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The Gardener and the Carpenter

Alison Gopnik

Book Cover

Overview

  • Gopnik critiques the modern, goal-oriented approach to parenting, arguing it is ineffective and misses the essence of the parent-child relationship.
  • She emphasizes the paradoxes inherent in parenting, particularly around love and learning.
  • Childhood is portrayed as a protected period for exploration and development that is critical for human creativity and adaptation.
  • Parents should focus more on providing a nurturing environment rather than attempting to shape specific outcomes in children.

Key Themes

So in essence, Gopnik advocates for a parenting approach based on love and exploration rather than control, accepting the natural messiness and variability of childhood as necessary for creativity and development. The key is to nurture rather than shape specific outcomes.

Introduction

  • Parenting as a Modern Concept: Gopnik argues that the current, goal-directed approach to parenting is misguided and ineffective. She critiques the notion of “parenting” as a set of actions aimed at shaping children into specific kinds of adults.
  • The Paradoxes of Love and Learning: The book delves into the paradoxes inherent in the parent-child relationship, particularly focusing on love and learning. Gopnik suggests that these paradoxes are fundamental to understanding childhood and parenthood.
  • Parenting vs. Being a Parent: The author distinguishes between “parenting” as a task and being a parent as part of a profound human relationship. She emphasizes the importance of love in the parent-child relationship, which should not be viewed as a form of work or a means to achieve certain outcomes in children.
  • Children’s Development and Exploration: Gopnik discusses the explorative nature of childhood, arguing that children’s development should be supported in a way that allows them to explore and grow in their own unique ways, rather than being directed towards specific goals.
  • Criticisms of Modern Parenting: The introduction criticizes the modern parenting industry and the pressure it puts on parents. Gopnik suggests that this approach to parenting has not improved the lives of children or parents.
  • A Different Perspective on Parenthood: Gopnik proposes a different view of parenthood, likening parents to gardeners who create a nurturing environment for children to flourish in diverse ways, rather than carpenters shaping a child to fit a preconceived mold.

Chapter 1: Against Parenting

  • Parenting vs. Parent-Child Relationship: The author argues that modern parenting focuses on techniques, missing the essence of the parent-child relationship, which should be based on love and guidance.
  • Childhood Development and Exploration: Emphasizes the importance of allowing children to explore and develop naturally, rather than shaping them into specific outcomes.
  • Societal Influence on Parenting: Discusses how societal and cultural changes have influenced parenting styles and expectations.
  • Evolutionary Perspective on Parenting: Introduces evolutionary biology concepts to explain the parent-child relationship, emphasizing the natural, exploratory nature of childhood.
  • Challenges of Modern Parenting: Highlights the paradoxes and challenges in modern parenting, suggesting a shift in perspective towards a more nurturing and less controlling role.
  • Nature of Childhood: Childhood is portrayed as a time of learning and exploration, critical for human development and innovation.

Chapter 2: The Evolution of Childhood

  1. The interaction between parental influence and children’s development is complex, blending genetic and environmental factors.
  2. The nature of childhood involves exploration and learning, key to human adaptation and creativity.
  3. The evolution of parenting is examined from an evolutionary biology perspective, questioning the modern, goal-oriented parenting model.
  4. Childhood is seen as a protected period for exploration and development.
  5. The role of parents and caregivers is discussed in providing a stable, nurturing environment for children, facilitating exploration without imposing rigid goals.

Chapter 3: The Evolution of Love

  1. Parental Influence and Children’s Development: The text discusses the complex interplay between genetic factors, environmental influences, and their combined effect on children’s development. It emphasizes the uniqueness and unpredictability of each child’s development.
  2. Childhood Exploration and Learning: The author explores how children’s early exploration and learning are fundamental to human adaptation and creativity. The importance of allowing children to explore and learn through unstructured play is highlighted.
  3. Parenting and Evolutionary Biology: Gopnik integrates evolutionary biology into the discussion, explaining how human caregiving and childhood are essential to our species’ success. She argues against the modern, goal-oriented parenting model, suggesting that it might not align with our evolutionary nature.
  4. Childhood as a Protected Period: The idea that childhood serves as a protected period for exploration and learning is emphasized. The text suggests that this period allows children to develop the skills and understanding necessary for adulthood.
  5. The Role of Parents and Caregivers: It discusses the role of parents and caregivers in providing a stable and nurturing environment for children, facilitating their exploration and development without imposing rigid expectations or goals.
  • Human evolution likely had as much or more to do with relations between grandparents, parents, and children as it did with hunting mastodons. Caring for children played a key role.
  • Recent anthropological evidence suggests that extractive foraging (gathering roots, nuts, etc.) was as important as hunting for early human survival. Sharing food with helpless young was critical.
  • Cooking, processing, and preserving food to feed babies and children was also vital in human evolution.
  • Humans take care of babies in cooperative groups of caregivers, including grandparents. This is unique among primates.
  • Human babies are extremely helpless compared to other primates, but very good at engaging caregivers to attend to them.
  • Human children have exceptional abilities to socially learn, imitate tools and behaviors, and share rituals and gestures. This facilitates cultural learning.
  • The long human childhood likely evolved to allow an extended period of variability, exploration and learning before having to focus on exploitation and labor.
  • Parents and caregivers provide the protected space for this childhood learning and exploration to occur.
  • There are challenges inferring evolutionary explanations for human behaviors, but evidence from fossil record, comparisons with apes, hunter-gatherer societies, mathematical models, and child development can provide insights.

