What the New Science of Child Development Tells Us About the Relationship Between Parents and Children

By: Alison Gopnik

Published: 2016

Read: 2021

Summary

As parents, we can’t know beforehand what new challenges kids will face. Shaping kids in your own image, or in the image of your current ideals, (“Carpenter”) might keep them from being able to adapt to new environments.

Instead, provide a stable environment for kids that allows them to explore, play, learn, take risks, make bad choices and generally figure out their own unique path (“Gardener”).

The “Gardener” approach is more aligned with how kids mostly learn: through exploration. They look (imitation), listen (asking why questions) and play (discovery). As they explore, traditions are passed on and new ways of doing things are figured out.

Education should similarly be about exploration, especially for preschoolers. As kids progress, the balance shifts from exploring to exploiting. Mastery of (social) skills becomes more important. Kids take what they have already learned and practice to make it second nature.

In all of this, don’t worry too much about the impact of (new) technology. Kids have a different relationship with new technologies than you do. Worry instead about transferring your “old tech” values. Kids can then incorporate these values into a new tech environment.

Worth Reading

No surprise, I loved reading this book. I had already enjoyed listening to Gopnik in a podcast with Ezra Klein and she provided interesting research to “How to Change Your Mind“, Michael Pollan’s book.

Gopnik makes deep observations about a wide range of linked topics, often delivered in a matter-of-fact tone, which makes them all the more convincing. Many of these insights hit home with me.

The list of takeaways from this book is long.

Key Takeaways

• The act of caring itself creates a bond.
  • The act of caring triggers satisfactory emotions.
  • These satisfactory emotions allow long-term commitments to develop.
  • To care for a child = to love a child.
• Young kids learn by exploring (wide focus).
  • Parents provide rich, safe, stable environment for kids to find new ways of thinking and acting.
  • Balance transfer of cultural traditions (exploit) with innovation (explore).
• Young kids learn by watching (imitation).
  • Kids imitate the goal, rather than the action.
  • Kids not only do as you do, they do as you intend to do.
• Young kids learn by listening (asking “why” questions).
  • Why questions require a causal explanation of events.
  • Causal explanations enable future learning, as one event can be applied to other events
  • Kids don’t just want more information, they want more causal information.
• Young kids learn by playing (safe space for discovery).
  • Develop social skills.
  • Experiment (discover how things work).
  • Practice mental skills (discover what others think, counter-factuals).
• Older kids learn by practicing (mastery).
  • Mastery is taking what you’ve learned and making it second nature.
  • Practice, automatic and effortless procedures, skills.
  • We acquire mastery by doing.
  • No difference between process of learning and its outcome.
• Adolescents learn through experience (emotional control).
  • Motivational and control system out of sync.
  • Motivation driven by over-active reward system.
  • Control, impulse inhibition slow to catch up.
• Better goals for pre-schoolers.
  • Learn to understand the reality around you.
  • Discover foundational principles about how the world works.
  • Explore as many possibilities as possible.
• Better goals for school-age children.
  • Learn to become competent adults.
  • Practice and master (social) skills of the culture.
  • Shift from exploring to exploiting.
• Kids (and other relationships) expand the self.
  • No longer one person with one set of values and interests to balance.
  • Self expands to include the values and interests of the other person.
  • Deciding to have kids or be in a relationship is deciding who you are going to be.

Key Concepts

Parenting versus being a parent

• Parenting.
  • Prescriptive: the things you should do.
    • Goal directed: techniques or expertise that produces the “right kind” of adult.
  • Prescriptive model emerged to replace disappearing traditions.
    • Traditional sources of parenting knowhow (experience) disappeared due to social changes.
      • Smaller families.
      • Greater mobility.
      • Older first-time parents.
  • What to do once continuity of tradition has been broken.
    • Replaced with how-to manuals (expertise).
  • Misguided from scientific, political and philosophical point of view.
    • Leads to asking questions that can’t be answered (should you have done this or that).
  • Carpenter: shape the material into a final product that fits your objective (precision, control).
• Being a parent.
  • To be a parent = to care for a child.
  • To care for a child = to love a child.
  • To love a child = to give it what it needs to thrive.
  • Purpose is to help the child shape its own destiny.
  • Provide rich, safe, stable environment (variation, innovation, novelty) in which children can produce new ways of thinking and acting.
  • Gardener: create a protective and nurturing environment for different plants to flourish (unpredictable, varied, flexible, dynamic, complex).

