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The Brain Is Highly Structured, But It Is Also Extremely Flexible. It's Not A Blank Slate, But It Isn't Written In Stone, Either.

-Alison Gopnik

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The Brain Is Highly

Alison Gopnik

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The Brain Is Highly Structured, But It Is Also Extremely Flexible. It's Not A Blank Slate, But It Isn't Written In Stone, Either.

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If You Just Got Enough Expertise And Enough Special Techniques And Read Up Enough, Then You Could Shape A Child Into The Kind Of Adult You Wanted. There's Almost This Kind Of Competitive Enterprise. That Picture Is The Picture I Think People Often Imply When They Use The Word "parenting".

Developmental Scientists Like Me Explore The Basic Science Of Learning By Designing Controlled Experiments.

We Provide A Secure, Stable Space For Children To Grow Up In, So Children Will Be Able To Take Risks And Have Adventures And Do Things That Are Unexpected. If There Isn't A Risk That Your Children Can Fail, Then You Haven't Succeeded As A Parent.

One Of The Most Distinctive Evolutionary Features Of Human Beings Is Our Unusually Long, Protected Childhood.

Children Are The Most Amazing Thing In The Universe, As Far As I'm Concerned. If You're Worrying About How It's Going To Turn Out, You Aren't Experiencing That Day-to-day Satisfaction Of Being With These Incredible, Extraordinary Creatures. Every Single One Of Them Is The Most Incredible, Extraordinary Creature That You're Ever Going To Want To See. I Think The Joy Of Having That Deep Relationship - That's The Core Of What Being A Parent Is.

Becoming An Adult Means Leaving The World Of Your Parents And Starting To Make Your Way Toward The Future That You Will Share With Your Peers.

Adults Tend To Think They Have Much Free Will. Kids Younger Than Six Are Less Sure. They May Be More Realistic!

Texts And E-mails Travel No Faster Than Phone Calls And Telegrams, And Their Content Isn't Necessarily Richer Or Poorer.

Preschool Kids Learn Best When Exploring, But Kids In School Learn Best When They Do Things, Interacting With A Master. Unfortunately, Our Schools Don't Do Much Of Either. Also, Kids Do Need To Learn How To Deal With Technology, And Online Education And Otherwise Using Electronic Devices As Learning Tools Facilitates That.

What Teenagers Want Most Of All Are Social Rewards, Especially The Respect Of Their Peers.

The Brain Knows The Real Secret Of Seduction, More Effective Than Even Music And Martinis. Just Keep Whispering, 'gee, You Are Really Special' To That Sack Of Water And Protein That Is A Body, And You Can Get It To Do Practically Anything.

The Youngest Children Have A Great Capacity For Empathy And Altruism. There's A Recent Study That Shows Even 14-month-olds Will Climb Across A Bunch Of Cushions And Go Across A Room To Give You A Pen If You Drop One.

Instead Of Just Saying, "i Love My Baby And I Pick Him Up Because He's Adorable And It's So Nice To Cuddle With Him," We Practice Attachment Parenting. We Let Our Children Play Outside And Have Age-appropriate Freedoms And Are Labeled Free-range Parents.

Putting Together Philosophy And Children Would Have Been Difficult For Most Of History. But Very Fortunately For Me, When I Started Graduate School There Was A Real Scientific Revolution Taking Place In Developmental Psychology.

Babies And Young Children Are Like The Research And Development Division Of The Human Species, And We Grown-ups Are Production And Marketing.

Research And Development

Ineffective Or Weak Brain Connections Are Pruned In Much The Same Way A Gardener Would Prune A Tree Or Bush, Giving The Plant A Desired Shape.

The More Obsessively We Focus On What A Particular Food Is Going To Do For Us, The Less Healthy We've Become. Simple Pleasures Become Complicated.

We Don't Wife Our Husbands And We Don't Child Our Parents.

On The Web We All Become Small-town Visitors Lost In The Big City.

