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

by Alison Gopnik

“Parent” is not actually a verb, not a form of work, and it isn’t and shouldn’t be directed toward the goal of sculpting a child into a particular kind of adult. Instead, to be a parent—to care for a child—is to be part of a profound and unique human relationship, to engage in a particular kind of love.

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 the path they take isn’t one we would choose ourselves, or even one we would choose for them.

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.

How can we value and pass on our own culture and traditions, yet also allow and encourage our children to invent entirely new ones?

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.

Human caregivers must both fiercely protect each individual child and give that child up when they become an adult; they must allow play and enable work; they must pass on traditions and encourage innovations. The parent paradoxes are the consequence of fundamental biological facts.

So there’s a reason the parenting model is popular. But it’s a poor fit to the scientific reality. From an evolutionary perspective, the relations between human children and the adults who care for them are crucially and profoundly important; indeed, they are a large part of what defines us as human beings. Our most distinctive and important human abilities—our capacities for learning, invention, and innovation; and for tradition, culture, and morality—are rooted in relations between parents and children.

In both cases traditions have been replaced by prescriptions. What was once a matter of experience has become a matter of expertise. What was once simply a way of being, what the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein called a form of life, became a form of work. An act of spontaneous and loving care became, instead, a management plan.

Karl Popper

Young brains are designed to explore; old brains are designed to exploit.

If children are like Popper’s scientists, we’re like the universities and funding agencies. We give children the resources, tools, and infrastructure they need to solve problems we haven’t even thought of yet.

Hunt Primeval,

Evolution may have given us the instinct to value children and the goal of helping them thrive. But it’s important to remember that we also have the distinctively human ability to reinvent our social arrangements to help achieve that goal. The initial motivation to care for children may come from evolution, but we can implement it in all sorts of brand-new ways.

The central paradox of learning is the tension between tradition and innovation.

The key to love in practice is doing things together—whether it’s working, child-rearing, lovemaking, taking a walk, or baking a cake—participating in the world in a way that accommodates the strengths and weaknesses of both of you. Here’s

So young children are somewhat more credulous than adults, more likely to give speakers the benefit of the doubt. But even the four-year-olds weren’t just credulous; they discriminated based on how confident the person seemed to be.

Children seem to be even more vulnerable to blowhards than the rest of us.

The evolutionary explanation for our extended childhood is that children are designed to learn from the previous generation. The new research shows that children are, in fact, remarkably quick to take in information that they hear from other people. They’re sponges, as people often say, but they aren’t indiscriminate sponges—from a very early age they make judgments about whether other people are credible and reliable. And as they come to understand other people better and better, they learn to calibrate just how credulous or skeptical they ought to be.

In fact, in one study researchers gave parents and children a bowl of water and a bunch of objects and asked them to figure out why some things sink and others float. The middle-class highly schooled parents and children treated this like a school activity—they spent more time talking about how the lesson would proceed than they did about sinking and floating. The less advantaged parents, with much less schooling, actually talked more about the actual problem, and their children asked deeper, more conceptual questions.

Children don’t just want more information about the world; they want causal information that will let them understand the world in a deeper and broader way—information that will enable future learning. And, remarkably, children recognize when they don’t possess this sort of deep, causal information, and they go out of their way to get it.

Still, the fact that children ask questions spontaneously from such a young age and across so many cultures also suggests that this way of getting information about the world, like imitation, is biologically very deeply rooted. It’s something children need to be allowed to do, not taught to do.

Giving children the chance to intimately observe what many different people do is the best way to help them learn by looking. Giving children the chance to talk with many different people is the best way to help them learn by listening.

In order to learn we need to believe that what we think now could be wrong, and to imagine how the world might be different.

Many of the most effective teachers, even in modern schools, use elements of apprenticeship. Ironically, though, these teachers are more likely to be found in the “extracurricular” classes than in the required ones. The stern but beloved baseball coach or the demanding but passionate music teacher let children learn this way.

Imagine if we taught baseball the way we teach science. Until they were twelve, children would read about baseball technique and history, and occasionally hear inspirational stories of the great baseball players. They would fill out quizzes about baseball rules. College undergraduates might be allowed, under strict supervision, to reproduce famous historic baseball plays. But only in the second or third year of graduate school, would they, at last, actually get to play a game. If we taught baseball this way, we might expect about the same degree of success in the Little League World Series that we currently see in our children’s science scores.

Learning to play baseball doesn’t prepare you to be a baseball player—it makes you a baseball player.

Being the best test-taker in the world isn’t much help for discovering either new truths about that world or new ways of thriving in it.

Even children’s social lives and explorations are heavily controlled and scheduled, all in the service of shaping children. Children continue to fit their own autonomous explorations into the cracks, but parents don’t help. And for children who are not middle-class, the disappearance of the public spaces is even more damaging. Instead of having a safe, stable world to explore, and peer groups to experiment with, rich children live in a world of schooling and control, and poor children

The brain has an innate propensity to organize the world in terms of intersecting lines and edges.

To be a parent, as opposed to parenting, is to be a bridge between the past and the future.

The parenting picture suggests that you can measure the value of caring for children by measuring the value of the adults those children become. But rather than trying to reduce the value of caring for children to other values, we should simply appreciate that the relations between parents and children are unique. Those relations are, as philosophers say, intrinsically and not just instrumentally valuable. Caring for children is a good thing in itself, not just because it may lead to other good things in the future.

But the morality of being a parent is about taking a creature who isn’t autonomous and can’t make his own decisions, and turning him into one who can.

Part of what makes having a child such a morally transformative experience is the fact that my child’s well-being can genuinely be more important to me than my own. It may sound melodramatic to say that I would give my life for my children, but, of course, that’s exactly what every parent does all the time, in ways both large and small. Once I commit myself to a child, I’m literally not the same person I was before. My ego has expanded to include another person even though—especially though—that person is utterly helpless and unable to reciprocate. And even though—especially though—that person’s desires and goals may be very different from mine. That’s at the heart of the paradox of dependence and independence.

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

We should start thinking about caring for the people we love, young or old, as an intrinsic value, a fundamental good that deserves both recognition and support. Just as we should provide paid parental leave, we should provide paid leave for caring for the elderly. And just as we should recognize formally that the demands of work should sometimes give way to the needs of our children, we should also recognize that they should sometimes give way to the needs of our parents.

But to be a parent is also to experience a kind of Orpheus effect in reverse. We parents, and grandparents even more, have to watch our beloved children glide irretrievably into the future we can never reach ourselves. It is a simple fact that I won’t see Augie’s life after forty, and that I can’t even begin to guess what that life will be like. But there’s another side to this. I won’t be here but he will, and so a part of me will be, too. In the end, the human story of parents and children is surely more hopeful than sad. Our parents give us the past, and we hand on the future to our children.