The Scientist in the Crib Quotes

“Knowledge guides emotion more than emotion distorts knowledge.”
― Alison Gopnik, The Scientist in the Crib: What Early Learning Tells Us About the Mind

“It’s not that children are little scientists but that scientists are big children.”
― Alison Gopnik, The Scientist in the Crib: What Early Learning Tells Us About the Mind

“If the child is a budding psychologist, we parents are the laboratory rats.”
― Alison Gopnik, The Scientist in the Crib: What Early Learning Tells Us About the Mind

“Initially children use just a few names, mostly for familiar things and people. But when they are still just beginning to talk, many babies will suddenly start naming everything and asking for the names of everything they see. In fact, what’sat? is itself often one of the earliest words. An eighteen-month-old baby will go into a triumphant frenzy of pointing and naming: “What’sat! Dog! What’sat! Clock! What’sat juice, spoon, orange, high chair, clock! Clock! Clock!” Often this is the point at which even fondly attentive parents lose track of how many new words the baby has learned. It’s as if the baby discovers that everything has a name, and this discovery triggers a kind of naming explosion.”
― Alison Gopnik, The Scientist in the Crib: What Early Learning Tells Us About the Mind

“We decided to become development psychologists and study children because there aren't any Martians. These brilliant beings with the little bodies and big heads are the closest we can get to a truly alien intelligence (even if we may occasionally suspect that they are bent on making us their slaves.)”
― Alison Gopnik , The Scientist in the Crib: What Early Learning Tells Us About the Mind

“..children only begin to understand differences in desires when they are about eighteen months old...Toddlers are systematically testing the dimensions on which their desires and the desires of others may be in conflict... The terrible twos reflects a genuine clash between children's need to understand other people and their need to live happily with them.”
― Alison Gopnik, The Scientist in the Crib: What Early Learning Tells Us About the Mind

“The very best outcome is that our children will end up as decent, independent adults who will regard us with bemused and tolerant affection; for them to continue to treat us with the passionate attachment of infancy would be pathological. Almost every hard decision of child-rearing, each tiny step—Should I let her cross the street? Can he walk to school yet? Should I look in her dresser drawer?—is about how to give up control, not how to increase it; how to cede power, not how to gain it.”
― Alison Gopnik, The Scientist in the Crib: What Early Learning Tells Us About the Mind

“We decided to become developmental psychologists and study children because there aren't any Martians. These brilliant beings with the little bodies and big heads are the closest we can get to a truly alien intelligence (even if we may occasionally suspect that they are bent on making us their slaves.)”
― Alison Gopnik, The Scientist in the Crib: What Early Learning Tells Us About the Mind

“The most interesting thing about babies is that they are so enormously interested; the most wonderful thing about them is their infinite capacity for wonder.”
― Alison Gopnik, The Scientist in the Crib: What Early Learning Tells Us About the Mind

“All that really reaches us from the outside world is a play of colors and shapes, light and sound. Take the people around the table. We seem to see husbands and wives and friends and little brothers. But what we really see are bags of skin stuffed into pieces of cloth and draped over chairs.”
― Alison Gopnik, The Scientist in the Crib: What Early Learning Tells Us About the Mind

“The advantage of learning is that it allows you to find out about your particular environment. The disadvantage is that until you do find out, you don't know what to do; you're helpless. We may have two evolutionary gifts: great abilities to learn about the world around us and a long protected period in which to deploy those abilities.”
― Alison Gopnik, The Scientist in the Crib: What Early Learning Tells Us About the Mind

“What makes the terrible twos so terrible is not that the babies do things you don't want them to do --- one-year-olds are plenty good at that --- but that they do things because you don't want them to.”
― Alison Gopnik, The Scientist in the Crib: What Early Learning Tells Us About the Mind

“Child abuse isn’t evil because it may produce neurotic adults but because it abuses children.”
― Alison Gopnik, The Scientist in the Crib: What Early Learning Tells Us About the Mind

“Instead, it may be that experience itself has changed our brains so that we perceive and interpret the world in a certain way. Once the neural wiring occurs, it is difficult to interpret the world in any different way. Once we have a representation that works, and instances mount up that confirm that representation, it becomes increasingly difficult to change it. When we are quite sure something is true, we are less likely to be willing, or even able, to change our minds about it, and this also seems to be true of our neural representations.”
― Alison Gopnik, The Scientist in the Crib: What Early Learning Tells Us About the Mind

“Like their parents, the Korean children used more verbs than the English-speaking kids, while the English-speaking kids used more nouns. But in addition, the Korean-speaking children learned how to solve problems like using the rake to get the out-of-reach toy well before the English-speaking children. English speakers, though, started categorizing objects earlier than the Korean speakers.”
― Alison Gopnik, The Scientist in the Crib: What Early Learning Tells Us About the Mind

“The dominant view was that children were essentially defective adults. They were defined by the things they didn’t know and couldn’t do.”
― Alison Gopnik, The Scientist in the Crib: What Early Learning Tells Us About the Mind