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

Your book is built around an analogy Parents behaving like gardeners Parents behaving like carpenters Unpack those analogies for me

Well if you look at the prevailing culture of parents and caregiving in the United States It's a picture that's a lot like the picture you might imagine if you thought about a carpenter Do the right things, get the right skills read the right books You're going to be able to shape your child into a particular kind of adult

And that picture is very different from the kind of picture that comes from the science The picture that comes from the science is much more like being a gardener

I think the science suggests that being a caregiver for human beings is much more like being a gardener than being a carpenter It's much more about providing a protected space in which unexpected things can happen and shaping a child to come out to be a particular kind of desirable adult

Alison Gopnik is a professor of psychology and philosophy at the University of California Berkeley. She's the author of several books about children's development and her most recent one is The Gardener and The Carpenter

In her book, The Gardener and the Carpenter, Alison looks at two approaches to being a parent and their consequences.

Your book is built around an analogy. Parents behaving like gardeners, parents behaving like carpenters.

Alison Gopnik is a professor of psychology and philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. She's the author of several books about children's development and her most recent one is The Gardener and The Carpenter.

Your book is built around an analogy. Parents behaving like gardeners, parents behaving like carpenters.

Well, if you look at the prevailing culture of parents and caregiving in the United States, even in Europe now, it's a picture that's a lot like the picture you might imagine if you thought about a carpenter.

And the idea is that if you just do the right things, get the right skills, read the right books, you're going to be able to shape your child into a particular kind of adult.

The picture that comes from the science is much more like being a gardener.

Alison Gopnik is a professor of psychology and philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. She's the author of several books about children's development, and her most recent one is The Gardener and The Carpenter.

Your book is built around an analogy, parents behaving like gardeners, parents behaving like carpenters.

Her most recent book, The Gardener and the Carpenter, explores the different ways parents can raise kids and the consequences of those choices.

I think intuitively parents feel that there's something that's crazy about having your teenagers staying up until 2 o'clock at night studying for their SATs and trying to get that little extra edge that's going to get them into the college as opposed to someone else.

And I think that's exactly right. And I think both those messages are there. And my experience in going around and talking about this book is

Alison Gopnik is a professor of psychology and philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. She's the author of several books about children's development, and her most recent one is The Gardener and The Carpenter.

one thing i would recommend to parents is uh is the book by ellison gopnik called the gardener and the carpenter

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Her most recent book is The Gardener and the Carpenter, with the new science of child development tells us about the relationship between parents and children.

I think gardening is a very nice metaphor for, if you're trying to do this project, which I would like to do of really taking caring seriously from a scientific perspective and a philosophical perspective, trying to find good ways of talking about it that make it be other than just, just another kind of work.

And I think that kind of picture is much more like what goes on with caregiving for a next generation. Even if you could accomplish this end of shaping a child to come out a particular way, you would have defeated the whole point of childhood by doing that, because the whole point of childhood is to have each generation introduce new variability, new kind of noise and randomness and new possibilities.