Alison Gopnik

Selected as a Book of the Year by the Financial Times 'The Gardener and the Carpenter should be required reading for anyone who is, or is thinking of becoming a parent' Financial Times Caring deeply about our children is part of what makes us human. Yet the thing we call 'parenting' is a surprisingly new invention. In the past thirty years, the concept of parenting and the huge industry surrounding it have transformed childcare into obsessive, controlling, and goal-orientated labour intended to create a particular kind of child, and therefore a particular kind of adult. Drawing on the study of human evolution and her own cutting-edge scientific research into how children learn, Gopnik shows that although caring for children is profoundly important, it is not a matter of shaping them to turn out a particular way. Children are designed to be messy and unpredictable, playful and imaginative, and to be very different both from their parents and from each other. The variability and flexibility of childhood lets them innovate, create, and survive in an unpredictable world. 'Parenting' won't make children learn - but caring parents let children learn by creating a secure, loving environment. In The Gardener and the Carpenter, the pioneering developmental psychologist and philosopher Alison Gopnik argues that the familiar twenty-first-century picture of parenting is profoundly wrong - it's not just based on bad science, it's bad for children and their parents too.

What the New Science of Child Development Tells Us About the Relationship Between Parents and Children

The Gardener and the Carpenter

Love the use and insight of the “verb”-ing

Kay so Queso

We recognize the diference between work and other relationships, other kinds of love. To be a wife is not to engage in "wifing", to be a friend is not to "friend", even on Facebook, and we don't "child" our mothers and fathers. Yet these relationships are central to who we are.

Rockstar reference for a book about parenting, love this.

Our lives wouldn't be fully human without both phases — Eden and the Fall, innocence and experience.

The key to love in practice is doing things together-whether it's working, child-rearing, lovemaking, taking a walk, or baking a cake-participating in the world in a way that accommodates the strengths and weaknesses of both of you.

I really enjoy Professor Gopnik’s perspective

Play is realy fun for grown-ups, too. It's a little compensation for the not-so-fun work of gathering enough resources for children to thrive.

When schools are under pressure to produce high test scores, they become motivated, consciously or unconsciously, to encourage ADHD diagnoses—either because the drugs allow low-performing children to score better or because ADHD diagnoses can be used to exclude children from testing.

On the Web we communicate with the planet, but rely on a psychology designed for the village.

Easier said than done, but I fw this sentiment

Just as we should give children the resources and space to play, and do so without insisting that play will have immediate payofts, we should do the same for scientists and artists and all the others who explore human possibilities.

The Gardener and the Carpenter quotes

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