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

by Alison Gopnik

Overview

In The Gardener and the Carpenter, Alison Gopnik, one of the world's leading child psychologists, illuminates the paradoxes of parenthood from a scientific perspective and shatters the myth of "good parenting".

Caring deeply about our children is part of what makes us human. 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 wrong—it’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. Children are designed to be messy and unpredictable, playful and imaginative—and to be very different both from their parents and from each other.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781250132253
Publisher:	Picador
Publication date:	08/01/2017
Pages:	320
Sales rank:	300,443
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Alison Gopnik, a professor of psychology at the University of California at Berkeley, is the author of The Philosophical Baby and The Scientist in the Crib.

Table of Contents

CONTENTS

Introduction: The Parent Paradoxes

From Parenting to Being a Parent

The Paradoxes

The Paradoxes of Love

The Paradoxes of Learning

The Uniqueness of Childhood

The Child Garden

1. Against Parenting

In Praise of Mess

The Ideas That Die in Our Stead

Exploring vs. Exploiting

Protective Parents

2. The Evolution of Childhood

Two Pictures

Beyond Just-So Stories

The Paradox of Immaturity

Learning, Culture, and Feedback Loops

Variability: The Unknown Unknowns

Back to Parenting

3. The Evolution of Love

Pair-Bonding: It’s Complicated

Varieties of Love

Grandmothers

Alloparents

The Commitment Puzzle

The Roots of Commitment

The Costs of Commitment

Love and Parenting

4. Learning Through Looking

The Little Actors

The Myth of Mirror Neurons

The Birth of Imitation

Learning About the World

When Children Are Better Than Adults

Overimitation

Rituals

Imitation Across Cultures

Doing Things Together

5. Learning Through Listening

Learning from Testimony

Being Sure of Yourself

Who You Gonna Believe?

Telling Stories

Questions and Explanations

Why Ask Why?

The Essential Question

Letting the Dude Figure It Out

6. The Work of Play

Rough-and-Tumble Rats

Getting Into Everything

Pop-Beads and Popper

Making Believe

Bayesian Babies

Kinds of Minds

Dancing Robots

Beyond Miss Havisham

7. Growing Up

Apprenticeship

Scholastic Skills

Thinking Differently

Attention Deficit Disorder

Schooling and Learning

The People in the Playground

The Two Systems of Adolescence

8. The Future and the Past: Children and Technology

The Reading Brain

The World of Screens

Eden and Mad Max

The Technological Ratchet

The City of the Web

What to Do?

9. The Value of Children

Private Ties and Public Policy

Finding the Money

The Old and the Young

Work, Play, Art, Science

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Acknowledgments

Index

Editorial Reviews

Bracing and thoughtful . . . Educators looking to resist the current vogue for highly scripted, teacher-driven lesson modules will be delighted by Gopnik’s strong scientific case for letting children guide their own learning . . . Gopnik never veers from her faith in the warm human bond between caregiver and child that drives not only 'the pathos, but also the moral depth' of being a parent.” —Erika Christakis, The Washington Post

“Fascinating and passionate . . . A welcome corrective to the results-driven approach to parenting.” —Bee Wilson, The Guardian

"Alison Gopnik's The Gardener and the Carpenter should be required reading for anyone who is, or is thinking of becoming, a parent . . . Hers is a rare erudition: scholarly, yes, but accessible and rooted in her experience as a mother and grandmother . . . Gopnik's science-based assertion is a welcome corrective to the prevailing culture of coaching and tutoring children—often at great expense—to avoid failure.” —Isabel Berwick, Financial Times

"[The Gardener and the Carpenter] calls into question the modern notion that good parents can mold their children into successful adults . . . Children are not supposed to become like their parents; they learn from them to create something new. 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] not only dispels the myth of a single best model for good parenting but also backs up its proposals with real-life examples and research studies . . . This book will provide helpful inspiration for parents and may prompt some to rethink their strategies.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

From the Publisher

It's refreshing…to read a book about raising children by a writer whose instinct is to telescope out and look at the job from a loftier perspective…Gopnik does not bother sniping helicopter parents or hunting tiger moms…Instead, she takes aim at the whole premise of modern parenting, "that if parents just practice the right techniques, they can make a substantial difference in the way their child turns out." Raising children has become a job, Gopnik writes, and it's a high-pressure one even for those of us who fancy ourselves to be low-key Her diagnosis will resonate painfully with anyone trying to raise good humans in a relentlessly outcome-obsessed culture…Marshaling evidence from sources including evolutionary biology and her own Berkeley lab, she argues that the kids'll be all right pretty much no matter what their parents do. At the very least, they won't be much different than they were going to be anyway.

The New York Times Book Review - Ruth Graham

★ 04/18/2016
What a relief to find a book that takes a stand against the practice of “helicopter parenting” so prevalent today. Developmental psychologist Gopnik (The Philosophical Baby) provides comfort for parents who want their children to experience a free-form childhood where they can spread their wings and grow up into well-rounded, responsible adults. Her book not only dispels the myth of a single best model for good parenting but also backs up its proposals with real-life examples and research studies. Gopnik argues that the modern notion of parenting as a kind of avocation or career is “fundamentally misguided, from a scientific, philosophical, and political point of view, as well as a personal one.” Employing the two titular professions as metaphors for opposing approaches to parenting, she maintains that parents should not try to shape their children like a carpenter, but rather provide them with room to grow, like a gardener, into creative thinkers and problem solvers. “Being a parent is simply about loving children,” Gopnik states, except that “love is never simple.” This book will provide helpful inspiration for parents and may prompt some to rethink their strategies. An extensive bibliography of further recommended reading is included. Agent: Andrew Wylie, Wylie Agency. (Aug.)

Publishers Weekly

2016-05-05
An internationally recognized leader in the field of childhood learning debunks the concept of "good parenting."Gopnik (Psychology and Philosophy/Univ. of California; The Philosophical Baby: What Children's Minds Tell Us about Truth, Love, and the Meaning of Life, 2009, etc.) is a grandmother and the director of a cognitive science laboratory. Her firsthand experience of the complexities of being a parent in today's society has led her to challenge the accepted view of "parenting." It is "not actually a verb," she writes, "not a form of work, and isn't and shouldn't be directed to the goal of sculpting a child into a particular kind of adult." Rather, parents should simply provide children with a loving, nurturing environment in which they can learn and thrive. The insatiability of children's curiosity is legendary. As Gopnik notes, research has shown that "pre-schoolers average nearly seventy-five questions per hour." Contrary to the traditional parenting model, which sets specific educational goals for children, parents can play a crucial role simply by responding to a child's questions. "Parents don't have to consciously manipulate what they say to give children the information they need," writes the author. They learn through rough-and-tumble play, careful observation of their environment, direct interaction, and the let's-pretend games they invent for themselves. "Pretending is closely related to another distinctly human ability," writes Gopnik, "hypothetical or counterfactual thinking—that is the ability to consider alternative ways that the world might be." In the author's view, it is imperative for caretakers and educators to nurture young children's curiosity, and they should also allow adolescents to experiment and learn by apprenticeship. Gopnik concludes that recognizing the dichotomy between the goal-oriented carpenter and the nurturing gardener is an appropriate metaphor for our broader cultural values. "Just as we should give children the resources and space to play, and do so without insisting that play will have immediate payoffs," she writes, "we should do the same for scientists and artists." A highly thoughtful and entertaining treatment of a subject that merits serious consideration.

Kirkus Reviews