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

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Developmental scientists like me explore the basic science of learning by designing controlled experiments.
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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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We're in a culture where everything is either consumption or production, so child care is either a very, very bad-paying form of work or a very expensive luxury that you purchase. There isn't a good place in our picture of the world for what caregiving is about. Even teenage babysitters have sort of disappeared from the scene.
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Adults often assume that most learning is the result of teaching and that exploratory, spontaneous learning is unusual. But actually, spontaneous learning is more fundamental.
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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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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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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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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 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 largest and most powerful computers are still no match for the smallest and weakest humans.
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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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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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We fear death so profoundly, not because it means the end of our body, but because it means the end of our consciousness - better to be a spirit in Heaven than a zombie on Earth.
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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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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 teenagers want most of all are social rewards, especially the respect of their peers.
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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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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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What happens when children reach puberty earlier and adulthood later? The answer is: a good deal of teenage weirdness.
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