Paradoxes of parenting: love and learning

• Paradox of love.
  • Dependence versus independence.
    • Move from being in control of a needy child to having no control over independent adult.
  • Specificity versus universality.
    • Fairness, equality and justice should be universal, but I care and am responsible for my own children far more than children in general.
• Paradox of learning.
  • Play versus work.
    • Children learn through playing, but how and why?
    • Children move from “mostly play” to “mostly work”, requiring profound changes in the children’s minds and focus.
  • Tradition versus innovation.
    • Caregivers pass on valuable (cultural) traditions.
    • Childhood is also designed to be a period of variability and exploration.
    • No new tradition to pass on without exploration.

Human “strategy for success”

• Strategy for human success has two parts.
  • Generate many different possibilities, at least partly at random.
  • Preserve the ones that work.
• Changing environment drives need to keep generating alternative possibilities.
  • To deal with new environment or unexpected problems.
• Strategy involves trade-offs.
  • Exploit versus explore.
  • Efficiency versus innovation.
  • One efficient system versus many alternatives.
• We explore as children and exploit as adults.
  • Young brains are designed to explore.
    • Plastic, make more new (weak) connections.
  • Old brains are designed to exploit.
    • Faster, longer distance brain connections, unused connections get pruned.
• Each child grows up in a new environment facing new problems.
  • Provide them with the tools, resources and safe infrastructure.
  • Allow them to explore and solve (new) problems.
  • Give them space (literally and metaphorically).
  • Provide chance for variation.
  • Develop new adaptations, new variety of order, new competencies.
• Results in a wide, variable, and unpredictable mix of children.
  • Each with unique temperament and abilities, strengths and weaknesses, types of knowledge and varieties of skill.
  • It lets us adapt to an unpredictable changing culture and environment.
  • Having a mix of people around, some timid and some adventurous, means that each individual person is more likely to survive.
  • We can’t know beforehand what unprecedented challenges the children of the future will face.
  • Shaping them in our own image, or in the image of our current ideals, might actually keep them from adapting to changes in the future.

Evolution of parent-child relationship

• Unique relationship.
  • Caring for children is a relationship unlike any other.
  • Most distinctive human abilities (learning, culture, morality) are rooted in relation between parents and children.
• Social caring is distinctly human phenomenon.
  • Human babies are slow to develop and need a lot of care.
  • Cluster of people involved in raising kids.
  • Distinctively human phenomenon.
• As is social learning.
  • Observe and imitate.
  • Babies adapt to learn from other people.
• Both drive unique cultural evolution.
  • Social caring and learning influence most of a baby’s early actions.
• Features that accommodate childhood learning time and space.
  • Longer childhoods.
  • Larger brains.
  • Higher parental investments.
  • Greater ability to learn.
  • Longer lifespans.
• Learning allows for new skills to evolve.
  • Driven by rapid feedback loops.
• Different social groups learn at different speeds.
  • Small differences in social learning environment rapidly compound.
    • Access to tools, resources, knowhow, innate capability.
• Need to balance imitation and innovation.
  • Exploit and explore.
• Respond to environmental variability with human variability.
  • Environment: changes in climate, nomadic lives, social environment.
  • Human: differences in temperament, behavior, exposure.

Care-giving network

• Babies need wide and extended caring.
  • Parents.
  • Grandparents.
  • Alloparents (other children’s parents).
• Parents (pair bonding).
  • Problem 1: human babies need a lot of care.
    • Long immaturity of babies.
  • Problem 2: asymmetry in male and female reproductive interests.
    • Men: able to spread genes fast and widely.
    • Women: pregnancy bottleneck, children require long period of care.
  • Solution: pair-bonding.
    • Link mating and caring
    • Pair of animals that mate share their lives.
    • Care for the young together.
  • Both parties are incentivized to pair-bond.
    • Women: higher rate of baby survival.
    • Men: easier to ascertain that off-spring is “legitimate” and worth the investment.
  • Emergence of adapted personality traits over time.
    • Females prefer less aggressive males (greater paternal investments).
    • Males engaging in greater paternal investment may come to dominate.
  • Still, humans have genetic potential for variety of sexual patterns.
    • Predominant patterns shaped by culture, tradition, laws.
  • Pair-bonding -> baby-bonding.
    • Long-term attachment of pair-bonding similar to love for children.
• Grandparents (grandmothers).
  • Not common in other species for women to live 20-30 years beyond fertility.
  • Grandmothers may have made it possible for humans to have many children.
  • Grandmothers able to step in as caregivers.
• Alloparents.
  • Other people in a group who take on responsibilities of child care.
  • Common in birds, unusual in mammals.
  • “Takes a village …”
  • Helping all babies thrive enables group survival.
  • Learning experience.

The commitment puzzle: why we feel unconditional and specific commitment to a particular child.

