Alison Gopnik Quotes About Parents

Quotes about: Parents

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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.

  Alison Gopnik

  Mean, Parent, Leaving

  Alison Gopnik (2016). “The Gardener and the Carpenter: What the New Science of Child Development Tells Us About the Relationship Between Parents and Children”, p.204, Macmillan

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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.

  Alison Gopnik

  Stars, Sibling, Parent

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

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