112 Quotes by Alison Gopnik

The radio was an improvement on the telegraph but it didn’t have the same exponential, transformative effect.

What’s it like to be a baby? It’s like being in love in Paris for the first time after you’ve had three double espressos.

I’m afraid the parenting advice to come out of developmental psychology is very boring: pay attention to your kids and love them.

Love doesn’t have goals or benchmarks or blueprints, but it does have a purpose. The purpose is not to change the people we love, but to give them what they need to thrive. Love’s purpose is not to shape our beloved’s destiny, but to help them shape their own. It isn’t to show them the way, but to help them find a path for themselves, even if the path they take isn’t one we would choose ourselves, or even one we would choose for them. The.

The very best outcome is that our children will end up as decent, independent adults who will regard us with bemused and tolerant affection; for them to continue to treat us with the passionate attachment of infancy would be pathological. Almost every hard decision of child-rearing, each tiny step – Should I let her cross the street? Can he walk to school yet? Should I look in her dresser drawer? – is about how to give up control, not how to increase it; how to cede power, not how to gain it.

Childhood is a fundamental part of all human lives, parents or not, since that’s how we all start out. And yet babies and young children are so mysterious and puzzling and even paradoxical.

It’s turns out to be much easier to simulate a grandmaster chess player than it is to simulate a 2-year-old.

Animals are certainly more sophisticated than we used to think. And we shouldn’t lump together animals as a group. Crows and chimps and dogs are all highly intelligent in very different ways.

It’s not that children are little scientists but that scientists are big children.