Chapter 4: Learning Through Looking

  • Children’s learning is a process of generating many possibilities, not systematically building up knowledge piece by piece. Their ideas shift and vary.
  • Young children consider extremely unlikely possibilities about how the world works. As they get evidence, some possibilities drop away.
  • Children’s learning is partly a process of telling stories and testing them against reality. Narrative imagining is key to innovation.
  • Children think about abstract principles behind events, not just the physical details. They make inferences about unseen causes.
  • Children combine information from their own experience and from what other people tell them to draw new, sometimes conflicting conclusions.
  • The way children learn language illustrates these principles. It’s rapid, unconscious pattern-finding rather than systematic building.
  • Children are much more influenced by the testimony of other people than we realize. They absorb information from books and screens.
  • Children have exceptional abilities to learn from other people through imitation, shared attention, empathy, and pedagogy.
  • The design of young children’s brains facilitates all these learning abilities. Brains become more specialized and efficient, but less flexible, with age.
  • The long protected period of immaturity in childhood lets children generate many ideas before having to settle on some to guide future behavior.

Chapter 5: Learning Through Listening

  • Children learn a great deal through listening, reading, and language. Much of our knowledge comes from the testimony of others rather than direct observation.
  • Young children are remarkably good at discerning subtle cues in language and determining if information and sources are reliable. They actively control their own learning.
  • Preschoolers ask a remarkably large number of questions - about 75 per hour on average. This shows an innate drive to understand causal explanations.
  • Good explanations connect particular events to general principles to enable broader understanding. Children persist in asking “why” if they don’t get adequate explanations.
  • From a very young age, children understand the difference between factual statements, fiction/fantasy, and claims about the supernatural. They treat these categories appropriately.
  • The language adults use, especially “generic” language about categories, influences children’s essentialist beliefs about the innate nature of categories. This applies to gender as well as animals.
  • Rather than explicitly teaching, caregivers mainly need to provide a trusting relationship and expose children to diverse conversations and observations. Children actively figure out how to interpret information.

Chapter 6: The Work of Play

  • Play is essential for healthy child development and learning. Through play, children develop cognitive, physical, social, emotional, and creative skills.

  • There are different types of play:

    • Exploratory play: playing with objects to understand how things work
    • Physical/rough-and-tumble play: physical play like running and wrestling
    • Pretend play: roleplaying and using imagination
    • Games with rules: playing games with structure and rules

  • Play progresses through developmental stages as children grow, from unoccupied play in babies to cooperative play with others in older children.

  • Play reduces stress and is enjoyable. The pleasure and fun of play motivates children to learn.

  • Parents and caregivers should facilitate play by providing a safe environment, play materials, and sometimes participating in play. However, play should be child-directed.

  • Overly controlling or instructing play can reduce creativity, exploration, and learning. Parents are encouraged to be like “gardeners” who support play rather than “carpenters” who overly structure and direct it.

  • Play is paradoxical - it is an activity done for its own sake, with no extrinsic goals, yet it seems to help children learn. Different types of play may facilitate different kinds of learning.

  • Rough-and-tumble play helps animals (like rats) and children develop social skills and flexibility in social interactions.

  • Exploratory play allows animals and children to learn about how the world works by trying out different possibilities.

  • Pretend play helps children practice counterfactual reasoning and improves theory of mind - understanding others’ perspectives.

  • Studies find a link between pretend play and performance on theory of mind tasks. Reading fiction similarly boosts theory of mind abilities in adults.

  • Letting robots play by trying random movements helps them adjust when parts break or the environment changes unexpectedly. This may explain why play aids learning flexibility.

  • Play is fun - random play ensures animals and children explore possibilities without needing extrinsic rewards. Caregivers can facilitate play by providing a safe environment, materials, and sometimes participating.

So in summary, play facilitates learning important life skills, especially social and causal reasoning, by allowing exploratory practicing of possibilities. Play is intrinsically motivating and caregivers enable it by providing security and resources.

Chapter 7: Growing Up

Here are the main points from the sources in bullet point form:

From “The Gardener and the Carpenter”:

  • Schools often have an inaccurate view of learning and development, seeing education as shaping children into particular kinds of adults rather than helping them explore and understand the world.
  • Standardized testing promotes this inaccurate view, with schools aiming to produce high test scores rather than support children’s natural learning abilities.
  • Apprenticeship is an effective learning method for school-age children, allowing them to observe and practice skills under expert guidance. However, most schools do not provide these kinds of hands-on learning opportunities.

From “The Two Systems of Adolescence”:

  • Adolescence involves two neural/psychological systems - an emotional/motivational system intensified by puberty, and a control system centered in the prefrontal cortex that develops more gradually.
  • The motivational system drives teenagers to seek rewards and peer approval, making them more reckless and accident/crime prone. The control system is still immature, unable to inhibit impulses and make sound decisions.
  • Historical changes mean adolescents gain motivational intensity at earlier ages but have fewer real-life skills and responsibilities to help develop their control systems, resulting in a mismatch.
  • Providing apprenticeship opportunities and more gradual increases in responsibilities/freedoms as teenagers get older can help bridge the gap between the two systems.

Chapter 8: The Future and the Past: Children and Technology

  • The “Device” described is actually books and reading, which the author has been addicted to all her life. This addresses concerns about how new technologies like smartphones affect children’s brains.
  • Childhood is when cultural innovation and transmission occurs through quickly learning from previous generations and then altering/adding to what was learned. Adolescents often lead technological and cultural changes.
  • Reading uses and reshapes parts of the brain evolved for other purposes like object recognition and speech. It becomes automatic and involuntary over time.
  • We are undergoing another major technological shift with digital devices and the internet reshaping young brains. However, it is hard to predict the impact for future generations.
  • Children learn new technologies unconsciously and effortlessly unlike adults. So future generations will likely integrate digital technologies far more wholly and naturally.
  • Teenagers use technology to do the same activities as always (socializing, gossiping, etc.), with both continuities and changes. Most parental fears about technology’s dangers are unsupported.
  • The internet expands social circles exponentially beyond our psychology’s innate village-sized capacity. Figuring out who to interact with online is challenging.
  • Caregivers provide context for innovation by passing on traditions, even if children alter them. We bridge between past and future.

