5 Quotes by Erika Christakis

Young children are important because they contain within themselves the ingredients for learning, in any place and at any time. Parents and teachers are important, too. And that’s because they still control the one early learning environment that trumps all the others: the relationship with the growing child.

Indeed, playing games and laughing together are far more educational than drilling kids on their ABCs on the way to daycare.

Pretending is an essential language of childhood.

Early learning is fundamentally social in nature.

Playing grocery store is actually better for brain development than a math work sheet with cartoon shopping carts? It has to be some kind of trick. Yet after decades of research, the benefits of play are so thoroughgoing, so dispositive, so well described that the only remaining question is how so many sensible adults sat by and allowed the building blocks of development to become so diminished.