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The Gardener and the Carpenter
by Alison Gopnik
You're not a carpenter. Your child is not a project. Be a gardener.
For you if
you want the philosophical and scientific case for letting go of the idea that your job is to produce a specific kind of child
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· Paperback
Reference price shown. Other editions may be available.
Reference price shown. Other editions may be available.
Gopnik is a developmental psychologist at Berkeley and the philosopher of childhood. Her argument: modern parenting has become carpentry — parents treating children as projects to be shaped toward a specific outcome. The alternative is gardening — creating the conditions for a child to flourish in ways you cannot predict or control. Drawing on evolutionary psychology, anthropology, and developmental research, she makes the case that children are designed to be unpredictable, that this is a feature not a bug, and that the parenting-as-optimization model is both wrong and harmful. The most philosophically rigorous parenting book on this shelf.
