The gardener and the carpenter
"Alison Gopnik, a leading developmental psychologist, illuminates the paradoxes of parenthood from a scientific perspective"
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2018–2026years
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What Hacker News says
- I think this is more difficult than it sounds. Kid A is very different from kid B. I've found that things that 'work' with my kids don't work on other kids.
Along these lines, I thought this book was interesting: The Gardener and the Carpenter: What the New Science of Child Development Tells Us About the Relationship Between Parents and Children
- I think different parents have different goals, so probably the best is to read a bunch of books and pick out the ones you like.
Some suggestions:
The Gardener and the Carpenter
Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2000/05/the-war...
The Well-Behaved Child: Discipline That Really Works!
How to Talk So Kids Will Listen
Raising An Emotionally Intelligent Child
And Baby Makes Three
The Rational Male - Positive Masculinity
Parenting With Love And Logic
- > A new board game gets set up, new pieces doled out, we learn to play the new game
Reminds me of this idea about sport / competition from the parenting book, The Gardener and the Carpenter by Alison Gopnik. She says that children must be encouraged to explore, not exploit ("play games"), without any end goal in mind. This lets them figure out the world around them and how they can affect it.
As "exploitation" (competition) is a means to use specific knowledge (performance) to achieve goals (progress), it will tend to have winners & losers. "Exploration", otoh, is choosing among umpteen pathways to growth and learning. Of course, middle-aged folks can seldom afford to not be playing games, but perhaps in times of change, they need to be exploring like children again.
Also see this post on Ask HN: Has anyone here turned around their life in their 40s? about Pyscho-Cybernetics & achieving goals: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34053801
- Yeah maybe that’s why women live longer in order to help with the exhausting process of raising their grandchildren [1].
We love to take care of babies, regardless of (or maybe because of) how clingy and dependent they are.
From an Evolutionary point of view, This relationship between needy babies and abnegated caregivers might have given rise to a complementary schimogenesis according to Gregory Bateson, in which babies might have evolved to be more and more dependent, because having more and more invested caregivers produces fitter offspring.
Parenthood is a self-inflicted sabotage and I cannot understand how come there are so many parents bearing children worldwide.
1. The Gardener and the Carpenter: Alison Gopnik, Erin Bennett: 9781536617832