Chapter 9: The Value of Children

  • Caring for children is a fundamental human value, but it should be seen as gardening rather than carpentry - providing a rich environment for varied outcomes rather than shaping particular outcomes.
  • The relationship between parents and children has intrinsic value and a special morality not captured by classical ethical frameworks like utilitarianism or Kantianism.
  • Deciding whether to have children is an existential choice that transforms your values and identity.
  • Providing resources for early childhood leads to better adult outcomes, but this works by expanding children’s opportunities rather than narrowly shaping them.
  • There are tensions between respecting parental authority over children and recognizing children as independent beings with rights.
  • Industrialization separated work from childcare, leading to problems as mothers entered the workforce without social supports. High quality public childcare and parental leave are needed.
  • Caring for aging parents raises similar issues and tensions as caring for young children, requiring significant personal sacrifice and lacking systemic social support.
  • Adult play in domains like art and science mirrors childhood play in its open-ended exploration, and thrives best without narrow instrumental goals.

Introduction: The Parent Paradoxes (Page 6)

In work, expertise leads to success. The promise of parenting is that there is some set of techniques, some particular expertise, that parents could acquire that would help them accomplish the goal of shaping their children’s lives. And a sizable industry has emerged that promises to provide exactly that expertise. Some sixty thousand books are in the parenting section on Amazon, and most of them have “How to” somewhere in the title. (Page 7)

Love doesn’t have goals or benchmarks or blueprints, but it does have a purpose. The purpose is not to change the people we love, but to give them what they need to thrive. Love’s purpose is not to shape our beloved’s destiny, but to help them shape their own. It isn’t to show them the way, but to help them find a path for themselves, even if the path they take isn’t one we would choose ourselves, or even one we would choose for them. (Page 13)

Childhood is designed to be a period of variability and possibility, exploration and innovation, learning and imagination. This is especially true of our exceptionally long human childhood. But our remarkable human capacities for learning and imagination come at a cost. There is a trade-off between exploration and exploitation, learning and planning, imagining and acting. (Page 18)

We can start thinking about caring for children in a way that escapes the morass of guilt and resignation, of parenting manuals and personal stories, and of codified political divisions that make up most of the current discussions of children and parents. We can recognize that relations between children and the people who care for them are among the most important and most distinctive of all human relationships. (Page 20)

Caring for children is like tending a garden, and being a parent is like being a gardener. (Page 20)

Against Parenting (Page 24)

they had extensive opportunities to watch other people, not just their own parents, but grandmothers and grandfathers, aunts and uncles and older cousins, take care of children. Those traditional sources of wisdom and competence—not quite the same as expertise—have largely disappeared. Parenting how-to books, websites, and speakers are appealing because they seem to fill that gap. (Page 24)

Parents are not designed to shape their children’s lives. Instead, parents and other caregivers are designed to provide the next generation with a protected space in which they can produce new ways of thinking and acting that, for better or worse, are entirely unlike any that we would have anticipated beforehand. This is the picture that comes from evolutionary biology, and it is also the picture that comes from empirical studies of child development, like the ones we do in my lab. (Page 25)

The fundamental paradox is similar. Cooking and caring for children are both essentially and distinctively human—we couldn’t survive as a species without them. But the more we intentionally and deliberately cook and eat in order to become healthy, or raise children in order to make them happy and successful adults, the less healthy and happy we and our children seem to become. (Page 28)

Note: I DONT UNDERSTAND WHAT THE AUTHOR IS SAYING. IF A PERSON DELIBERATELY COOKS AND EATS IN ORDER TO BECOME HEALTHY = LESS HEALTHY? THAT MAKES ZERO SENSE.

One way to solve this problem is to alternate between periods of exploration and exploitation. A particularly effective strategy is to start out exploring, and then proceed to exploit. You begin by randomly generating lots of variation and then zero in on what works. (Page 33)

One answer is “Call Mom and Dad!” A protected period of childhood is one solution to the explore/ exploit dilemma. We are allowed to explore when we are children so that we can exploit when we are adults. Childhood and caregiving are two sides of the same coin; children can’t exist without care. By giving an animal a protected early period, a period when its needs are met in a reliable, stable, and unconditional way, you can provide space for mess, variability, and exploration. (Page 34)

If children are designed to explore, it would make sense that they are so much messier than adults. In fact, new scientific discoveries suggest that the messiness of children makes a special contribution to human evolvability. Variability and exploration are at their height during childhood. (Page 34)

children influence the way their parents behave as much as parents influence children. (Page 36)

One of the most striking findings concerns what is called the nonshared environment. If the parenting view was right, you might expect that siblings, who share most of their genes and also have the same parents, would be very similar to each other. In fact, behavioral geneticists find that siblings are much more different from one another than you would expect. The nonshared environment is simply a way of describing all the factors that influence children other than genes and the shared experiences they have as members of the same family, including parenting. Those factors may range from prenatal influences to epigenetic variation, to birth-order differences, to sheer random events like accidents or illnesses. They even include differences in exactly how children interpret their parents’ actions. Put the risk-taking baby in the bouncy swing and he’s exhilarated; put his timid brother in the swing and he’s terrified. (Page 36)

Ironically, in a society that values creativity and innovation more and more, we provide fewer and fewer unfettered opportunities for children to explore. (Page 39)

The caregiver’s job isn’t just to give children a protected space in which to explore, learn, and make a mess. It is also to guide the child’s transition from this exploratory disorder into a new kind of control—a new variety of order that comes with a new set of adult competencies. But we can’t precisely anticipate what that new order will be; that’s the whole point of the generational human reboot. (Page 39)

The Evolution of Childhood (Page 40)

human babies do seem designed to be especially good at using their inimitable charm to engage other people in their care and to get other people to teach them what they need to know. (Page 43)

Human children are also remarkably effective social learners. To a much greater extent than any other animal, they immediately observe and imitate the tools that people use— (Page 44)

Human children are distinctively adapted to learn, and especially to learn from other people, and human grown-ups are distinctively adapted to care for and teach them at the same time. Many biologists think those facts played a major role in our evolutionary success. (Page 44)

