The Gardener and the Carpenter: What the New Science of Child Development Tells Us About the Relationship Between Parents and Children

Name: a Grandma wrote this
Item: The Gardener and the Carpenter: What the New Science of Child Development Tells Us About the Relationship Between Parents and Children
Rating: 3
Author: Thriftbooks.com User

By Alison Gopnik

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Book Overview

In The Gardener and the Carpenter, Alison Gopnik, one of the world's leading child psychologists, illuminates the paradoxes of parenthood from a scientific perspective and shatters the myth of "good parenting".

Caring deeply about our children is part of what makes us human. Yet the thing we call "parenting" is a surprisingly new invention. In the past thirty years, the concept of parenting and the multibillion-dollar industry surrounding it have transformed child care into obsessive, controlling, and goal-oriented labor intended to create a particular kind of child and therefore a particular kind of adult.

In The Gardener and the Carpenter, the pioneering developmental psychologist and philosopher Alison Gopnik argues that the familiar twenty-first-century picture of parents and children is profoundly wrong--it's not just based on bad science, it's bad for kids and parents, too.

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. Children are designed to be messy and unpredictable, playful and imaginative--and to be very different both from their parents and from each other.

Format:Paperback

Language:English

ISBN:1250132258

ISBN13:9781250132253

Release Date:August 2017

Publisher:Picador USA

Length:320 Pages

Weight:0.66 lbs.

Dimensions:0.8" x 5.5" x 8.2"

Related Subjects

Parenting & Relationships Psychology

Customer Reviews

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a Grandma wrote this

Published by Thriftbooks.com User , 1 year ago

Although this book offered some great insights, in many ways it could be summed up as a book about “free-style parenting from the perspective of a grandma”. The author uses a lot of her personal experiences around her own children, but much around her grandchildren too. I lost interest.

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The Gardener and the Carpenter: What the New Science of Child Development Tells Us About the Relationship Between Parents and Children

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