Quote

If parents are the fixed stars in the childs universe, the vaguely understood, distant but constant celestial spheres, siblings are the dazzling, sometimes scorching comets whizzing nearby.

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.
Stars
Celestial
Whizzing
Universe
Spheres
Scorching
Sometimes
Distant
Comets
Fixed
Vaguely
Constant
Nearby
Understood
Siblings
Parents
Dazzling
Parent
Sibling

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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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The best scientific way to discover if one factor influences another is to do a controlled experiment.
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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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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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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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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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The radio was an improvement on the telegraph but it didn't have the same exponential, transformative effect.
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Owning our past allows us to own our future.
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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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Animals are certainly more sophisticated than we used to think. And we shouldn't lump together animals as a group. Crows and chimps and dogs are all highly intelligent in very different ways.
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What teenagers want most of all are social rewards, especially the respect of their peers.
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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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