There is one interesting exception to this pattern. Human beings typically wean our babies earlier than chimpanzee mothers do. Even in forager societies babies are weaned at two or three instead of at four or five. Partly as a result, we have babies more often than other primates, every three years instead of every six. Nevertheless, after our babies are weaned they remain dependent on others for food—recall that hazelnut biscotto. As a consequence, we actually end up having more, and more needy, babies than our primate relatives. (Page 49)

It’s possible that our long immaturity simply reflects the time it takes to grow a large brain. But it is very unlikely that’s the whole story. From the moment they’re born, human children are exceptional learners. We take the extra time to program our brains, not just to grow them. (Page 52)

In fact, our brains are most active, and hungriest, in the first few years of life. Even as adults, our brains use a lot of energy: when you just sit still, about 20 percent of your calories go to your brain. One-year-olds use much more than that, and by four, fully 66 percent of calories go to the brain, more than at any other period of development. In fact, the physical growth of children slows down in early childhood to compensate for the explosive activity of their brains. (Page 52)

Childhood is for learning—that’s what children are designed to do, and that’s why adults and children have such a special relationship. But children’s learning goes far beyond just listening to what their parents say or doing what their parents want. (Page 53)

But learning and cultural transmission are also especially important because they allow—in fact, encourage—feedback loops. Minute changes in our ability to learn or teach can turn into massive changes in what we do and how we think. (Page 54)

For example, consider what it’s like to learn how to use a new tool. Whether it’s a wooden spoon or a cello bow, a grinding stone or a baby sling, this kind of learning involves watching others use the tool, and understanding the new possibilities that tool offers. (Page 55)

Even if we humans could precisely shape our children’s behavior to suit our own goals and ideals, it would be counterproductive to do it. We can’t know beforehand what unprecedented challenges the children of the future will face. Shaping them in our own image, or in the image of our current ideals, might actually keep them from adapting to changes in the future. (Page 58)

The Evolution of Love (Page 60)

Human fathers, for example, are what biologists call facultative caregivers. Depending on the circumstances they can be utterly devoted or completely indifferent. For fathers especially, what seems to matter is the actual experience of care. If fathers are put in a situation in which they have to actively care for a baby themselves, they are more likely to develop a bond with the baby, which leads them to engage in more care. But fathers also seem more likely than mothers to just leave the job of caring to someone else. (Page 69)

The anthropologist and biologist Helen Fisher distinguishes among three kinds of biological processes that underpin sexual love—lust, intense romantic attraction, and long-term attachment. (Page 71)

In particular, grandmothers may have made it possible for humans to have lots of children and still be able to care for those children for an extended amount of time. We often bring new babies into the world at a time when their older siblings are still very needy toddlers. Hawkes found that infants were more likely to thrive if their mothers had more resources—not surprising. But for toddlers what mattered was how many resources Grandmom had. Grandmom stepped in at the critical juncture when a new baby appeared. (Page 75)

These emotions are in tension with the parenting picture. If the purpose of being a parent is to shape a particular kind of child or a particular kind of life for a child, then it is difficult to see why just this child and no other would be the exclusive focus of our commitment and love. Surely, if our aim is to bring a particular kind of adult into the world, we should just look around for the children that are most likely to become such adults, and then teach and train them! What makes us love a child isn’t something about the child—it’s something about us. We don’t care for children because we love them; we love them because we care for them. (Page 89)

Learning Through Looking (Page 90)

really striking result is that very little of that learning comes through conscious and deliberate teaching. (Page 90)

Children are tuned in to details of how parents act that you may not even notice. (Page 91)

children actually learn more from the unconscious details of what caregivers do than from any of the conscious manipulations of parenting. (Page 91)

years. Children learn by watching and imitating the people around them. Psychologists call this observational learning. And they learn by listening to what other people say about how the world works—what psychologists call learning from testimony. (Page 92)

When we imitate other people, in a very real sense we become those people. Even adults experience “imposter syndrome”—that sense that you aren’t really a competent grown-up but are only imitating the competent grown-ups around you. The funny thing about imposter syndrome, of course, is that even if you’re just imitating, you actually behave as much like a competent grown-up as everybody else. In fact, the cure for imposter syndrome is to realize that all the other people are just convincing imposters, too. (Page 93)

most of the scientists who work on mirror neurons realize just how complicated the neural underpinnings of imitation, empathy, and language really are. But the mirror neuron idea seems to have escaped from the scientific context and into popular culture. It’s become a kind of neuroscience myth. (Page 94)

Imitation helps children learn two important things. It lets them learn how objects work. And it lets them learn how people work. (Page 98)

There are two ways to learn about cause and effect: by trial and error, and by observing other people or events. Learning through trial and error is the most fundamental way that all animals learn. Even the simplest of creatures—flies, slugs, and snails—will repeat an action that has led to a reward in the past. Trial and error lets you test how your actions cause events and learn how to make new things happen. (Page 99)

Children use imitation to figure out how tools work. They imitate effective actions but not ineffective ones. But they don’t just imitate everything they see another person do, and they don’t even imitate everything they see another person do that leads to an effect. They imitate only intentional actions. They try to reproduce what the actor wanted to do—not just the action itself. (Page 101)

some circumstances children may actually be better at this kind of observational learning than adults are. (Page 104)

This difference between children and adults reflects the “explore” versus “exploit” tension I talked about earlier. In “exploit” learning we try to quickly find the solution that is most likely to work right now. In “explore” learning we try out lots of possibilities, including unlikely ones, even if they may not have much immediate payoff. To thrive in a complicated world you need both kinds of learning. Once again, childhood seems to be designed to produce innovation and creativity. Grown-ups stick with the tried-and-true; four-year-olds have the luxury of looking for the weird and wonderful. (Page 106)

Children not only imitate, they overimitate. (Page 107)

Passing on rituals seems to be as important in cultural evolution as passing on technologies. In fact, you might argue that rituals are technologies. But they’re social technologies instead of physical ones. (Page 111)

