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Babies and young children are like the research and development division of the human species, and we grown-ups are production and marketing.

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.
Young
Production
Human
Productions
Humans
Marketing
Children
Grown
Like
Species
Research
Baby
Babies
Development
Division

More quotes by Alison Gopnik

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I'm culturally Jewish but, like most scientists, an atheist: I don't believe there's a God or supernatural world. Buddhism offers guidance on what to do in a world without God: It opines that truly being present in the world‚ experiencing and hanging out with your loved ones, provides all the significance you could want.
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On the Web we all become small-town visitors lost in the big city.
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The brain is highly structured, but it is also extremely flexible. It's not a blank slate, but it isn't written in stone, either.
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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.
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Adults tend to think they have much free will. Kids younger than six are less sure. They may be more realistic!
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We don't measure the quality of our other relationships by how well the other person turns out, for instance whether my husband is a better person after 10 years than he was when I first met him.
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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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We don't wife our husbands and we don't child our parents.
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To support the people we care about is intrinsic, it is not instrumental. It's not something we do because we're hoping to get some other outcome.
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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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Owning our past allows us to own our future.
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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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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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Being a grandmother is a wonderful thing, so my advice is skip the children. Go straight to the grandchildren.
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If you just got enough expertise and enough special techniques and read up enough, then you could shape a child into the kind of adult you wanted. There's almost this kind of competitive enterprise. That picture is the picture I think people often imply when they use the word parenting.
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Caring for children has always been one of the deepest and most satisfying things that a human being does, and yet it is hard to keep a healthy attitude toward it in our competitive, outcome-oriented society.
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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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From an evolutionary perspective children are, literally, designed to learn. Childhood is a special period of protected immaturity. It gives the young breathing time to master the things they will need to know in order to survive as adults.
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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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You read a bunch of books and you get a bunch of how-tos, and you take a bunch of classes and you learn a bunch of techniques. You set yourself goals and benchmarks. I think people have imported that into their experience of taking care of children.
Alison Gopnik