The Gardener and the Carpenter by Alison Gopnik

I'm currently reading this book. Here are some quotes that have grabbed me so far.

Some Broad Themes

• Humans are successful because we come in such a variety of flavors. One never knows what traits will be successful in a given environment, so one strategy is to maximize variety.
• Similarly, children represent that "variety" in their freedom and creativity. We need innovation every generation

Introduction

Many of the parenting how-to books, of course, simply give practical advice about being a parent. But many more promise that if parents just practice the right techniques, they can make a substantial difference in the way their child turns out.

I’m one of those anxious, middle-class working parents myself, and all my life I’ve felt both the pull of the parenting model and the reaction against it. My three sons are all grown up, reasonably happy and successful, and starting to have children of their own. But I have also found myself perpetually assessing my responsibility—or should that be credit?—for the ups and downs of their lives. Was I overprotective when I walked my youngest son to school every day when he was eight years old? Or was I neglectful when I didn’t do the same when he turned nine? I wanted my children to follow their own paths and discover their own gifts. But should I have insisted that my oldest child finish college instead of trying to become a musician? I believed—and still do—that good public schools are best for all children. But when my older kids were suffering at the local public high school, should I have sent them to a fancy private school in the suburbs, as I did with my youngest son? Should I have forced my youngest to turn off the computer and read, or should I have let him master coding? How could I have made sure that my “gifted” middle child had lots of free time to play, and did his homework, and at the same time went to an advanced math tutor and ballet classes? Hardest of all, I got divorced when my youngest child finished high school. Should I have done it sooner or later or not at all?

My professional expertise and knowledge about development has brought me no closer to answers than anybody else. Looking back on my nearly forty years as a parent, I suspect the best answer is that these are just the wrong questions.

Caring for children has never, in all of human history, just been the role of biological mothers and fathers. From the very beginning it’s been a central project for any community of human beings. This is still true. Education, for example, is simply caring for children broadly conceived.

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.

Indeed, paradoxically there would be no specific cultures and traditions to pass on if past human beings hadn’t done something new.

Chapter 1

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.

Chapter 2

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.

Chapter 3

We don’t care for children because we love them; we love them because we care for them.

Chapter 4

The central paradox of learning is the tension between tradition and innovation.

Imitation is very complex. Mirror neuron theory is too simple. Neurons fire in different areas and in different patterns depending on context. The brain is tremendously complicated.

There are two hypotheses about why humans have been so successful evolutionarily. One is that we’re the best at using tools, the other is that we’re the best at using psychological manipulation. Tool use requires knowing about cause and effect, which is very difficult. Humans depend on learning through observation a lot more than even our closest relatives.

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.

We’ve also found this pattern in several other experiments—younger learners are better than older ones at figuring out unlikely options. We think it might reflect a much more general difference between children and adults. Children might be especially good at thinking about unlikely possibilities. After all, grown-ups know a tremendous amount about how the world works. It makes sense that we mostly rely on what we already know.

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