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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

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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.
Take
Taking
Children
Books
Think
Goal
Benchmarks
Thinking
Read
Imported
People
Learn
Techniques
Experience
Classes
Care
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More quotes by Alison Gopnik

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We don't wife our husbands and we don't child our parents.
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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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Babies and young children are like the research and development division of the human species, and we grown-ups are production and marketing.
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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 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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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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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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The more obsessively we focus on what a particular food is going to do for us, the less healthy we've become. Simple pleasures become complicated.
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Owning our past allows us to own our future.
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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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What teenagers want most of all are social rewards, especially the respect of their peers.
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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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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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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 best scientific way to discover if one factor influences another is to do a controlled experiment.
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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.
Alison Gopnik
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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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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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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.
Alison Gopnik