More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Sending them to public schools is arguably better for everyone, but sending them to private ones is arguably better for them.
“value pluralism,” contra both Mill and Kant. We have a multiplicity of diverse ethical values and those values are often simply incompatible. There is no way to measure or weigh them against one another, no single value that trumps the others.
Deciding whether to have children isn’t just a matter of deciding what you want. It means deciding who you’re going to be.
“Never pretend that the things you haven’t got are not worth having.”
there is no entirely rational way to decide whether a life intensely devoted to just one value is better than a life devoted less intensely to many, or whether a life divided into different phases with different values is better than one where many values jostle with each other simultaneously.
the percentage of children in poverty has actually gone up over the past ten years.
In an industrial world, there is an assumption that resources are a reward for goal-directed work (though often, of course, they are more likely to be the result of sheer luck).
this was a very particular approach that emerged in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries with the rise of industrialization.
Until the nineteenth and even the twentieth century, most people lived and worked on farms, or in small local workshops or businesses.
In 1830, 70 percent of American children lived in families with two parents who both worked on a farm; only 15 percent lived in a “nuclear family”
On a farm, fathers and mothers, and families more generally, both work and care for children at the same time. It was only when home and work became separated that caregiving and work became separated as well.
recognize that providing resources for children is the responsibility not only of biological mothers or even biological mothers and fathers but also of the community at large.
Multiple studies show that interventions that support parents in the early years have strong effects into adulthood.
Children with this kind of support grow up to be healthier and have higher incomes, and are less likely to be imprisoned.
We also shouldn’t think of preschool only in terms of “school readiness,” as if the only point of caring for young children is to make them into older children who will do better in the particular strange institution of school.
the evolutionary purpose of childhood is to provide a protected period in which variation and innovation can thrive. Play is the most striking manifestation of that strategy. Play is, precisely, an activity with no apparent goal or purpose or outcome.
Play is the essence of an exploration strategy rather than an exploitation one.
Even as adults, humans have the potential for the kind of open-ended curiosity, exploration, and play that is so characteristic of children.
Just as we should give children the resources and space to play, and do so without insisting that play will have immediate payoffs, we should do the same for scientists and artists and all the others who explore human possibilities.
being a parent allows a new kind of human being to come into the world, both literally and figuratively.
If there isn’t some chance that our children will fail as adults, then we haven’t succeeded as parents.
As we move forward in time we leave behind the ghosts of our own departed loves. All the efforts we make to look back and keep them with us—memory, storytelling, photographs, and videos—just serve to drive them further away into the uncapturable past. We watch helplessly as the shades of our grandparents and parents, our own youthful selves, even the beautiful and beloved faces of our young children, fade away down the long slope of the past.
We parents, and grandparents even more, have to watch our beloved children glide irretrievably into the future we can never reach ourselves.
