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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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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
Much
Realistic
Think
Younger
Thinking
Tend
Adults
Sure
Free
Less

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On the Web we all become small-town visitors lost in the big city.
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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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We don't wife our husbands and we don't child our parents.
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I'm afraid the parenting advice to come out of developmental psychology is very boring: pay attention to your kids and love them.
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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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What happens when children reach puberty earlier and adulthood later? The answer is: a good deal of teenage weirdness.
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What teenagers want most of all are social rewards, especially the respect of their peers.
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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.
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The largest and most powerful computers are still no match for the smallest and weakest humans.
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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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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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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.
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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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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.
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Owning our past allows us to own our future.
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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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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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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.
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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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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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