Even very young children are sensitive to rituals. (Page 111)

They are also sensitive to the intentions, goals, and purposes of the person they’re imitating. They pay attention to what the person wants, but they also pay attention to what the person knows, to whether the other person has expertise. All this means that children are in an excellent position to learn about the most significant tools and techniques of the previous generation, and to take advantage of the information that previous generations have discovered. (Page 113)

Children not only do as you do, they do as you intend to do, as you really ought to have done, and as it would make most sense for you to do. They do as they ought to do if you knew what you were doing, or as they ought to do even if you had no idea. They do as you do when you’re trying to perform rituals and be a good American or be a good Arab. And they differentiate between all these subtly different ways of doing what you do. (Page 115)

Note: I THINK THIS IS ONE OF THE MAIN FUNDAMENTAL POINTS OF THE BOOK. ITS GOOD TO HAVE YOUR CHILDREN WATCH YOU AS YOU GO ABOUT LIFE, ALLOWING THEM TO OBSERVE, INSTEAD OF MAKING UP SO MANY GAMES AND MUNDANE TEACHING SIMILAR TO SCHOOL.

for children, observing and imitating their parents and others as they behave in skilled and useful ways is an education in itself. This is true whether those actions involve bashing cars or bumping your head, making tortillas or chopping wood, cooking or gardening, taking care of children or talking to grown-ups, drinking your tea or using your fork. And children learn not only from but about other people. Watching the range of ways that people act can teach children about how many kinds of people there are and can help them decide what kind of person to be themselves. (Page 115)

isn’t that hard to integrate babies and young children into these everyday activities, even if, as with the Mayan caregivers, it means slowing down a little. That would probably do us all some good anyway. (Page 115)

The key to love in practice is doing things together—whether it’s working, child-rearing, lovemaking, taking a walk, or baking a cake—participating in the world in a way that accommodates the strengths and weaknesses of both of you. (Page 116)

Learning Through Listening (Page 117)

Many kinds of knowledge can come only through language. Knowledge about language itself, such as knowing what words or sentences mean, has to come through this route. This is also the only way to acquire fictional, mythological, or religious knowledge. (Page 117)

So children who felt differently about their caregivers also learned differently from them. The parenting model implies that there is a certain way you can talk to children that will shape what they know. (Page 120)

As children grow older they become sensitive to more subtle aspects of the way people talk to them. Children can tell how confident someone sounds. If two people make competing claims, even three-year-olds go with the one who sounds more sure of herself. If four-year-olds hear someone knowledgeable make a claim, they are more likely to credit that person than someone who is ignorant. And five-year-olds take more specific kinds of knowledge into account—they are more likely to believe what a doctor has to say about medicine, or what an engineer has to say about machines. (Page 121)

Children are also sensitive to consensus, they pay attention to how many people make one claim versus another. (Page 121)

How would this influence a child’s decision to trust the person next time? Other experiments show that even four-year-olds pay attention to how reliable someone is. (Page 124)

Children seem to be even more vulnerable to blowhards than the rest of us. (Page 125)

Children are enthralled by stories but they also create stories themselves, and that ability also seems to be both ancient and fundamental. From the time children are eighteen months old, they spontaneously immerse themselves in the fantastic, imaginary worlds of pretend play. Exactly why this ability emerges at this age isn’t entirely clear, but it’s probably connected to the beginnings of language. (Page 127)

It takes children quite a while to know how to handle these cases. But by the time they are ten years old or so, children treat factual and scientific claims, fictional and pretend claims, and magical and religious claims differently, even in highly religious communities. (Page 131)

Another related possibility is that children are sensitive to consensus, or the lack thereof, among adults. Adults usually agree on both real facts and fictional stories. We saw before that children and adults will sometimes disbelieve their own eyes in the light of a conflicting consensus. But the opposite may also be true. Supernatural and religious beliefs are often variable, and even those who accept them acknowledge that others may not. (Page 132)

Are those endless questions really genuine, or are they just a way of prolonging the conversation and getting attention? In fact, the most recent studies show that children really do want answers to their questions, really do look for good explanations, and really do learn from them. (Page 133)

answers. They found that children were very sensitive to whether their questions were answered adequately. They responded to an inadequate or empty answer by asking another question or by repeating the question they’d just asked. When they got a more informative answer, they would express their agreement and use the next question to elaborate, differentiate, or ask for more details. (Page 135)

Children don’t just want more information about the world; they want causal information that will let them understand the world in a deeper and broader way—information that will enable future learning. And, remarkably, children recognize when they don’t possess this sort of deep, causal information, and they go out of their way to get it. (Page 137)

it’s hardly necessary to answer every single question a child asks, and even less so to feel guilty about the occasional Louis C.K. response. Young children are persistent—they will continue to seek out the information they want and need. (Page 138)

All thinking creatures divide up the world into categories. “Essentialism” is the psychologist’s term for our tendency to think that those categories are deep, innate, and permanent, that they come from the world rather than from our minds alone. (Page 139)

Where does this essentialist impulse come from? It turns out that what adults say influences how children think about categories. Even quite subtle details of wording can shape how children see the world. In fact, those subtle details may be especially effective in influencing how children think—even more effective than more obvious kinds of teaching. (Page 139)

turns out instead that even the youngest children look below the surface to try to understand the deeper essences of the things around them. In fact, when children make mistakes, it’s often because they are looking too hard for essences when there are actually none to be found. (Page 140)

Even two-and three-year-olds seem to share that vague sense that there is some constant, invisible essence underlying natural categories. Deep, essential categories help us make new predictions. (Page 140)

This kind of essentialist thinking is actually helpful when it comes to understanding the physical and biological world. (Page 141)

Children also develop essentialist views of the social world, though, and that’s a lot more problematic. When they are still quite young they treat categories such as gender, race, or even language the same way they treat categories such as duck or dog. They think social categories are innate, deep, and unchanging, too. (Page 142)