• We have a biological impulse to care.
  • Biological patterns are reshaped by knowledge and culture.
• Related to release of oxytocin.
  • Tend and befriend hormone.
• The act of caring itself creates a bond.
  • Caring (for babies) triggers satisfactory emotions.
  • Satisfactory emotions allow for long-term commitment.
• This mechanism may transfer to other types of care, relationships.
  • Altruism, cooperation.
• These mechanisms may have developed as evolutionary adaptations.
  • Issue: collaboration, altruism, cooperation are good but costly.
    • Prisoner’s dilemma, dilemma of the commons, etc.
    • Tit-for-tat not an optimal solution.
    • Always need to be monitoring for cheats.
  • How to identify collaborators and stick with them?
    • Make commitment and collaboration emotionally satisfying, rewarding.
  • Leads to long-term trust and attachment.
• Parenting: long-term commitments and attachments w/o immediate reward.
  • Tit-for-tat makes no sense: long lags between investment and returns.
  • Emotions of care are triggered by social context.
  • Humans respond to the act of caring itself.
  • Taking care of a baby helps us love that baby.
• This type of commitment mechanism comes at a cost.
  • Difficult to untangle long-term relationships.
  • Divides the world into in-groups and out-groups.
• Long-term partnerships deeply ingrained in human culture.
  • Very few animals exhibit pair-bonding.
  • Less than 5% of mammals, very few primates.

Learning through looking: imitation

• Extended childhood allows for long period of learning.
  • Deepens relationship between children and caregivers.
• Cultural learning: tension between tradition and innovation.
  • Tradition: transfer of discoveries of previous generations.
  • Innovation: children’s own experiences, new discoveries.
• Two ways of learning:
  • Experiential (trial and error).
  • Social (observing others).
• Social learning: watch and listen.
  • Learn more from unconscious details of what caregivers do.
  • Very little learning comes from conscious, deliberate teaching.
• Social learning: imitate.
  • Learn how objects work (physical world).
  • Learn how people work (social world).
• Imitation: intent, efficiency matter.
  • Children don’t just reproduce what they see.
  • They read the intention of the action, judge its efficiency.
  • They imitate the goal, rather than the action.
  • Children not only do as you do, they do as you intend to do.
• Children are better at learning than adults.
  • Children are good at thinking about unlikely outcomes (explore).
  • Adults sensibly rely more on experience, likely outcomes (exploit).
• Children may “over-imitate”.
  • Default assumption is that the person they are imitating is an expert.
  • Passing on rituals importance (social perspective) that may not make ordinary causal sense.

Learning through listening: language.

• Many kinds of knowledge can only come through language.
  • We can teach others by talking to them.
  • We can learn by listening.
• Requires judging how credible, reliable others are.
  • Kids more likely to believe confident person.
  • Context matters (intonation, choice of words, etc.)
• Kids more likely to accept information from caregivers.
  • Subject to attachment patterns.
• How you talk to your child shapes what they know.
  • Stable relationship more important than the details of the communication.
• Kids also learn through stories.
  • Day-time conversation patterns: CCC (criticism, complaint, conflict).
  • Night-time conversation patterns: stories (gossip, imagination, historical information)
• Kids separate real beliefs (facts about the world) and fictional beliefs (stories).
  • Real world: real causes have real effect.
  • World of fiction: counter-factual world, possible causes have possible effects.
    • Stories often wildly fictional.
    • Parents send signals that they are pretending (language).
  • Third realm (magic, religion) mixes fiction and non-fiction.
    • Less easily understood.
• Kids not just passive in absorbing information.
  • They don’t just want more information, they want more causal information.
  • As a lot of “why” questions.
• “Why” questions.
  • Lead to deeper, broader discussions than “what” questions.
  • Require causal explanation of events.
• Causal explanations enable future learning.
  • One event can be applied to other events.
• Kids try to understand the “essence” of the things around them.
  • Thinking in innate, deep and permanent categories.

Cultural learning: looking and listening.

• Kids learn by looking and listening.
  • Vehicles for the transmission of accumulated cultural knowledge.
  • Children don’t mindlessly reproduce what they see or hear.
  • They take in information, combine what they learn through observation with other information.
  • Create new tools, new techniques, new stories, new explanations.
• Parents: resource for learning, rather than explicit teacher.
  • Building relationship of trust more important than teaching strategies.
  • Giving children the chance to intimately observe what many different people do is the best way to help them learn by looking.
  • Giving children the chance to talk with many different people is the best way to help them learn by listening.

