Alison Gopnik is a professor of psychology and an affiliate professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. She is an internationally recognized leader in the study of children's learning and development. Gopnik 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.
Many modern-day parents are training their children to be competitive at an early age — playing soccer to win, getting high test scores at school, and shaping their activities to increase their chances of getting into an Ivy League school. This controlling behavior makes parenting into work and not an outcome of love.
Children, Gopnik asserts, are capable of learning and advancing on their own. "Our job is not to shape our children's minds; it's to let those minds explore all the possibilities that the world allows." That's why she uses two metaphors in the title of her wise book. Being a carpenter is controlling a child and using a design manual to achieve certain results. Being a gardener is nurturing the conditions in which children can flourish and bloom.
Tapping into her studies of evolutionary biology and research conducted in her Berkeley lab, Gopnik assures us that "we can't make children learn but we can let them learn." It is best to relinquish control. The Gardener and the Carpenter will open many new doors for parents who approach the author's approach with openness. Here are some bits of information we found to be very interesting:
- Researchers have discovered that pre-schoolers average nearly seventy-five questions per hour.
- Children who pretend have a distinct advantage in understanding other people.
- The skills of the hyper-literate twentieth century may well disappear or at least become highly specialized enthusiasms, the way the skills of hunting, poetry, and dance are today.
- The latest estimate is that children in the United States cost an average of $245,000 to raise, and that's not counting the cost of college.
