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

by Alison Gopnik

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.