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Becoming an adult means leaving the world of your parents and starting to make your way toward the future that you will share with your peers.

Alison Gopnik

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Alison Gopnik
Age: 69
Born: 1955
Born: June 16
Psychologist
University Teacher
Writer
Philadelphia
Pennsylvania
A. Gopnik
A Gopnik
Gopnik
Gopnik A
Gopnik A.
World
Becoming
Share
Peers
Parent
Adult
Future
Leaving
Means
Adults
Mean
Starting
Way
Toward
Make
Parents

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Caring, whether for children or the dying, shouldn't be instrumental. It should be an intrinsic, moral good.
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Texts and e-mails travel no faster than phone calls and telegrams, and their content isn't necessarily richer or poorer.
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We don't wife our husbands and we don't child our parents.
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Teaching is a very effective way to get children to learn something specific - this tube squeaks, say, or a squish then a press then a pull causes the music to play. But it also makes children less likely to discover unexpected information and to draw unexpected conclusions.
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We know that kids who grow up in an environment of warmth and support will thrive and function in whatever environment they find themselves. What we need to do is to do more to help poor kids have such an environment.
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Some people say that parents don't matter, and that's not true at all. The irony is that we pay attention to all these things that don't matter, and not to what does matter, such as parents having enough resources to provide an environment where their children have both security and freedom.
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One of the most distinctive evolutionary features of human beings is our unusually long, protected childhood.
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Developmental scientists like me explore the basic science of learning by designing controlled experiments.
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What's it like to be a baby? It's like being in love in Paris for the first time after you've had three double espressos.
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Preschool kids learn best when exploring, but kids in school learn best when they do things, interacting with a master. Unfortunately, our schools don't do much of either. Also, kids do need to learn how to deal with technology, and online education and otherwise using electronic devices as learning tools facilitates that.
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The radio was an improvement on the telegraph but it didn't have the same exponential, transformative effect.
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Childhood is a fundamental part of all human lives, parents or not, since that's how we all start out. And yet babies and young children are so mysterious and puzzling and even paradoxical.
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Instead of just saying, I love my baby and I pick him up because he's adorable and it's so nice to cuddle with him, we practice attachment parenting. We let our children play outside and have age-appropriate freedoms and are labeled free-range parents.
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The brain knows the real secret of seduction, more effective than even music and martinis. Just keep whispering, 'Gee, you are really special' to that sack of water and protein that is a body, and you can get it to do practically anything.
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It's turns out to be much easier to simulate a grandmaster chess player than it is to simulate a 2-year-old.
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The youngest children have a great capacity for empathy and altruism. There's a recent study that shows even 14-month-olds will climb across a bunch of cushions and go across a room to give you a pen if you drop one.
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Scientists learn about the world in three ways: They analyze statistical patterns in the data, they do experiments, and they learn from the data and ideas of other scientists. The recent studies show that children also learn in these ways.
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There is a tension between our desire to get our kids to turn out a particular way versus letting them develop to be their own person. If there were a pill that would make my child turn out the way I wanted, I'm not sure I'd take it.
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What happens when children reach puberty earlier and adulthood later? The answer is: a good deal of teenage weirdness.
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Because we imagine, we can have invention and technology. It's actually play, not necessity, that is the mother of invention.
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