The Gardener and the Carpenter
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Parenting may be ubiquitous, but it is surprisingly modern. The past three decades have seen it transformed into a billion-dollar industry of obsessive, controlling and goal-oriented labor intended to create a specific type of child and thereby, a certain type of adult. Alison Gopnik, the pioneering developmental psychologist, challenges the twenty-first-century concept of parenting as we know it. She argues that this popular picture of parents and children is not only based on bad science, but it is also bad for both kids and parents. Drawing on human evolution and her own ground-breaking research into how children learn, Gopnik illustrates that while taking care of children is indeed critical, it is not a process of shaping them to turn out a particular way. The variability and flexibility that comes with childhood allows children to be messy and unpredictable, to be creative and imaginative, and to be vastly different from their parents. In this insightful book, Gopnik bridges the gap between the science of child development and common parenting beliefs showing how caring parents who create secure and loving environments let children learn and thrive on their own.