Alison Gopnik Quotes - Page 2

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• 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

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Alison Gopnik

  Husband, Years, Quality

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

  6 Copy quote

• 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

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  4 Copy quote

• 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

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• 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

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Alison Gopnik

  Giving, Tree, Brain

  4 Copy quote

• One of the most distinctive evolutionary features of human beings is our unusually long, protected childhood.

  Alison Gopnik

  Long, Childhood, Humans

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• 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.

  4 Copy quote

• Texts and e-mails travel no faster than phone calls and telegrams, and their content isn't necessarily richer or poorer.

  Alison Gopnik

  Phones, Mail, Phone Calls

  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.229, Macmillan

  6 Copy quote

• 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.

  Alison Gopnik

  Real, Water, Brain

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

  Alison Gopnik

  Children, Teenage, Answers

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• 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

  4 Copy quote

• Adults tend to think they have much free will. Kids younger than six are less sure. They may be more realistic!

  Alison Gopnik

  Kids, Thinking, Free Will

  Source: www.psychologytoday.com

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Alison Gopnik

  Simple, Focus, Healthy

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

  11 Copy quote

• 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

  4 Copy quote

• Developmental scientists like me explore the basic science of learning by designing controlled experiments.

  Alison Gopnik

  Design, Scientist, Like Me

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• It's turns out to be much easier to simulate a grandmaster chess player than it is to simulate a 2-year-old.

  Alison Gopnik

  Inspiring, Player, Years

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• 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.

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Alison Gopnik

  Mean, Heaven, Zombie

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• The best scientific way to discover if one factor influences another is to do a controlled experiment.

  Alison Gopnik

  Way, Influence, Experiments

  4 Copy quote

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