Quotes from Alison Gopnik

From an evolutionary perspective, parenting isn't a good model for parents and children. Caring for children, nurturing them and investing in them, is absolutely critical for human thriving. Teaching children implicitly and explicitly is certainly important. But, from the point of view of evolution, trying to consciously shape how your children will turn out is both futile and self-defeating.

The human mind is more like a hand than a Swiss Army knife. A human hand isn't designed to do any one thing in particular. But it is an exceptionally flexible and effective device for doing many things, including things we might never have imagined.

What makes the terrible twos so terrible is not that the babies do things you don't want them to do --- one-year-olds are plenty good at that --- but that they do things because you don't want them to.

Cuando eres joven deseas cosas, cuando eres mayor deseas desearlas.

Puedes tomar decisiones mejores tomando decisiones no tan buenas y luego corrigiéndolas.

There is another possibly apocryphal story about the philosopher Jerry Fodor (he's the Yogi Berra of philosophy). Someone asked what his stream of consciousness was like as he wrote philosophy. His reply was that it mostly said, "Come on, Jerry, you can do it, Jerry, keep going, Jerry.

those abilities lead children to create imaginary friends—and lead grown-ups to create plays and novels. Imagining how they could be different actually lets children, and adults, become different. We can turn ourselves into our imaginary alter egos.

The advantage of learning is that it allows you to find out about your particular environment. The disadvantage is that until you do find out, you don't know what to do; you're helpless. We may have two evolutionary gifts: great abilities to learn about the world around us and a long protected period in which to deploy those abilities.

raising children is one of the most significant, meaningful, and profound experiences of their lives. Is this just an evolutionary illusion, a trick to make us keep on reproducing? I'll argue that it's the real thing, that children really do put us in touch with truth, beauty, and meaning.

On the Web we all become small-town visitors lost in the big city.

If you wanted to design a robot that could learn as well as it possibly could, you might end up with something that looked a lot like a 3-year-old.

If you just casually look at a baby, it doesn't look like there's very much going on there, but they know more and learn more than we would ever have thought. Every single minute is incredibly full of thought and novelty. It's easy as adults to take for granted everything it took to arrive at the state where we are.

Imaginary friends are one of the weirder forms of pretend play in childhood. But the research shows that imaginary friends actually help children understand the other people around them and imagine all the many ways that people could be.

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

What makes knowledge automatic is what gets you to Carnegie Hall - practice, practice, practice.

Something like reading depends a lot on just having people around you who talk to you and read you books, more than sitting down and, say, doing a reading drill when you're 3 or 4 years old.

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

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.

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

Young children seem to be learning who to share this toy with and figure out how it works, while adolescents seem to be exploring some very deep and profound questions: 'How should this society work? How should relationships among people work?' The exploration is: 'Who am I, what am I doing?'

Loving children doesn't give them a destination. It gives them sustenance for the journey.

All these differences between children and adults

What makes us love a child isn't something about the child—it's something about us. We don't care for children because we love them; we love them because we care for them.

The dominant view was that children were essentially defective adults. They were defined by the things they didn't know and couldn't do.