The Gardener and the Carpenter: What the New Science of Child Development Tells Us About the Relationship Between Parents and Children

by Alison Gopnik

There is a trade-off between exploration and exploitation, learning and planning, imagining and acting.

Being a good parent won’t transform children into smart or happy or successful adults. But it can help create a new generation that is robust and adaptable and resilient, better able to deal with the inevitable, unpredictable changes that face them in the future.

The story of Eden is a good allegory for childhood. We grow as children in a garden of love and care, a garden at its best so rich and stable that, as children, we don’t even recognize the work and thought that lie behind it. As adolescents we enter both the world of knowledge and responsibility and the world of labor and pain, including the literal and metaphorical labor pains of bringing another generation of children into the world. Our lives wouldn’t be fully human without both phases—Eden and the Fall, innocence and experience.

Are those endless questions really genuine, or are they just a way of prolonging the conversation and getting attention? In fact, the most recent studies show that children really do want answers to their questions, really do look for good explanations, and really do learn from them.

The role parents play is quite different from the role that the parenting model suggests. Parents and other caregivers don’t have to teach young children so much as they just have to let them learn. Young children learn from others with alacrity and ease, and they are remarkably skilled at getting the information they need and interpreting that information. Parents don’t have to consciously manipulate what they say to give children the information they need.

Being a caregiver who is a stable and reliable resource for learning is more valuable than being a caregiver who explicitly teaches.

Part of the point of parents and especially grandparents is to provide a sense of cultural history and continuity. Our children’s lives would be poorer without that sense of a connection to the past. To be a parent, as opposed to parenting, is to be a bridge between the past and the future.

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. For good or ill, the digital generation will be their own generation and make their own world, and they, not us, will have the responsibility of figuring out how to live in it.

Deciding whether to have children isn’t just a matter of deciding what you want. It means deciding who you’re going to be.

Berlin argues that in these cases of conflicting values the best we can do is muddle through and make the best decision we can given the particular context. There is no decision that is best in some absolute way, and we need to accept both the guilt and regret, and the consolations, that follow from this.

One set of solutions is well known and straightforward and has already been adopted in most civilized countries. This is to 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. There is no mystery about the moral advantages or the good practical consequences of policies such as universal prenatal care, home visitors and nurses, paid parental leave for men and women, universal and free preschool, and direct subsidies to parents.