Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Alison Gopnik
Age: 69
Born: 1955
Born: June 16
Psychologist
University Teacher
Writer
Philadelphia
Pennsylvania
A. Gopnik
A Gopnik
Gopnik
Gopnik A
Gopnik A.
Kids
Letting
Person
Tension
Wanted
Develop
Take
Particular
Children
Turn
Make
Child
Would
Sure
Pill
Desire
Versus

More quotes by Alison Gopnik

Image
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.
Alison Gopnik
Image
I'm afraid the parenting advice to come out of developmental psychology is very boring: pay attention to your kids and love them.
Alison Gopnik
Image
Because we imagine, we can have invention and technology. It's actually play, not necessity, that is the mother of invention.
Alison Gopnik
Image
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.
Alison Gopnik
Image
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.
Alison Gopnik
Image
What happens when children reach puberty earlier and adulthood later? The answer is: a good deal of teenage weirdness.
Alison Gopnik
Image
Caring, whether for children or the dying, shouldn't be instrumental. It should be an intrinsic, moral good.
Alison Gopnik
Image
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.
Alison Gopnik
Image
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.
Alison Gopnik
Image
Adults tend to think they have much free will. Kids younger than six are less sure. They may be more realistic!
Alison Gopnik
Image
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
Image
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.
Alison Gopnik
Image
The radio was an improvement on the telegraph but it didn't have the same exponential, transformative effect.
Alison Gopnik
Image
On the Web we all become small-town visitors lost in the big city.
Alison Gopnik
Image
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.
Alison Gopnik
Image
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.
Alison Gopnik
Image
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.
Alison Gopnik
Image
The best scientific way to discover if one factor influences another is to do a controlled experiment.
Alison Gopnik
Image
We don't wife our husbands and we don't child our parents.
Alison Gopnik
Image
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.
Alison Gopnik