Selected as a Book of the Year by the Financial Times `The Gardener and the Carpenter should be required reading for anyone who is, or is thinking of becoming a parent'
Financial Times Caring deeply about our children is part of what makes us human.
In The Gardener and the Carpenter, the pioneering developmental psychologist and philosopher Alison Gopnik argues that the familiar twenty-first-century picture of parenting is profoundly wrong - it's not just based on bad science, it's bad for children and their parents too.. `Parenting' won't make children learn - but caring parents let children learn by creating a secure, loving environment.
The variability and flexibility of childhood lets them innovate, create, and survive in an unpredictable world.
Children are designed to be messy and unpredictable, playful and imaginative, and to be very different both from their parents and from each other.
Drawing on the study of human evolution and her own cutting-edge scientific research into how children learn, Gopnik shows that although caring for children is profoundly important, it is not a matter of shaping them to turn out a particular way.
In the past thirty years, the concept of parenting and the huge industry surrounding it have transformed childcare into obsessive, controlling, and goal-orientated labour intended to create a particular kind of child, and therefore a particular kind of adult.
Yet the thing we call `parenting' is a surprisingly new invention.
Selected as a Book of the Year by the Financial Times `The Gardener and the Carpenter should be required reading for anyone who is, or is thinking of becoming a parent'
Financial Times Caring deeply about our children is part of what makes us human
