• The Curiosity Cycle: Preparing Your Child for the Ongoing Technological Explosion
• by Jonathan Mugan (2014)
• Roar Score: 3/5

Curiosity Cycle: The learning process that consists of individuating concepts, using the concepts to build models, and testing models. We all have multiple curiosity cycles going at once, and the product of these curiosity cycles is a web of knowledge. Natural curiosity makes the cycles go around, and the cycles also add to curiosity.

If you’re around young children for any length of time, it’s quickly apparent that curiosity seems like it’s an instinctive trait. Children are naturally curious. About everything. The endless stream of Why? questions from my 5-year-old reaffirms this on a daily basis.

As a parent, I see my kids intuitively want to know more about the world around them. They and their friends are constantly exploring their environment, investigating everything from the dirtiest bits of nature they can find to how their toys work to the wonders of the night sky. They do this in their own ways, of course, but their desire to know more—their curiosity—is readily apparent.

Because this curiosity is so inherent, we often forget that one of our most important jobs as parents is to nurture our children’s curiosity and encourage them to explore, discover, and investigate anything and everything. It might sometimes seem like they don’t need much encouragement, but with the right amount of prodding and direction, they can go from “why?” to “whoa!”

Jonathan Mugan is a research scientist in developmental robotics. This might seem like an unlikely background from which to write what is essentially a parenting book, but it gives him a unique perspective that gives his book a refreshing angle. At its heart, The Curiosity Cycle seeks to understand and explain how children learn and how we, as parents, can best facilitate that process.

The book is divided into sections intended to explore various modes and areas of learning, from the straightforward (e.g., history, math, and language) to the academic (e.g., cognitive biases, theory of mind, group dynamics). The chapters themselves feel like a mashup of an academic research paper and a guide to parenting. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as typical parenting books tend to be little more than a waste of good trees.

However, the audience that would be attracted to the scientific topics Mugan discusses (which form the majority of the book) will likely have little use for the sometimes basic parenting advice supplied in the end-of-chapter bullet lists. Examples:

• To identify new concepts, have your child tell you which object is different from the others when you encounter a group of objects.
• Always ask your child “How many?” when they ask for small things such as grapes.
• A fun way to explore the biases of the human brain with your child is to get a book of optical illusions. The illusions illustrate to your child that the world is not always as it appears.

These lists provide some great ideas, but they seem to be aimed at a different audience than the rest of the book.

As Mugan mentions, “The continuous advancement of technology means that understanding how computers think will be necessary to be a literate member of society.” Surprisingly, this idea—and the conceit of the subtitle, Preparing Your Child for the Ongoing Technological Explosion—doesn’t really come into play until the last third of the book.

To my mind, this is the one flaw of the book. There is a somewhat jarring disconnect between the bulk of the book, which explores how children explore their environment and learn through curiosity, and Part III, in which we explore the continuous development of technology and its effect on children. Until I reached Part III, the subtitle seemed to have very little relevance to what I was reading.

Nevertheless, The Curiosity Cycle is a very worthwhile read. It casts an eye on parenting from a unique point of view and, despite my gripes about the “mashup” feel, it does provide quite a few good ideas. And it succeeds where it counts: it makes you appreciate your children’s innate drive toward curiosity and inspires your to foster them however you can.

(A review copy of this book was provided to me by the author. All opinions are my own.)