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

by Alison Gopnik

“parenting” just to describe what parents actually do.

In this book, I’ll argue that this prescriptive parenting picture is fundamentally misguided, from a scientific, philosophical, and political point

All this scientific research points in the same direction: Childhood is designed to be a period of variability and possibility, exploration and innovation, learning and imagination.

We need to provide the environment for variability.

It takes hard labor and the sweat of our brows, with a lot of exhausted digging and wallowing in manure.

In England, that land of gardeners, they use the term “hothousing” to refer to the kind of anxious middle-class parenting that Americans call helicoptering.

Unlike a good chair, a good garden is constantly changing, as it adapts to the changing circumstances of the weather and the seasons.

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.

Let them play in their way

Parenting how-to books, websites, and speakers are appealing because they seem to fill that gap.

That makes me a pretty good wife, but it would be criminal child abuse if he were my literal, rather than metaphorical, baby.

of “nutrition” and “dieting” that has a lot in common with the culture of parenting.

science Karl Popper pointed out that good scientists should be more interested in evidence that contradicts their theories than evidence that confirms them.

Adults often suffer from “confirmation bias”—we pay attention to the things that fit what we already know and ignore the things that might

Piaget thought that children pretended because they couldn’t distinguish between reality and fantasy.

Bayesianism is one of the most influential recent accounts of human learning. It’s named after the Reverend Thomas Bayes,

Counterfactual thinking is crucial for learning about the world. In order to learn we need to believe that what we think now could be wrong,

there is some evidence that they do. There is not much evidence that pretending improves the kinds of academic skills we cultivate

It’s much harder to design a robot that can deal with changing circumstances.

The children were more eager to imitate the teacher than to discover things themselves.

That is the way we learn new things

The apprentice watches the master attentively, and then tries out a simplified part of the skill. It might be stirring the stockpot, cutting out

The school learning could not make you master a subject

Then and only then did Banzo announce that Matajuro could begin training. Matajuro became, of course, the greatest

But I think it also reflects the fact that sports and music are much more likely to be taught through apprenticeship

And though I don’t exactly wield a wooden sword—or even a wastebasket—I’m told that my “track changes”

How we teach our strident

How many public school teachers are as good at science or mathematics or writing as the average coach is good at baseball?

There is no intrinsic discovery involved in learning a particular artificial mapping between letters and sounds,

We could not find our heart

School-age children are fascinated by adult skills and inclined toward apprenticeship.

Skilled adults continue to face difficult challenges, of course, but passing exams isn’t one of them.

When schools are under pressure to produce high test scores, they become motivated, consciously or unconsciously, to encourage ADHD diagnoses—

A standardized test score is the apotheosis of the goal-directed, child-shaping, carpentry picture of schooling—

It’s especially mysterious because reading is such a recent invention. Our brains didn’t evolve to read.

reading brain is the result of hundreds of thousands of years of evolution instead of a few thousand years of culture.

Augie learned how to find Thomas the Tank Engine on a smartphone before he knew what the printed words “Thomas” or “Engine” meant.

in the spontaneous and unself-conscious way that the children born in 2017 will experience it.

We need to let our children get used to the world they are facing with.

digital pessimists sometimes seem to treat minor variations in human nature like apocalyptic psychological revolutions.

the United States cost an average of $245,000 to raise, and that’s not counting the cost of college.

poverty itself is the fact that an increasing number of children grow up in isolation and chaos.

only 15 percent lived in a “nuclear family” with a working father and a stay-at-home mom.

Children with this kind of support grow up to be healthier and have higher incomes, and are less likely to be imprisoned.

One group includes the parents who want to shape their three-year-olds into Harvard freshmen.

We simply can’t rely on the forager and farmer models of extended families living in the same place,

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