They even seem to treat arbitrary social groups the same way. If you tell them only that there’s a group called Zazes and another called Flurps, they are likely to conclude that the Zazes and Flurps will be different in other ways, and they also, sadly, conclude that Zazes will be more likely to hurt Flurps than fellow Zazes. In particular, children develop an essentialist view of gender very early. In our culture, essentialist attitudes toward race come later, although you can also see them emerging in children after five or so. But four-year-olds say that girls will always be girls and never become boys. (Page 142)

That sort of essentialism about physical gender traits might seem sensible enough; after all, it’s mostly true. But children are often essentialists about psychological gender traits, too, even when you explicitly try to raise them in a nonsexist way. Indeed, they are often more absolute about gender than adults are. They’ll tell their very own pantsuited doctor mother that girls wear dresses and women are nurses. (Page 142)

But there is a particular kind of language—what linguists call generic language—that is especially likely to lead to essentialist thinking. Consider these sentences: “Birds fly.” “A cat will chase a mouse every time.” “The zebra has stripes.” Now compare them with these sentences: “Some birds fly.” “A cat chased a mouse.” “The zebra ran away from the tiger.” (Page 143)

The role parents play is quite different from the role that the parenting model suggests. Parents and other caregivers don’t have to teach young children so much as they just have to let them learn. Young children learn from others with alacrity and ease, and they are remarkably skilled at getting the information they need and interpreting that information. Parents don’t have to consciously manipulate what they say to give children the information they need. (Page 147)

In fact, given how sensitive and subtle children’s learning is, conscious manipulation probably wouldn’t work. Even if I wanted to, it’s unlikely that I could keep track of whether I am using generics or speaking in “pretendese.” It’s even less likely that I could consciously control those things. And there’s no reason at all to think that I should. (Page 147)

Fundamental relationships of trust are more important than teaching strategies. (Page 148)

There is no surer sign of love than the back-and-forth of teasing and banter, diminutives and endearments, soul-searching and chitchat. There is no signal of a failed intimacy more devastating than refusing to talk to the other person. Children learn by being part of that kind of intimate, open-ended, dynamic conversation. (Page 148)

Just as children can learn from observing and imitating many different kinds of people with different skills, so children learn about the world around them by listening to many different kinds of people talking about many different kinds of things in different kinds of ways. Paradoxically, even hearing inaccurate or misleading information can help children learn. They learn not only what someone has said but how reliable they are, and how much to trust them in the future. (Page 148)

Giving children the chance to intimately observe what many different people do is the best way to help them learn by looking. Giving children the chance to talk with many different people is the best way to help them learn by listening. (Page 148)

The Work of Play (Page 149)

Play, like childhood in general, depends on safety and security. (Page 152)

So if children don’t pretend because they’re confused, why do they pretend? Pretending is closely related to another distinctively human ability, hypothetical or counterfactual thinking—that is, the ability to consider alternative ways that the world might be. And that, in turn, is central to our powerful human learning abilities. (Page 163)

One way of thinking about pretend play is that it gives children a safe space to practice higher-order mental skills, just as rough-and-tumble gives baby rats a safe space to practice fighting and hunting, and exploratory play gives baby crows a safe space to practice using sticks. (Page 166)

Playful pretending was strongly associated with the ability to think about possibilities. (Page 168)

Pretending and thinking about possibilities were very specifically linked. And in experiments we’ve done since, we’ve found that actually getting children to pretend first makes them better at these counterfactual inferences later on. (Page 168)

By far the most important and interesting problem for young children is figuring out what’s going on in other people’s minds. Theory of mind, as it’s called, is the ability to figure out the desires, perceptions, emotions, and beliefs of other people. It’s quite possibly the most important kind of learning people ever do. (Page 169)

period from eighteen months to five years is the great watershed for developing theory of mind. Children learn fundamental facts about how people’s desires, emotions, and beliefs work. They learn that different people may want and believe different things. And they learn that those differences may lead people to act in very different, and very confusing, ways. (Page 169)

Imaginary companions are a particularly vivid example of this kind of pretending. Imaginary friends are both fascinating and sort of creepy, and people often assume that they are symptoms of genius, craziness, or both. But they are actually very common: (Page 170)

very clear and robust relationship between pretending about people and theory of mind. (Page 170)

Children who pretend more have a distinct advantage in understanding other people; they do much better on these “false-belief” tests. And that advantage is particularly clear for children who have imaginary companions. (Page 170)

psychologists. For adults, fiction and drama are the equivalent of pretend play and imaginary companions. And studies show that reading fiction can have the same advantages as pretending. People who read a great deal of fiction are consistently more empathetic and better at understanding other people. They do better on adult versions of theory of mind tests than people who read an equal amount of nonfiction. (Page 170)

So rough-and-tumble play seems to help animals and children to interact with others. Exploratory play helps animals and children learn how things work. And pretend play helps children think about possibilities and understand other people’s minds. (Page 171)

The very silliness of play, the apparently random weirdness of it all, is what makes it so effective. (Page 173)

This kind of guided play can serve as a model for teachers and educators. Scientists use the word “scaffolding” to describe this kind of interaction. It’s not that the grown-up builds knowledge for the child. Instead, the grown-up builds a scaffold, and the scaffold helps the child to build knowledge herself. This work on guided play parallels the work on children’s learning and listening I described earlier. (Page 176)

And grown-ups can sometimes join in the play themselves. If children are exploring the minds of others, then the actual minds of actual others are the best toys of all. “Guided play” is a nice example. The grown-ups allow the children to lead the way, but they are also there to suggest or elaborate (and wear those silly detective hats). (Page 177)

There is a famously puritan streak in America. We have a knack for taking what are simple pleasures in other cultures, from food to walks to sex, and turning them into strenuous work projects. (Page 178)