We Know That Kids Who Grow Up In An Environment Of Warmth And Support Will Thrive And Function In Whatever Environment They Find Themselves. What We Need To Do Is To Do More To Help Poor Kids Have Such An Environment.

We Don't Measure The Quality Of Our Other Relationships By How Well The Other Person Turns Out, For Instance Whether My Husband Is A Better Person After 10 Years Than He Was When I First Met Him.

The Best Scientific Way To Discover If One Factor Influences Another Is To Do A Controlled Experiment.

The Brain Is Highly Structured, But It Is Also Extremely Flexible. It's Not A Blank Slate, But It Isn't Written In Stone, Either.

Philosophers And Psychologists Have Long Puzzled Over The Question Of How We Know As Much As We Do Despite Our Limited Experiences. One Way Is To See How Children Learn. Another Example Is Consciousness. The Concept Is Usually Explored By Armchair Academics. Looking At Kids Expands Our Conceptions Of Consciousness.

From An Evolutionary Perspective Children Are, Literally, Designed To Learn. Childhood Is A Special Period Of Protected Immaturity. It Gives The Young Breathing Time To Master The Things They Will Need To Know In Order To Survive As Adults.

Adults Often Assume That Most Learning Is The Result Of Teaching And That Exploratory, Spontaneous Learning Is Unusual. But Actually, Spontaneous Learning Is More Fundamental.

Caring, Whether For Children Or The Dying, Shouldn't Be Instrumental. It Should Be An Intrinsic, Moral Good.

Owning Our Past Allows Us To Own Our Future.

Some People Say That Parents Don't Matter, And That's Not True At All. The Irony Is That We Pay Attention To All These Things That Don't Matter, And Not To What Does Matter, Such As Parents Having Enough Resources To Provide An Environment Where Their Children Have Both Security And Freedom.

Security And Freedom

Young Children Seem To Be Learning Who To Share This Toy With And Figure Out How It Works, While Adolescents Seem To Be Exploring Some Very Deep And Profound Questions: How Should This Society Work? How Should Relationships Among People Work? The Exploration Is: Who Am I, What Am I Doing?

I'm Afraid The Parenting Advice To Come Out Of Developmental Psychology Is Very Boring: Pay Attention To Your Kids And Love Them.

Scientists Learn About The World In Three Ways: They Analyze Statistical Patterns In The Data, They Do Experiments, And They Learn From The Data And Ideas Of Other Scientists. The Recent Studies Show That Children Also Learn In These Ways.

People Talked About Being A Parent, Or Being A Mother Or A Father. We Don't Talk About "wiving" Our Husbands Or "friending" Our Friends, Or "childing" Our Parents. We Just Talk About Being In A Relationship With Those People. You Don't Measure Whether Your Marriage Was Good Based On Whether Or Not Your Husband Is Better Now Than He Was 10 Years Ago, Or Whether Your Friend Is Richer Than When They First Became Your Friend. The Relationships Between Parents And Children Is A Kind Of Love, Rather Than A Kind Of Work.

Being A Grandmother Is A Wonderful Thing, So My Advice Is Skip The Children. Go Straight To The Grandchildren.

I Think, At The End Of The Century We'll Have A Generation Of Parents And A Generation Of Children Who Won't Have Had The Deep Satisfactions Of Being Parents And Being Children In The Way That They Might Have And Are Going To Spend A Lot Of Time Fretting And Worrying And Being Hovered Over For Nothing. The Question Isn't So Much "what Will Happen In The Long Run?" But "what's Happening To People's Lives Right Now?"

The Largest And Most Powerful Computers Are Still No Match For The Smallest And Weakest Humans.

Because We Imagine, We Can Have Invention And Technology. It's Actually Play, Not Necessity, That Is The Mother Of Invention.

We Fear Death So Profoundly, Not Because It Means The End Of Our Body, But Because It Means The End Of Our Consciousness - Better To Be A Spirit In Heaven Than A Zombie On Earth.

