Alison Gopnik Quotes

Quotes about:

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

  Alison Gopnik

  Kids, Advice, Psychology

  47 Copy quote

• Because we imagine, we can have invention and technology. It's actually play, not necessity, that is the mother of invention.

  Alison Gopnik

  Mother, Technology, Play

  "What Is It Like to Be a Baby?". Interview with Jonah Lehrer, www.scientificamerican.com.

  16 Copy quote

• From an evolutionary perspective children are, literally, designed to learn. Childhood is a special period of protected immaturity. It gives the young breathing time to master the things they will need to know in order to survive as adults.

  Alison Gopnik

  Children, Order, Breathing

  13 Copy quote

• 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.

  Alison Gopnik

  Baby, Motivation, Inspiration

  15 Copy quote

• Scientists learn about the world in three ways: They analyze statistical patterns in the data, they do experiments, and they learn from the data and ideas of other scientists. The recent studies show that children also learn in these ways.

  Alison Gopnik

  Children, Data, Ideas

  "We All Start Out As Scientists, But Some of Us Forget" by Chris Mooney, Indre Viskontas, www.motherjones.com. November 8, 2013.

  13 Copy quote

• All of us gardeners know that nothing comes out the way you planned. It's a different garden every year, and it's always sort of different from what you were thinking when you began. What it really means to be a good gardener is to work hard to produce an ecosystem that will have enough diversity, enough possibilities, so it's robust, and it's resilient, and it can change when the seasons change. And that kind of robust, unexpected, variable, messy system - that's what you want to create when you're having children, too.

  Alison Gopnik

  Children, Mean, Hard Work

  Source: www.macleans.ca

  4 Copy quote

• Adults often assume that most learning is the result of teaching and that exploratory, spontaneous learning is unusual. But actually, spontaneous learning is more fundamental.

  Alison Gopnik

  Teaching, Adults, Fundamentals

  11 Copy quote

• Babies and young children are like the research and development division of the human species, and we grown-ups are production and marketing.

  Alison Gopnik

  Baby, Children, Research And Development

  "We All Start Out As Scientists, But Some of Us Forget" by Chris Mooney, Indre Viskontas, www.motherjones.com. November 8, 2013.

  7 Copy quote

• The largest and most powerful computers are still no match for the smallest and weakest humans.

  Alison Gopnik

  Inspiring, Powerful, Computer

  7 Copy quote

• We pass our values, ideas and moral character on to our children, but we do that knowing that our children are going to revise our knowledge and reshape their values. There's something very paradoxical and profound about being a parent as opposed to parenting. We put in all this effort and energy not so that we can shape a child of a particular sort, but so that all sorts of possibilities can happen in the future.

  Alison Gopnik

  Children, Character, Profound

  Source: www.macleans.ca

  4 Copy quote

• To support the people we care about is intrinsic, it is not instrumental. It's not something we do because we're hoping to get some other outcome.

  Alison Gopnik

  People, Support, Care

  Interview with Jessica Zack, www.sfgate.com. September 29, 2016.

  4 Copy quote

• I think, at the end of the century we'll have a generation of parents and a generation of children who won't have had the deep satisfactions of being parents and being children in the way that they might have and are going to spend a lot of time fretting and worrying and being hovered over for nothing. The question isn't so much "What will happen in the long run?" but "What's happening to people's lives right now?"

  Alison Gopnik

  Running, Children, Thinking

  Source: www.macleans.ca

  7 Copy quote

• The brain is highly structured, but it is also extremely flexible. It's not a blank slate, but it isn't written in stone, either.

  Alison Gopnik

  Brain, Stones, Blank

  10 Copy quote

• What teenagers want most of all are social rewards, especially the respect of their peers.

  Alison Gopnik

  Teenager, Peers, Want

  7 Copy quote

• Caring for children has always been one of the deepest and most satisfying things that a human being does, and yet it is hard to keep a healthy attitude toward it in our competitive, outcome-oriented society.

  Alison Gopnik

  Children, Attitude, Caring

  Interview with Jessica Zack, www.sfgate.com. September 29, 2016.

  8 Copy quote

• Owning our past allows us to own our future.

  Alison Gopnik

  Past, Our Future, Our Past

  4 Copy quote

• The youngest children have a great capacity for empathy and altruism. There's a recent study that shows even 14-month-olds will climb across a bunch of cushions and go across a room to give you a pen if you drop one.

  Alison Gopnik

  Children, Giving, Empathy

  25 Copy quote

• We know that kids who grow up in an environment of warmth and support will thrive and function in whatever environment they find themselves. What we need to do is to do more to help poor kids have such an environment.

  Alison Gopnik

  Growing Up, Kids, Support

  Source: www.psychologytoday.com

  4 Copy quote

• Teaching is a very effective way to get children to learn something specific - this tube squeaks, say, or a squish then a press then a pull causes the music to play. But it also makes children less likely to discover unexpected information and to draw unexpected conclusions.

  Alison Gopnik

  Children, Teaching, Play

  8 Copy quote

• You read a bunch of books and you get a bunch of how-tos, and you take a bunch of classes and you learn a bunch of techniques. You set yourself goals and benchmarks. I think people have imported that into their experience of taking care of children.

  Alison Gopnik

  Children, Book, Thinking

  Source: www.macleans.ca

  4 Copy quote

• Children are the most amazing thing in the universe, as far as I'm concerned. If you're worrying about how it's going to turn out, you aren't experiencing that day-to-day satisfaction of being with these incredible, extraordinary creatures. Every single one of them is the most incredible, extraordinary creature that you're ever going to want to see. I think the joy of having that deep relationship - that's the core of what being a parent is.

  Alison Gopnik

  Children, Thinking, Worry

  Source: www.macleans.ca

  4 Copy quote

• Preschool kids learn best when exploring, but kids in school learn best when they do things, interacting with a master. Unfortunately, our schools don't do much of either. Also, kids do need to learn how to deal with technology, and online education and otherwise using electronic devices as learning tools facilitates that.

  Alison Gopnik

  School, Kids, Technology

  Source: www.psychologytoday.com

  6 Copy quote

• I'm culturally Jewish but, like most scientists, an atheist: I don't believe there's a God or supernatural world. Buddhism offers guidance on what to do in a world without God: It opines that truly being present in the world‚ experiencing and hanging out with your loved ones, provides all the significance you could want.

  Alison Gopnik

  Atheist, Believe, Buddhism

  Source: www.psychologytoday.com

  5 Copy quote

• On the Web we all become small-town visitors lost in the big city.

  Alison Gopnik

  Cities, Towns, Visitors

  7 Copy quote

• Philosophers and psychologists have long puzzled over the question of how we know as much as we do despite our limited experiences. One way is to see how children learn. Another example is consciousness. The concept is usually explored by armchair academics. Looking at kids expands our conceptions of consciousness.

  Alison Gopnik

  Children, Kids, Long

  Source: www.psychologytoday.com

  4 Copy quote

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