The Gardener and the Carpenter: What the New Science of Child Development Tells Us About the Relationship Between Parents and Children

Gopnik has written yet another wonderful, wise book about children. Gopnik's gardener/carpenter metaphor goes to the heart of the way children are seen in modern America, epitomized by the recent coinage "parenting." A gardener supports animate objects as they grow according to their own internal nature. A carpenter shapes inanimate objects entirel. Compelling and insightful text with unfortunately framed introduction C. Nagy The central thesis of this book and most of the supporting text is intriguing and compelling. The core idea is that “parenting”, encompassed by a set of techniques with associated expertise and focus on outcomes, is problematic for a variety of reasons; “being a p. "Great read even if you aren't raising children" according to MWH. Thoughtful book, clearly talking about how children explore and learn. We don't shape children (the carpenter) but provide the environment (gardener) that supports them as they develop the tools to flourish in the future, unpredictable world. The author also writes about society, c

Children are designed to be messy and unpredictable, playful and imaginativeand to be very different both from their parents and from each other.. Yet the thing we call “parenting” is a surprisingly new invention. In the past thirty years, the concept of parenting and the multibillion-dollar industry surrounding it have transformed child care into obsessive, controlling, and goal-oriented labor intended to create a particular kind of child and therefore a particular kind of adult.In The Gardener and the Carpenter, the pioneering developmental psychologist and philosopher Alison Gopnik argues that the familiar twenty-first-century picture of parents and children is profoundly wrongit’s not just based on bad science, it’s bad for kids and parents, too.Drawing on the study of human evolution and her own cutting-edge scientific research into how children learn, Gopnik shows that although caring for children is profoundly important, it is not a matter of shaping them to turn out a particular way. One of the world's leading child psychologists shatters the myth of "good parenting"Caring deeply about our children is part of what makes us human

. She has three sons and lives in Berkeley, California, with her husband, Alvy Ray Smith. She writes the Mind and Matter column for The Wall Street Journal and is the author of The Philosophical Baby and coauthor of The Scientist in the Crib. Alison Gopnik is a professor of psychology and an affiliate pr

Each generation is different from the ones before. And that, Gopnik suggests, is the whole point of being human." Courtney Humphries, The Boston Globe"Deeply researched Gopnik's approach focuses on helping children to find their own way She describes a wide range of experiments showing that children learn less through 'conscious and deliberate teaching' than through watching, listening, and imitating.” Josie Glausiusz, Nature“What a relief to find a book that takes a stand against the practice of “helicopter parenting” so prevalent today The Gardener and the Carpenter