The work of play

• Play is common in:
  • Social animals.
  • With a long childhood.
  • High parental investment.
  • Large brains.
• Characteristics of play:
  • Pretend: it doesn’t accomplish anything.
  • Fun: leads to joy, delight.
  • Voluntary: no instructions or rewards for doing it.
  • Safety: only play when basic needs are satisfied.
  • Structure: patterns of repetition and variation.
• Rough and tumble play: playing with others.
  • Safe space to practice social skills.
  • Associated with better social competence later on.
  • Ability to rapidly assess a complex social situation and respond intuitively.
  • Social coordination (frontal cortex), dealing with variety, flexibility.
• Exploratory play: playing with things.
  • Safe space to experiment and figure out how things work.
  • Hedgehog: knows one thing (short childhood, limited skill set).
  • Fox: knows many things (long childhood, broad skill set).
  • Playing allows kids to experiment, discover and test theories.
    • Kids tend to be more open to surprises (less confirmation bias).
• Pretend play: hypothetical and counterfactual thinking.
  • Safe space to practice higher order mental skills.
  • Pretend play is not unlike scientific progress.
  • Involves the same question: what does it mean if your current view of the world is wrong.
  • Counterfactual thinking is crucial for learning about the world …
    • What we think now could be wrong.
    • Imagine how the world would be different.
  • … and understanding others.
    • Figuring out what goes on in other people’s minds (theory of mind).
    • Desires, perceptions, emotions, and beliefs of other people.
    • 18 months to five years old most important period.
    • For instance, through playing with imaginary friends.
• Play: dealing with the unexpected.
  • Undirected, randomly and variable actions.
  • Observe consequences.
• Guided play.
  • Specific teaching may get in the way of exploring possibilities.
  • Provide “scaffolding”, resources that allow for discovery.

Schooling

• Schooling objectives similarly mistaken as parenting objectives:
  • Using education to shape a child into a particular kind of adult.
  • Arbitrary goals (standardized tests, etc.)
  • Focus on trying to ensure your kids succeed in school.
• Better goals: pre-schoolers.
  • Learn to understand the reality around you.
  • Discover foundational principles about how the world works.
  • Explore as many possibilities as possible.
• Better goals: school-age children.
  • Learn to become competent adults.
  • Practice and master (social) skills of the culture.
  • Traditionally, through apprenticeships.
• Discovery and mastery learning.
  • Discovery learning (observation):
    • Younger and older kids.
    • Exploring new things.
    • Variability, messiness, play, etc.
  • Mastery learning:
    • Older kids only.
    • Exploiting what you already know.
    • Mastery is taking what you’ve learned and making it second nature.
    • Practice, automatic and effortless procedures, skills.
• We acquire mastery by doing.
  • No difference between process of learning and the outcome.
  • Example: apprenticeships.
• We get better at mastery learning as we get older.
  • Prefrontal area of the brain exercises increasing control.
  • Neural connections become stronger and more efficient conductors.
• Mastery requires controlled focus.
  • Children naturally shift from a wider form of attention to a more narrow one.
    • Lantern versus spotlight attention.
    • Lantern attention of young kids not unlike adults on hallucinogenic drugs.
    • [See also “How to Change Your Mind“.]
  • Away from pure discovery, towards more mastery learning.
  • Children vary on where they sit on the attention continuum.
    • ADHD represents one possible point on the continuum.
  • Schools ideally accommodate discovery and mastery learning.
• Shift from caregiver dependence to larger social group.
  • Intense family attachments transform into broader social relationships.
  • School and playing games (with rules) accommodate this shift.
  • Exploring cultural and social possibilities, experiencing consequences of their actions.
  • Kids increasingly lack experience of safe peer group play.
    • Rich = overscheduled, isolated.
    • Poor = chaos, neglect.
• Adolescence.
  • Period of independence, innovation and change.
    • Leave protected context and make things happen yourself.
  • Motivational neural system gets turned up.
    • Emotionally intense.
  • Reckless acts not so much result of an underestimation of risks.
    • But, driven by over-active reward system, especially social rewards.
  • This mechanism helps adolescents turn away from family and toward peers.
  • Control of neural system can only develop through experience.
    • Over time, learn to inhibit impulses, guide decision-making long-term planning.
  • Motivational and control systems increasingly out-of-sync during adolescence.
    • Motivational system gets turned up faster (early onset of puberty).
    • Control system still underdeveloped (less opportunities to develop).
  • Smarter, but directionless adolescents…
    • Need more opportunities to develop basic (social) skills.