There is good reason to think that letting children play—spontaneously, randomly, and by themselves—helps allow them to learn. But another part of the evolutionary story is that play is a satisfying good in itself—a source of joy, laughter, and fun for parents as well as children. If it had no other rationale, the sheer pleasure of play would be justification enough. (Page 178)

Growing Up (Page 179)

The job for school-age children is to start actually becoming competent adults themselves. Their evolutionary agenda is to practice and master the particular skills of their own culture, especially social skills, while they’re still within the safe cocoon of adult caregiving. (Page 180)

The preschool brain is enormously flexible and changes easily, but it is also noisy. The school-age brain is much more efficient and effective, but it is also more rigid. (Page 183)

How does mastery happen? For most of human history, learning in middle childhood meant apprenticeship, not school. Children learned to master skills informally inside the family, or outside the family, more formally and later. Most people were foragers or farmers, and foraging and farming children learned by helping out—they still do. Children also learned more-specialized skills by becoming apprentices to master tradesmen and artisans. (Page 184)

Schools have largely replaced apprenticeship. Public and universal schooling was invented quite recently, in concert with the industrial revolution. It was designed to give people a new set of skills that were essential for success in an industrial world. School was invented to allow children to master the technical details of reading, writing, and arithmetic calculation. And not incidentally, it came to give children a protected haven while their caregivers were, for the first time in human history, far away at work. (Page 187)

what schools do best is teach children how to go to school. School-age children are fascinated by adult skills and inclined toward apprenticeship. It’s natural for them to imitate and practice the activities that are most important to the adults around them. In school, intentionally or not, that means paying attention, taking tests, and getting grades. (Page 190)

Being the best test-taker in the world isn’t much help for discovering either new truths about that world or new ways of thriving in it. (Page 190)

younger children consciousness seems to be more like a lantern, illuminating everything at once. When we say that preschoolers are bad at paying attention, what we really mean is that they’re bad at not paying attention—they have difficulty keeping themselves from being drawn to distractions. (Page 192)

Some of the most important kinds of middle childhood learning don’t happen in the classroom at all—they happen at lunch and during recess, in the hall and riding the bus. The greatest and most challenging transition in the school-age period is the transition from a life that is centered on our caregivers to one that is instead centered on our peers—the friends and enemies, leaders and followers, and lovers and rivals who will dominate our lives as adults. (Page 198)

At least for middle-class children, the parenting model has led to the notoriously overscheduled life of official school classes, followed by extracurriculars, followed by homework. Even children’s social lives and explorations are heavily controlled and scheduled, all in the service of shaping children. Children continue to fit their own autonomous explorations into the cracks, but parents don’t help. And for children who are not middle-class, the disappearance of the public spaces is even more damaging. Instead of having a safe, stable world to explore, and peer groups to experiment with, rich children live in a world of schooling and control, and poor children live in a world of chaos and neglect. (Page 201)

Contemporary children have very little experience with the kinds of tasks that they’ll have to perform as grown-ups. They have increasingly fewer chances to practice basic skills like cooking and caregiving. Contemporary adolescents often don’t do much of anything beyond going to school. Even the paper route and the babysitting job have largely disappeared. And the growth of the control system depends on just those sorts of experiences. (Page 205)

The rise in IQ scores depends on a combination of factors, but clearly the rise of education and schooling has played a particularly important role. Dr. Flynn himself argues for a “social multiplier” theory. An initially small change can set off a feedback loop that leads to big effects. Slightly better education, health, income, or nutrition might make a child do better at school and appreciate learning more. That greater appreciation would motivate her to read more books and try to go to college, which would make her even smarter and more eager for education, and so on. (Page 207)

There is even evidence from neuroscience that higher IQ is correlated to longer frontal-lobe maturation. In studies that look at how children’s brains change over time, researchers have found that children whose frontal lobes mature relatively late are likely to hav e higher IQs. So there may be an inverse relationship between high levels of control and wide-ranging learning. (Page 207)

What does make a difference is having a graduated system in which teenagers slowly acquire both more skill and more freedom—a driving apprenticeship. (Page 209)

Instead of giving adolescents more and more school experiences—those extra hours of after-school classes and homework—we could try to arrange more opportunities for apprenticeship. AmeriCorps, the federal community-service program for youth, is an excellent example, since it provides both challenging real-life experiences and a degree of protection and supervision. (Page 209)

“Take your child to work” could become a routine practice rather than a single-day annual event, and college students could spend more time watching and helping scientists and scholars at work rather than just listening to their lectures. Summer enrichment activities like camp and travel, so common for children whose parents have the means, might be usefully alternated with summer jobs. (Page 209)

They gave her the Device when she was only two years old. It had a sophisticated graphical interface, sending signals along the optic nerve that swiftly transported her brain to an alternate universe—a captivating other world. By the time she was seven, she would smuggle it into school and engage it secretly under her desk instead of listening to the teachers. By fifteen, visions from the Device—a girl entering a ballroom, a man dying on a battlefield—seemed more real than her actual adolescent life. She would sit motionless with it for hours on end, oblivious to everything around her. Its addictive grip was so great that she often stayed up half the night, unable to put it down. When she grew up, the Device dominated her house; no room was free from it. No activity, not even eating or going to the bathroom, was carried on without its aid. Even when she made love, it was images from the Device that filled her mind. When one of her children had to go to the hospital with a concussion, her first thought was to be sure she took the Device along. Saddest of all, as soon as her children were old enough, she did everything she could to get them hooked on it, too. Psychologists showed that she literally could not disengage from it—if the Device could reach the optic nerve, she would automatically and inescapably be in its grip. Neuroscientists demonstrated that large portions of her brain, parts that had once been devoted to understanding the real world, had been co-opted by the Device. A tale of the dystopian technological future? No, just autobiography. The Device is, of course, the book, and I’ve been its willing victim all my life. (Page 211)

cultural ratchet effect. Childhood contributes to two distinctively human complementary abilities. We can learn from the previous generation. Through observation, imitation, and testimony children can swiftly take on and re-create the skills and technologies of those who came before us. Imitating technologies is much quicker and easier than inventing them. But if we just imitated our elders exactly, there would be no progress at all. So each generation also adds to the knowledge and expertise of the previous ones. The ratchet comes because we can take the previous generation’s discoveries for granted as we pursue our own. (Page 213)

