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The earliest questions were likely to be factual requests for details of what and where.
But when the children were still very young, not more than two, they also began to ask for explanations. “Why” and “how” began to show up as well.
children were very sensitive to whether their questions were answered adequately. They responded to an inadequate or empty answer by asking another question or by repeating the question they’d just asked. When they got a more informative answer, they would express their agreement and use the next question to elaborate, differentiate, or ask for more details.
Why is just restating facts so much less satisfying than explaining why those facts are true?
Hearing explanations is one way to get deep, causal knowledge about the world. But as we saw in the previous chapter, you can also make similar inferences by watching people act in a skillful way.
Parents matter. Children learn from their parents and other
caregivers, whether they are learning by observation or learning through testimony. They look carefully at what parents do and listen just as carefully to what they say. Talking and listening to children, asking and answering “why,” helps them thrive.
Parents and other caregivers don’t have to teach young children so much as they just have to let them learn.
The alternative gardener’s picture, that being a parent is fundamentally a relationship, a form of love, gives you a different take on how children learn from adults. And it actually fits better with the research.
Being a caregiver who is a stable and reliable resource for
learning is more valuable than being a caregiver who e...
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play is what you do when you’re not trying to do anything. It’s an activity whose goal is not to have a goal. If it’s shaped by what a grown-up wants, should it even count as play at all?
Children start to pretend when they are just a year old,
By far the most important and interesting problem for young children is figuring out what’s going on in other people’s minds. Theory of mind, as it’s called, is the ability to figure out the desires, perceptions, emotions, and beliefs of other people.
People who read a great deal of fiction are consistently more empathetic and better at understanding other people.
Lipson could have tried to anticipate what his robot offspring should do in every situation, as we are tempted to do with children. But that would only give them information about what to do when the expected happens. The gift of play is the way it teaches us how to deal with the unexpected.
grown-ups can actually get in the way of play.
A Wired magazine contest awarded sticks the prize of the all-time best toy. But they can be joined by pots and pans, watering cans and flowerpots, goldfish and caterpillars, and even iPhones and tablets.
there is a more important reason to play with children. Play is really fun for grown-ups, too.
it’s extremely unlikely that I would engage in so spectacularly twee a game if it weren’t for him.
There is a famously puritan streak in America. We have a knack for taking what are simple pleasures in other cultures, from food to walks to sex, and turning them into strenuous work projects.
There is good reason to think that letting children play—spontaneously, randomly, and by themselves—helps allow them to learn. But another part of the evolutionary story is that play is a satisfying good in itself—a source of joy, laughter, and fun for parents as well as children.
Schools have really only been around for a couple of hundred years, an eye-blink in human history.
The misleading idea is that education is supposed to shape a child into a particular kind of adult.
The job for school-age children is to start actually becoming competent adults themselves.
For example, at around ten, children begin to develop concepts of density and to differentiate density from weight. Six- and
seven-year-olds start to understand biology in a new way. Four-year-olds think that when you die you simply move to a different location, while older children develop the tragic understanding that death is an irreversible process, especially if they have pet fish or live on a farm. And older children begin to grasp subtle psychological concepts like sarcasm and ambivalence; they know that you can say one thing and mean something quite different, or feel sadness and happiness simultaneously. Seven- and eight-year-olds also engage in the exploration and discovery that we see at such a fever
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Learning to play baseball doesn’t prepare you to be a baseball player—it makes you a baseball player.
what schools do best is teach children how to go to school.
If you think of schools as institutions that are designed to produce children with particular characteristics, variability is a drawback, not a strength.
many of the skills that are most important for school are far removed from the natural abilities and inclinations of most children.
In particular, schooling requires the ability to focus attention narrowly.
indigenous children learned by just watching the teacher demonstrate the skill to another child, while Western children learned only when the teacher explicitly taught them.
recent studies show that young babies’ attention is consistently drawn to precisely the events in their environment that they are most likely to learn from.
Rather than thinking of ADHD as a disease like smallpox we should think of it as a particular
point on a continuum of attentional style.
One of the other disadvantages of the goal-directed view of parenting and schooling is that it treats childhood itself as little more than a way station toward adulthood.
A standardized test score is the apotheosis of the goal-directed, child-shaping, carpentry picture of schooling—
Suppose we thought of schools as environments that were designed to make children thrive, in the same way that we might think of parenting as a way of designing a safe, stable, structured, rich environment in which variation, innovation, and novelty can blossom.
We should be judging schools on how well they educate children in general, not how well each child does on a test.
Some of the most important kinds of middle childhood learning don’t happen in the classroom at all—they happen at lunch and during recess, in the hall and riding the bus.
Our distinctively human knack for cooperation and coordination is one of our most important evolutionary features.
adolescents are reckless not because they underestimate risks but because they overestimate rewards—
And our brains are rewired and shaped by experience, especially early experience.
My experience of the Web feels fragmented, discontinuous, and effortful because for adults, learning a new technology depends on conscious, attentive, intentional processing. In adults, this kind of attention is a very limited resource.
the exaggerated, highly focused attention required by the contemporary classroom is itself a recent cultural invention, and one with costs as well as benefits.
The puzzle is how to provide children with the rich, stable, secure context they need to grow up without expecting that we can or should be able to control how they turn out.
What I can’t do, and shouldn’t do, is expect that my children and their children will exactly replicate my values, traditions, and culture.
Caring for children is an absolutely fundamental, profoundly valuable part of the human project. But it isn’t carpentry, it isn’t a goal-directed enterprise aimed at shaping a child into a particular kind of adult. Instead, being a parent is like making a garden. It’s about providing a rich, stable, safe environment that allows many different kinds of flowers to bloom.
The parenting picture suggests that you can measure the value of caring for children by measuring the value of the adults those children become.
