started applying it to his own parenting.

Instead of constantly telling his daughter she was so intelligent, he praised her for the way she kept her eyes on the page, or the way she concentrated on a task.

In this way, he felt, his daughter learned to become more independent rather than to look hungrily for constant approval.

It was teaching her to feel good about mastering a task rather than turning her into a praise junkie.

The fallacy of similar effect

Praising kids for specific actions, for persistence, makes them more resilient and better equipped for the long haul, argues Dweck.

Children learn that the mind is a muscle that they can and must exercise if they want to master future problems.

I wrote about Dweck some time ago and I was excited by her findings back then.

But in her book, Mindset, she tried to generalize from children to adults and, for me, something didn't feel quite right about that.

Bronson, on the other hand, has an answer for that generalization, something he calls "the fallacy of similar effect."

Essentially, that means it's a mistake to assume that "things work in children in the same way they work in adults," as he puts it so succinctly in NurtureShock.

Bronson tells us that praise has been extensively studied in the workplace, where it can be demonstrated that adults thrive on heaps of sincere compliments.

Don't we all love to be told we're intelligent or funny or socially graceful?

And can't we handle it, even when we come across people who are smarter, funnier and more charming than we are? Of course we can.

Count some of your blessings

Bronson also informs us about another fallacy of similar effect when it comes to gratitude.

Positive psychologists, as they're called, love to promote gratitude exercises.

They tell us to count our blessings and write them down at the end of the day. They like to have their clients write gratitude letters to long-lost mentors or relatives. It's supposed to make the letter writers happier, more appreciative and live more fully.

Gratitude is a classic virtue. The philosopher Cicero loved it. So have religious figures through the ages as well as grandmothers everywhere.

But gratitude exercises can backfire with some students.

This shocked Jeffrey Froh, a psychologist at Hofstra University on Long Island.

He expected to find that his study group of middle school students would benefit from doing gratitude exercises just as much as college students who, it was said, increased their life satisfaction by 25 per cent.

But after counting their blessings and keeping their gratitude diaries, some middle school students actually felt worse.

How could that be? Froh asked, puzzled and disappointed.

Think Holden Caulfield

One answer might be that at least some teens have an extra-strong need for autonomy and independence. As a result, doing gratitude exercises makes them uncomfortably aware of their dependence on grown-ups.

"They might already feel like adults are pulling the strings in their lives — controlling what they eat, what they study, what they're allowed to wear and who they hang out with," writes Bronson.

Saying formal thank-yous only reinforces that absence of self-determination.

Actually, when I took a positive psychology course for a magazine article I wrote on the subject, I suspected that a similar phenomenon happened in my classes when we adults attempted gratitude exercises.

It also might have been compassion fatigue, which of course nobody would admit to.

But that would be another fallacy of similar effect, perhaps: That the social skills we all learn as we grow into adulthood — to fudge the truth, to massage reality — is not the way to deal with children.

All that adult prevaricating and fudging and straight-out lying, is not helpful when you are raising kids, says Bronson, drawing on the latest research.

The best advice he gave Hana Gartner was to be "sincere" with your kids, don't teach them to be manipulators or phonies.

That's also what Holden Caulfield told us in J.D. Salinger's legendary novel, The Catcher in the Rye.

Almost 60 years later, it's still pretty good advice, even without the new science.