Alison Gopnik: Teaching is a very effective way to get children to lea...

I'm afraid the parenting advice to come out of developmental psychology is very boring: pay attention to your kids and love them.

Alison Gopnik

psychology advice kids

Because we imagine, we can have invention and technology. It's actually play, not necessity, that is the mother of invention.

Alison Gopnik

technology mother play

What's it like to be a baby? It's like being in love in Paris for the first time after you've had three double espressos.

Alison Gopnik

motivation inspiration baby

We know that kids who grow up in an environment of warmth and support will thrive and function in whatever environment they find themselves. What we need to do is to do more to help poor kids have such an environment.

Alison Gopnik

support growing-up kids

From an evolutionary perspective children are, literally, designed to learn. Childhood is a special period of protected immaturity. It gives the young breathing time to master the things they will need to know in order to survive as adults.

Alison Gopnik

breathing order children

Scientists learn about the world in three ways: They analyze statistical patterns in the data, they do experiments, and they learn from the data and ideas of other scientists. The recent studies show that children also learn in these ways.

Alison Gopnik

data children ideas

Caring for children has always been one of the deepest and most satisfying things that a human being does, and yet it is hard to keep a healthy attitude toward it in our competitive, outcome-oriented society.

Alison Gopnik

caring attitude children

Being a grandmother is a wonderful thing, so my advice is skip the children. Go straight to the grandchildren.

Alison Gopnik

grandmother advice children

Adults often assume that most learning is the result of teaching and that exploratory, spontaneous learning is unusual. But actually, spontaneous learning is more fundamental.

Alison Gopnik

adults teaching fundamentals

The brain is highly structured, but it is also extremely flexible. It's not a blank slate, but it isn't written in stone, either.

Alison Gopnik

blank stones brain

The largest and most powerful computers are still no match for the smallest and weakest humans.

Alison Gopnik

computer powerful inspiring

We're in a culture where everything is either consumption or production, so child care is either a very, very bad-paying form of work or a very expensive luxury that you purchase. There isn't a good place in our picture of the world for what caregiving is about. Even teenage babysitters have sort of disappeared from the scene.

Alison Gopnik

teenage culture children

Owning our past allows us to own our future.

Alison Gopnik

our-past our-future past

I think, at the end of the century we'll have a generation of parents and a generation of children who won't have had the deep satisfactions of being parents and being children in the way that they might have and are going to spend a lot of time fretting and worrying and being hovered over for nothing. The question isn't so much "What will happen in the long run?" but "What's happening to people's lives right now?"

Alison Gopnik

running children thinking

If you just got enough expertise and enough special techniques and read up enough, then you could shape a child into the kind of adult you wanted. There's almost this kind of competitive enterprise. That picture is the picture I think people often imply when they use the word "parenting".

Alison Gopnik

children people thinking

You read a bunch of books and you get a bunch of how-tos, and you take a bunch of classes and you learn a bunch of techniques. You set yourself goals and benchmarks. I think people have imported that into their experience of taking care of children.

Alison Gopnik

book children thinking

We don't measure the quality of our other relationships by how well the other person turns out, for instance whether my husband is a better person after 10 years than he was when I first met him.

Alison Gopnik

quality husband years

Texts and e-mails travel no faster than phone calls and telegrams, and their content isn't necessarily richer or poorer.

Alison Gopnik

phone-calls phones mail

All of us gardeners know that nothing comes out the way you planned. It's a different garden every year, and it's always sort of different from what you were thinking when you began. What it really means to be a good gardener is to work hard to produce an ecosystem that will have enough diversity, enough possibilities, so it's robust, and it's resilient, and it can change when the seasons change. And that kind of robust, unexpected, variable, messy system - that's what you want to create when you're having children, too.

Alison Gopnik

hard-work mean children

The brain knows the real secret of seduction, more effective than even music and martinis. Just keep whispering, 'Gee, you are really special' to that sack of water and protein that is a body, and you can get it to do practically anything.

Alison Gopnik

real brain water

Teaching is a very effective way to get children to learn something specific - this tube squeaks, say, or a squish then a press then a pull causes the music to play. But it also makes children less likely to discover unexpected information and to draw unexpected conclusions.