What Happens When Children Reach Puberty Earlier And Adulthood Later? The Answer Is: A Good Deal Of Teenage Weirdness.

What's It Like To Be A Baby? It's Like Being In Love In Paris For The First Time After You've Had Three Double Espressos.

I'm Culturally Jewish But, Like Most Scientists, An Atheist: I Don't Believe There's A God Or Supernatural World. Buddhism Offers Guidance On What To Do In A World Without God: It Opines That Truly Being Present In The World‚ Experiencing And Hanging Out With Your Loved Ones, Provides All The Significance You Could Want.

There Is A Tension Between Our Desire To Get Our Kids To Turn Out A Particular Way Versus Letting Them Develop To Be Their Own Person. If There Were A Pill That Would Make My Child Turn Out The Way I Wanted, I'm Not Sure I'd Take It.

Animals Are Certainly More Sophisticated Than We Used To Think. And We Shouldn't Lump Together Animals As A Group. Crows And Chimps And Dogs Are All Highly Intelligent In Very Different Ways.

We're In A Culture Where Everything Is Either Consumption Or Production, So Child Care Is Either A Very, Very Bad-paying Form Of Work Or A Very Expensive Luxury That You Purchase. There Isn't A Good Place In Our Picture Of The World For What Caregiving Is About. Even Teenage Babysitters Have Sort Of Disappeared From The Scene.

You Read A Bunch Of Books And You Get A Bunch Of How-tos, And You Take A Bunch Of Classes And You Learn A Bunch Of Techniques. You Set Yourself Goals And Benchmarks. I Think People Have Imported That Into Their Experience Of Taking Care Of Children.

If Parents Are The Fixed Stars In The Childs Universe, The Vaguely Understood, Distant But Constant Celestial Spheres, Siblings Are The Dazzling, Sometimes Scorching Comets Whizzing Nearby.

We Pass Our Values, Ideas And Moral Character On To Our Children, But We Do That Knowing That Our Children Are Going To Revise Our Knowledge And Reshape Their Values. There's Something Very Paradoxical And Profound About Being A Parent As Opposed To Parenting. We Put In All This Effort And Energy Not So That We Can Shape A Child Of A Particular Sort, But So That All Sorts Of Possibilities Can Happen In The Future.

All Of Us Gardeners Know That Nothing Comes Out The Way You Planned. It's A Different Garden Every Year, And It's Always Sort Of Different From What You Were Thinking When You Began. What It Really Means To Be A Good Gardener Is To Work Hard To Produce An Ecosystem That Will Have Enough Diversity, Enough Possibilities, So It's Robust, And It's Resilient, And It Can Change When The Seasons Change. And That Kind Of Robust, Unexpected, Variable, Messy System - That's What You Want To Create When You're Having Children, Too.

The Radio Was An Improvement On The Telegraph But It Didn't Have The Same Exponential, Transformative Effect.

Teaching Is A Very Effective Way To Get Children To Learn Something Specific - This Tube Squeaks, Say, Or A Squish Then A Press Then A Pull Causes The Music To Play. But It Also Makes Children Less Likely To Discover Unexpected Information And To Draw Unexpected Conclusions.

It's Turns Out To Be Much Easier To Simulate A Grandmaster Chess Player Than It Is To Simulate A 2-year-old.

Childhood Is A Fundamental Part Of All Human Lives, Parents Or Not, Since That's How We All Start Out. And Yet Babies And Young Children Are So Mysterious And Puzzling And Even Paradoxical.

Caring For Children Has Always Been One Of The Deepest And Most Satisfying Things That A Human Being Does, And Yet It Is Hard To Keep A Healthy Attitude Toward It In Our Competitive, Outcome-oriented Society.

To Support The People We Care About Is Intrinsic, It Is Not Instrumental. It's Not Something We Do Because We're Hoping To Get Some Other Outcome.

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