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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.

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.
Hard
Toward
Children
Healthy
Oriented
Always
Attitude
Outcome
Things
Society
Competitive
Keep
Deepest
Doe
Outcomes
Human
Satisfying
Humans
Caring

More quotes by Alison Gopnik

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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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We provide a secure, stable space for children to grow up in, so children will be able to take risks and have adventures and do things that are unexpected. If there isn't a risk that your children can fail, then you haven't succeeded as a parent.
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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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The largest and most powerful computers are still no match for the smallest and weakest humans.
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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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Young children seem to be learning who to share this toy with and figure out how it works, while adolescents seem to be exploring some very deep and profound questions: how should this society work? How should relationships among people work? The exploration is: who am I, what am I doing?
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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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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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Caring, whether for children or the dying, shouldn't be instrumental. It should be an intrinsic, moral good.
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Putting together philosophy and children would have been difficult for most of history. But very fortunately for me, when I started graduate school there was a real scientific revolution taking place in developmental psychology.
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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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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.
Alison Gopnik
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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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Developmental scientists like me explore the basic science of learning by designing controlled experiments.
Alison Gopnik
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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.
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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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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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On the Web we all become small-town visitors lost in the big city.
Alison Gopnik
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Ineffective or weak brain connections are pruned in much the same way a gardener would prune a tree or bush, giving the plant a desired shape.
Alison Gopnik
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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.
Alison Gopnik