University of California, Berkeley, psychology professor Alison Gopnik, PhD, has spent nearly four decades figuring out that children are inventive and omnivorous learners, gaining the knowledge they need through creative play as well as simply observing the world around them. During those same decades, Gopnik has also watched the rise of "parenting culture"—in which parents search for just the right parenting techniques to ensure they'll raise successful adults.
But those two strains—the science of learning and the culture of parenting—are at odds with each other, says Gopnik. In her new book, "The Gardener and the Carpenter," she argues that parents should not aim to be "carpenters" who shape their children to turn out in a particular way, but instead "gardeners" who create a nurturing environment so that their children can flourish in unpredictable ways.
Where did "parenting culture" come from, and why do you believe it's a problem?
"Parenting" became really popular in the 1970s when for the first time in human history, many people who had never taken care of children before were having children. Before that, by the time you had children yourself, you'd had lots of experience in caring for your younger siblings, cousins and other children. Meanwhile, those same parents who hadn't been taking care of children had been going to school and work. So, it's natural that when they became parents they approached it the same as school or work: They worked to achieve a particular outcome. The term "parenting" encapsulated that shift.
[Today's parenting cultural has] caused a lot of unnecessary anxiety and guilt for parents, and for children as well, because it shifted the focus of being a parent from what we intuitively know is important—having enough resources to be able to create a loving, protected environment—to these very small differences in the details of what parents do, like whether you co-sleep or don't co-sleep, or have your stroller facing front or back. The data suggest that those small differences that middle-class parents obsess about really don't make any difference in the long run, and they shift attention away from the things that we do know scientifically are important, like creating a secure and loving environment.
You say that even if you could mold a child to come out the way you wanted, it would defeat the evolutionary significance of childhood. Why?
Human beings have a much longer childhood than any other species. I argue in my book that such a long period gives us the space for innovation.
That innovation comes about because there are individual differences among children, and also because children themselves are designed to think of the world in new ways and to master new tools. Childhood is all about having this protected period that allows individual differences to develop [and that is how the human species as a whole adapts to changing environments].
One of the analogies I make is to growing potatoes. It might seem like the best thing farmers could do is to find the right variety of potato that's going to be the best, highest-yield potato, and then figure out how to give it the most fertilizer and the most pesticides and get fields of [only] those potatoes. That's kind of what the parenting culture is. But one of the things that we know is that if the environment changes, then those kinds of monocultures are very fragile. You want something that's much more diverse. So "parenting" is kind of like trying to raise monoculture potatoes.
Is there a good model for "gardener schools" to help children flourish?
We have some great models of how to support early childhood learning, like the Reggio Emilia program or the Early Childhood Study Center here at Berkeley. But unfortunately, those models aren't influencing other schools. Instead, preschools are under pressure to look more like schools [for older children], and that's going in exactly the wrong direction, from what we know from the science.
If you want to think of an ideal context for children, it would probably mean more mud, livestock and relatives than we can usually give our children in an urban setting. But if you don't have mud, livestock and relatives, then having a sandbox and a guinea pig and an attentive preschool teacher is probably the next best thing.
Why is this area so important to you?
For my entire career, my sense of my vocation has been that our relationships with children, on any objective measure that you can think of—evolutionary biology, neuroscience, politics, philosophy—are absolutely essentially important to who we are and who we become. And yet, historically those questions haven't been taken seriously in the general intellectual and scientific world—and even in psychology itself. It's getting better, but just like everything that traditionally has to do with women, children have been really intellectually devalued.
So, that's really what I want to convey to the world at large—just how important the whole topic of children and our relationship to children is. How morally deep, how complex it is, how much it has to tell us about being human. And how much the science itself over the last 30 or 40 years has become an incredibly productive, exciting, methodologically complex, and intellectually challenging subject matter.
