Review by New York Times Review
THERE'S SOMETHING PARADOXICAL about books on parenting: Reading is said to expand one's world, but caring for small children seems just as sure to shrink it. Parents lose whole days - months! decades! - to monitoring the moods and effluvia of their offspring. Why won't the baby sleep? Why won't the toddler obey? Why won't the teenager sleep and obey? The love is abundant, sure, but there's an awful lot of laundry that comes with it. It's refreshing, therefore, to read a book about raising children by a writer whose instinct is to telescope out and look at the job from a loftier perspective. In previous books, including "The Philosophical Baby," the developmental psychologist Alison Gopnik has argued that the complex minds of children and the way they approach the world can help us better understand the human condition. In her latest, "The Gardener and the Carpenter," she takes a similarly sweeping approach, contending that children are such naturals at learning and playing and innovating that parents should just loosen up and let them do their thing. "We can't make children learn," she writes, "but we can let them learn." Gopnik does not bother sniping helicopter parents or hunting tiger moms, who at this late date are easy prey for parental pontificators. Instead, she takes aim at the whole premise of modern parenting, "that if parents just practice the right techniques, they can make a substantial difference in the way their child turns out." Raising children has become a job, Gopnik writes, and it's a high-pressure one even for those of us who fancy ourselves to be low-key types. These days, even letting one's children play outdoors has become an official philosophy, with its own label ("free range"), guidebooks and rules. Her diagnosis will resonate painfully with anyone trying to raise good humans in a relentlessly outcome-obsessed culture. Co-sleeping or crying it out, forcing extra homework or letting kids goof around - very little of it has predictable effects on a child's future, Gopnik writes. Marshaling evidence from sources including evolutionary biology and her own Berkeley lab, she argues that the kids'll be all right pretty much no matter what their parents do. At the very least, they won't be much different than they were going to be anyway. Children are learning all the time, whether an adult thinks she is teaching them or not, and they are almost terrifyingly astute. In one experiment, for example, 18-month-olds watch someone with her arms bound up in a blanket using her head to bang on a box and make it light up. When it's the toddlers' turn to light up the box, they use their hands. But if the adult's hands are free and she still uses her head to turn on the light, the children use their own heads, too. That's a remarkably sophisticated bit of reasoning for people still in diapers. The middle chapters of "The Gardener and the Carpenter" are stuffed with absorbing bite-size summaries of similar research, demonstrating children's intuitive grasp of concepts like probability, reliability and ontology. It's in teasing out the implications of all this evidence where things get both fuzzy and frustrating. Gopnik's title comes from her idea that modern parents too often approach their tasks like a carpenter, attempting to shape the raw material into a particular finished product. Better to be a gardener, she writes, cultivating "a protected and nurturing space for plants to flourish" but realizing that the greatest beauty comes when we relinquish total control. After all, the whole point about the future is that we don't know exactly what we'll face there. If children are specially built to adapt and innovate, then it's counterproductive to overschedule their time and overdetermine their interests. So far, so good. True to her own ethos, Gopnik goes light on prescriptions for individual parents, though some of them may wonder what exactly it looks like to be the beatific "gardener" of a 6-year-old shrieking for iPhone time. She offers some concluding thoughts on the political and educational implications of the garden model. But she is more interested in proclamations about how the relationship between caregivers and children teaches us what it means to be human. No one would contradict the idea that, for example, raising children is about love. But if no one would contradict it, then do we really need to read chapters of proof? In the end, Gopnik's woodworker starts to look more like a straw man. Only cartoonish control freaks are obsessive about turning their children into scientists or senators and nothing else. On the other hand, how many parents could possibly be so blithe about "gardening" that they could accept Gopnik's laissez-faire openness to "watching that most promising of sprouts wither unexpectedly"? Whenever Gopnik edges up to confronting what this looks like in practice, she gestures to "paradox" and "mystery" and "moral depth" and pulls back to reassure the reader that this is really about the species as a whole. "From the point of view of evolution," she writes, "trying to consciously shape how your children will turn out is both futile and self-defeating." It's all well and good to know that humans will be fine "from the point of view of evolution." But no one gets up early to do laundry for a species. Scientific validation that there's not much we can do to help or hinder our kids. RUTH GRAHAM is a contributing writer at Slate.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [September 14, 2016]
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
What a relief to find a book that takes a stand against the practice of "helicopter parenting" so prevalent today. Developmental psychologist Gopnik (The Philosophical Baby) provides comfort for parents who want their children to experience a free-form childhood where they can spread their wings and grow up into well-rounded, responsible adults. Her book not only dispels the myth of a single best model for good parenting but also backs up its proposals with real-life examples and research studies. Gopnik argues that the modern notion of parenting as a kind of avocation or career is "fundamentally misguided, from a scientific, philosophical, and political point of view, as well as a personal one." Employing the two titular professions as metaphors for opposing approaches to parenting, she maintains that parents should not try to shape their children like a carpenter, but rather provide them with room to grow, like a gardener, into creative thinkers and problem solvers. "Being a parent is simply about loving children," Gopnik states, except that "love is never simple." This book will provide helpful inspiration for parents and may prompt some to rethink their strategies. An extensive bibliography of further recommended reading is included. Agent: Andrew Wylie, Wylie Agency. (Aug.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
An internationally recognized leader in the field of childhood learning debunks the concept of "good parenting."Gopnik (Psychology and Philosophy/Univ. of California; The Philosophical Baby: What Children's Minds Tell Us about Truth, Love, and the Meaning of Life, 2009, etc.) is a grandmother and the director of a cognitive science laboratory. Her firsthand experience of the complexities of being a parent in today's society has led her to challenge the accepted view of "parenting." It is "not actually a verb," she writes, "not a form of work, and isn't and shouldn't be directed to the goal of sculpting a child into a particular kind of adult." Rather, parents should simply provide children with a loving, nurturing environment in which they can learn and thrive. The insatiability of children's curiosity is legendary. As Gopnik notes, research has shown that "pre-schoolers average nearly seventy-five questions per hour." Contrary to the traditional parenting model, which sets specific educational goals for children, parents can play a crucial role simply by responding to a child's questions. "Parents don't have to consciously manipulate what they say to give children the information they need," writes the author. They learn through rough-and-tumble play, careful observation of their environment, direct interaction, and the let's-pretend games they invent for themselves. "Pretending is closely related to another distinctly human ability," writes Gopnik, "hypothetical or counterfactual thinkingthat is the ability to consider alternative ways that the world might be." In the author's view, it is imperative for caretakers and educators to nurture young children's curiosity, and they should also allow adolescents to experiment and learn by apprenticeship. Gopnik concludes that recognizing the dichotomy between the goal-oriented carpenter and the nurturing gardener is an appropriate metaphor for our broader cultural values. "Just as we should give children the resources and space to play, and do so without insisting that play will have immediate payoffs," she writes, "we should do the same for scientists and artists." A highly thoughtful and entertaining treatment of a subject that merits serious consideration. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