Technology

• Evolution of human cognition involves better handling of technology.
  • Physical technology: getting better at manipulation of tools.
  • Social technology: getting better at manipulation of others.
• Humans are designed to handle a constantly changing environment.
  • Each generation shapes the environment the next generation grows up in.
  • Each generation of brains has different early experiences, which affect its wiring.
  • Each generation of newly wired brains changes environment again.
• Leads to cultural innovation and transmission.
  • Innovation: learning by experimentation, new experiences, etc. (especially in childhood).
  • Transmission: learning by observation, imitation, etc.
• New technologies constantly emerge, reshaping our environment.
  • From books to screens.
  • Difficult to anticipate cultural changes.
  • Children are able to master new technologies more easily than adults.
  • Children’s brains adapt attentional strategies more easily than adult brains.
• Key issue with Internet: amount of people we interact.
  • Most of us can keep track of about 100 people (a village).
  • Internet expands the number of people we interact with exponentially.
  • Communicate with the planet with psychology developed for a village.
    • Need to develop navigations skills: who to talk to and how.
  • On the Internet , we all become small-town visitors lost in a big city.
    • Positive: excitement, novelty and possibility.
    • Negative: loneliness, distraction and alienation.
• Inevitability of technological and cultural change.
  • Not simply go with the flow.
  • Provide context, history, continuity: shape of innovation depends on tradition.
  • Kids use foundational traditions (skills, cultural institutions, values) and transform them into institutions and values of their own.

The value of children

• Caring for children is a fundamental part of the human project.
  • A good thing in itself.
• Universal moral frameworks hard to apply to decisions about specific children.
  • Run up against paradoxes of love.
    • Specific vs universal care.
    • Dependence vs independence.
• Decision to have kids involves balancing multiple incompatible values.
  • Many decisions can’t be rational: you don’t know the impact unless you live through it.
  • Many decisions are morally transformative: you become a different person after the decision.
• Deciding whether to have children is a decision who you are going to be.
  • Alternatively, deciding not to have children simply means embracing a different life and set of values.
  • Also true for other major decisions: work, get married, religiosity.
• Children (or relationships) expand the self.
  • No longer one person with one set of values and interests to balance.
  • Self expands to include the values and interests of the other person.
  • Make the best decision depending on the context.
• In many parts of industrial society, caring for children falls through the cracks.
  • Demise of nuclear family, high divorce rates, fewer stay-at-home mothers.
  • No good political (or economic) way of articulating the value of caring for children.
• Providing resources for children to thrive should be responsibility of community at large.
  • Universal, free, high-quality child care through (gardener-style) preschool.
• Other kinds of (asymmetric) care have deteriorated in the same way as child care.
  • Situations where we can expect to give more care to another person than we could expect to receive in return.
  • For instance, caring for the aging.
  • We typically fail to provide the people we love with a good and dignified end.
• Care, for young or old, is an intrinsic value.
  • Fundamental good that deserves both recognition and support.
• Side note: what adults can learn from balancing work and play.
  • Directed work provides specific goals and resources for play.
  • Undirected play takes up resources and allows you to reach unspecific goals.
  • Similar to balance between explore and exploit.

Selected Paragraphs

“Why be a parent? What makes caring for children worthwhile? Being a parent isn’t worthwhile because it will lead to some particular outcome in the future, because it will create a particular kind of valuable adult. Instead, being a parent allows a new kind of human being to come into the world, both literally and figuratively. Each new child is entirely unprecedented and unique—the result of a new complicated combination of genes and experience, culture and luck. And each child, if cared for, will turn into an adult who can create a new, unprecedented, unique human life. That life may be happy or sad, successful or disappointing, full of pride or regret. If it’s like most valuable human lives it will be all of these things. The very specific, unconditional commitment we feel to the child we care for is a way of respecting and supporting that uniqueness.

Part of the pathos, but also the moral depth, of being a parent is that a good parent creates an adult who can make his own choices, even disastrous choices. A secure, stable childhood allows children to explore, to try entirely new ways of living and being, to take risks. And risks aren’t risks unless they can come out badly. If there isn’t some chance that our children will fail as adults, then we haven’t succeeded as parents. But it’s also true that being a good parent allows children to succeed in ways that we could never have predicted or imagined shaping. If I look back on the questions I started out with—Did I do the right thing when I raised my own children? How did I influence the way they turned out?—I am more convinced than ever that those questions were simply ill-conceived. None of my children has replicated my life. Instead, each of them has created a uniquely valuable life of his own—a life that is a mash-up of my values and traditions, the values and traditions of the other people who have taught and cared for them, the inventions of their generation, and their own inventions. I may at times be uncomprehending or even appalled (septum piercing? gangsta rap?), but more often I am surprised and delighted (artisanal deli! eco-carpentry!). I couldn’t ask for more.”