One of the paradoxes of cultural transmission is that adults tend to adopt the behaviors that we see most of our fellow adults perform—we’re natural conformists. But, by definition, many innovations are going to start out as something only a few people do. The fact that younger people, particularly adolescents, are more likely to adopt a wider variety of unusual behaviors can ensure that the more eccentric inventions get preserved and passed on. (Page 216)

So childhood isn’t really a period of innocence when children are protected from technological and cultural change—instead, childhood is the very crucible of such change. It is both the period when innovation becomes internalized and, especially in adolescence, the period in which innovation is often actually sparked. (Page 216)

Attention and learning work very differently in young brains. Young animals have much more widespread cholinergic transmitters than adults, and their ability to learn doesn’t depend on planned, deliberate attention. Young brains are designed to learn from everything new, surprising, or information-rich even when it isn’t particularly relevant or useful. (Page 224)

The media scholar Danah Boyd spent thousands of hours with teenagers from many different backgrounds, systematically observing the way they use technology and talking to them about what technology meant to them. Her conclusion is that young people use social media to do what they have always done: establish a community of friends and peers, distance themselves from their parents, flirt and gossip, bully, experiment, rebel. (Page 225)

and found little evidence to support any of them. The one genuine technological problem that did emerge was not one that most parents had even thought of, and it affects adults as much as children: the disruptive effect that LED screens have on sleep. (Page 226)

There is good evidence that most of us can keep track of only about a hundred other people—a village’s worth. (Page 228)

What I can’t do, and shouldn’t do, is expect that my children and their children will exactly replicate my values, traditions, and culture. For good or ill, the digital generation will be their own generation and make their own world, and they, not us, will have the responsibility of figuring out how to live in it. (Page 231)

The Value of Children (Page 232)

Another philosophical approach to morality may work better. The philosopher Isaiah Berlin argued for “value pluralism,” contra both Mill and Kant. We have a multiplicity of diverse ethical values and those values are often simply incompatible. There is no way to measure or weigh them against one another, no single value that trumps the others. Justice or mercy, altruism or autonomy, what Yeats called “perfection of the life or of the work”—these values can’t simply be weighed in some single objective scale. They can’t be measured against each other in a way that reveals the single best thing to do. And yet often, in real life, we have to choose between them. (Page 234)

Berlin thought this made human life inescapably tragic, and he was right. But it is also what makes it rich and deep. Caring for children fits Berlin’s picture better than Mill’s or Kant’s. (Page 234)

of what makes having a child such a morally transformative experience is the fact that my child’s well-being can genuinely be more important to me than my own. It may sound melodramatic to say that I would give my life for my children, but, of course, that’s exactly what every parent does all the time, in ways both large and small. (Page 235)

Once I commit myself to a child, I’m literally not the same person I was before. My ego has expanded to include another person even though—especially though—that person is utterly helpless and unable to reciprocate. And even though—especially though—that person’s desires and goals may be very different from mine. That’s at the heart of the paradox of dependence and independence. (Page 235)

In the richest country on earth more than one-fifth of the children grow up in poverty. More children are poor than people in any other age group. People who take care of children, especially young children, are paid less than almost any other group. And this disaster is getting worse: the percentage of children in poverty has actually gone up over the past ten years. Worse even than poverty itself is the fact that an increasing number of children grow up in isolation and chaos. (Page 240)

We talk about how women started leaving the home to work in the 1970s. But we don’t recognize that fathers also started leaving the home to work only relatively recently. Until the nineteenth and even the twentieth century, most people lived and worked on farms, or in small local workshops or businesses. In 1830, 70 percent of American children lived in families with two parents who both worked on a farm; only 15 percent lived in a “nuclear family” with a working father and a stay-at-home mom. In 1930, only 30 percent of children had two farming parents, and 55 percent were in nuclear families. In the 1970s, the composition of families began to change again, and by 1989 less than a third of children were being raised in “nuclear families”—most children were raised by two parents who both worked or by a single parent who did. The percentage of children in one-parent families has continued to rise. By 2014 more than 30 percent of children were being raised by single parents. (Page 242)

Multiple studies show that interventions that support parents in the early years have strong effects into adulthood. The interventions may be “home-visiting” programs where nurses provide additional care and advice to parents, or they may provide high-quality preschool, or they may give parents paid leave, or they may just give parents money. Children with this kind of support grow up to be healthier and have higher incomes, and are less likely to be imprisoned. (Page 244)

We should start thinking about caring for the people we love, young or old, as an intrinsic value, a fundamental good that deserves both recognition and support. Just as we should provide paid parental leave, we should provide paid leave for caring for the elderly. And just as we should recognize formally that the demands of work should sometimes give way to the needs of our children, we should also recognize that they should sometimes give way to the needs of our parents. (Page 248)

The myth of Orpheus and Eurydice is one of the most vivid and compelling images of our relationship with the past. As we move forward in time we leave behind the ghosts of our own departed loves. All the efforts we make to look back and keep them with us—memory, storytelling, photographs, and videos—just serve to drive them further away into the uncapturable past. We watch helplessly as the shades of our grandparents and parents, our own youthful selves, even the beautiful and beloved faces of our young children, fade away down the long slope of the past. (Page 252)

But to be a parent is also to experience a kind of Orpheus effect in reverse. We parents, and grandparents even more, have to watch our beloved children glide irretrievably into the future we can never reach ourselves. It is a simple fact that I won’t see Augie’s life after forty, and that I can’t even begin to guess what that life will be like. But there’s another side to this. I won’t be here but he will, and so a part of me will be, too. In the end, the human story of parents and children is surely more hopeful than sad. Our parents give us the past, and we hand on the future to our children. (Page 252)