Alison Gopnik Quotes About Children

Quotes about: Children

• 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.

  Alison Gopnik

  Children, Attitude, Caring

  Interview with Jessica Zack, www.sfgate.com. September 29, 2016.

• 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.

  Alison Gopnik

  Children, Order, Breathing

• 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.

  Alison Gopnik

  Children, Teaching, Play

• 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.

  Alison Gopnik

  Children, Data, Ideas

  "We All Start Out As Scientists, But Some of Us Forget" by Chris Mooney, Indre Viskontas, www.motherjones.com. November 8, 2013.

• 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.

  Alison Gopnik

  Mother, Children, Husband

  Source: www.macleans.ca

• Being a grandmother is a wonderful thing, so my advice is skip the children. Go straight to the grandchildren.

  Alison Gopnik

  Children, Grandmother, Advice

  Source: www.macleans.ca

• 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.

  Alison Gopnik

  Children, Mean, Hard Work

  Source: www.macleans.ca

• Caring, whether for children or the dying, shouldn't be instrumental. It should be an intrinsic, moral good.

  Alison Gopnik

  Children, Caring, Dying

  Source: www.psychologytoday.com

• 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?

  Alison Gopnik

  Children, People, Profound

  "In conversation: Alison Gopnik". Interview with Kate Fillion, www.macleans.ca. November 1, 2011.

• 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.

  Alison Gopnik

  Children, Book, Thinking

  Source: www.macleans.ca

• 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.

  Alison Gopnik

  Children, Kids, Desire

  Source: www.psychologytoday.com

• We don't wife our husbands and we don't child our parents.

  Alison Gopnik

  Children, Husband, Wife

  Interview with Jessica Zack, www.sfgate.com. September 29, 2016.

• 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.

  Alison Gopnik

  Teenage, Children, Culture

  Source: www.macleans.ca

• 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.

  Alison Gopnik

  Children, Kids, Long

  Source: www.psychologytoday.com

• What happens when children reach puberty earlier and adulthood later? The answer is: a good deal of teenage weirdness.

  Alison Gopnik

  Children, Teenage, Answers

• 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.

  Alison Gopnik

  Children, Security And Freedom, People

  Interview with Jessica Zack, www.sfgate.com. September 29, 2016.

• 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.

  Alison Gopnik

  Growing Up, Children, Adventure

  Source: www.macleans.ca

• 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.

  Alison Gopnik

  Baby, Children, Childhood

• 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.

  Alison Gopnik

  Baby, Children, Nice

  Interview with Jessica Zack, www.sfgate.com. September 29, 2016.

• 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.

  Alison Gopnik

  Children, Character, Profound

  Source: www.macleans.ca

• 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.

  Alison Gopnik

  Children, Philosophy, Real

  "What Is It Like to Be a Baby?". Interview with Jonah Lehrer, www.scientificamerican.com. September 1, 2009.

• 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.

  Alison Gopnik

  Children, Thinking, Worry

  Source: www.macleans.ca

• 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.

  Alison Gopnik

  Children, Giving, Empathy

• 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".

  Alison Gopnik

  Children, Thinking, People

  Source: www.macleans.ca

• 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?"

  Alison Gopnik

  Running, Children, Thinking

  Source: www.macleans.ca

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