InThe 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.
InThe 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 wrongits not just based on bad science, its 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 imaginativeand to be very different both from their parents and from each other.
Alison Gopnik, a professor of psychology at the University of California at Berkeley, is the author of
The Philosophical Babyand
The Scientist in the Crib.
Bracing and thoughtful . . . Educators looking to resist the current vogue for highly scripted, teacher-driven lesson modules will be delighted by Gopniks 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 welcomelS
![The Gardener and the Carpenter: What the New Science of Child Development Tells Us About the Relationship Between Parents and Children [Paperback]](/itemImage/2/6/7/2/2_5473270.jpg "The Gardener and the Carpenter: What the New Science of Child Development Tells Us About the Relationship Between Parents and Children [Paperback]")