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The parenting idea is also a major source of grief for parents—especially mothers. It helps fuel the never-ending “mommy wars.”
it isn’t and shouldn’t be directed toward the goal of sculpting a child into a particular kind of adult.
We can aspire to love better without thinking of love as a kind of work.
The most important rewards of being a parent aren’t your children’s grades and trophies—or even their graduations and weddings. They come from the moment-by-moment physical and psychological joy of being with this particular child, and in that child’s moment-by-moment
joy in being with you.
Love doesn’t have goals or benchmarks or blueprints, but it does have a purpose. The purpose is not to change the people we love, but to give them what they need to thrive. Love’s purpose is not to shape our beloved’s destiny, but to help them shape their own. It isn’t to show them the way, but to help them find a path for themselves, even if th...
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rich, stable, safe environment—an environment in which variation, innovation, and novelty can blossom.
Loving children doesn’t give them a destination; it gives them sustenance for the journey.
Children move from a dependence that is far greater than that of the neediest lover to an independence that is far greater than the most distant and detached one.
Schools, the main institutions we use to manage this transition, arguably do a pretty terrible job on both fronts.
Continuing a past cultural identity, placing yourself in a tradition, is a deep and satisfying part of human life. Caregivers pass on traditions just in the course of nurturing babies. At the same time one of the basic functions of childhood is allowing for innovation and change.
So our job as parents is not to make a particular kind of child. Instead, our job is to provide a protected space of love, safety, and stability in which children of many unpredictable kinds can flourish. Our job is not to shape our children’s minds; it’s to let those minds explore all the possibilities that the world allows. Our job is not to tell children how to play; it’s to give them the toys and pick the toys up again after the kids are done. We can’t make children learn, but we can let them learn.
being a parent, even a bad one, involves a greater investment of time, energy, and attention than any other human relationship, by a sizable margin.
Children are incontrovertibly and undeniably messy.
Whatever the rewards of being a parent may be, tidiness is not one of them.
Small subtle genetic variations can interact with experience and lead to differences in children’s personalities.
For one thing, children influence the way their parents behave as much as parents influence children.
If you have a child with a small genetic tendency toward risk-taking, you will probably treat him very differently, even just unconsciously, than you treat his more timid brother,
factors may range from prenatal influences to epigenetic variation, to birth-order differences, to sheer random events like accidents or illnesses. They even include differences in exactly how children interpret their parents’ actions.
Put the risk-taking baby in the bouncy swing and he’s exhilarated; put his timid brother in the swing and he’s terrified.
a one-year-old brain has twice as many neural connections as your brain does. A
As we get older our brains can still change, but they are more likely to change only under pressure, and with effort and attention.
Young brains are designed to explore; old brains are designed to exploit.
Being a parent is very different from being somebody who “parents,” though it’s just as hard.
The rise of parenting has accompanied the decline of the street, the public playground, the neighborhood, even recess.
Childhood is for learning—that’s what children are designed to do,
care for children becomes part of caring for one another. The very demands of cooperatively caring for children lead to bonds of care and love among those who do this work.
For most of the people who care for babies, the act of caring itself creates the bond.
A tit-for-tat strategy with our children would be disastrous—
The flip side of my commitment to those I love is the lack of a similar commitment to those I don’t.
the impulses that lead us to care so deeply about “our” children, even when those children aren’t actually related to us, can lead us to be indifferent to the children of others.
We don’t care for children because we love them; we love them because we care for them.
just how much even the youngest children learn from other people, and it’s much more than we would ever have thought before. But the really striking result is that very little of that learning comes through conscious and deliberate teaching.
The central paradox of learning is the tension between tradition and innovation.
they actively interpret and try to understand both what people do and why they do it.
your children may actually know more about you than you do yourself. Children are tuned in to details of how parents act that you may not even notice.
children actually learn more from the unconscious details of what caregivers do than from any of the conscious manipulations of parenting.
Children learn by watching and imitating the people around them. Psychologists call this observational learning. And they learn by listening to what other people say about how the world works—what psychologists call learning from testimony.
WEIRD cultures (White, Educated, Industrial, Rich, and Developed).
The old injunction to do as I say and not as I do is unlikely to work with young children.
Imagine again the spousing or friending manual. Just as you wouldn’t measure your marriage by its effects on your husband or wife, you also wouldn’t set aside particular activities that you directed only at them,
The key to love in practice is doing things together—
Some evolutionary theorists think that music and dancing emerged as a way of promoting social relationships. You can’t simply make another person move in a particular way and call it dancing.
Middle-class parents simply tend to talk more to their children than less-advantaged parents, and that in turn makes their children talk more, and develop a larger vocabulary, too.
“Secure” babies are unhappy when their mothers leave and joyful when they return.
“Avoidant” babies, in contrast, look away when their mother leaves, and continue to actively avoid looking at her even when she returns.
“Anxious” babies, on the other hand, are inconsolable both after the mother leaves and when she returns, the infantile equivalent of the painfully needy lover.
a stable, secure base of love seems to be more important than the details of what parents say.
From the time children are eighteen months old, they spontaneously immerse themselves in the fantastic, imaginary worlds of pretend play.
Most religious believers think that those beliefs have some special status, that they are unlike mundane facts about the world.
