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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.

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.
Find
Grow
Need
Environment
Support
Poor
Help
Whatever
Warmth
Helping
Thrive
Kids
Function

More quotes by Alison Gopnik

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What happens when children reach puberty earlier and adulthood later? The answer is: a good deal of teenage weirdness.
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
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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.
Alison Gopnik
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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.
Alison Gopnik
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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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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.
Alison Gopnik
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Being a grandmother is a wonderful thing, so my advice is skip the children. Go straight to the grandchildren.
Alison Gopnik
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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.
Alison Gopnik
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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.
Alison Gopnik
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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.
Alison Gopnik
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Philosophers and psychologists have long puzzled over the question of how we know as much as we do despite our limited experiences. One way is to see how children learn. Another example is consciousness. The concept is usually explored by armchair academics. Looking at kids expands our conceptions of consciousness.
Alison Gopnik
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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!
Alison Gopnik
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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.
Alison Gopnik
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One of the most distinctive evolutionary features of human beings is our unusually long, protected childhood.
Alison Gopnik
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What teenagers want most of all are social rewards, especially the respect of their peers.
Alison Gopnik
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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.
Alison Gopnik
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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.
Alison Gopnik
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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.
Alison Gopnik
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Caring, whether for children or the dying, shouldn't be instrumental. It should be an intrinsic, moral good.
Alison Gopnik
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Developmental scientists like me explore the basic science of learning by designing controlled experiments.
Alison Gopnik