American - Psychologist | June 16, 1955 -
The science can tell you that the thousands of pseudo-scientific parenting books out there - not to mention the 'Baby Einstein' DVDs and the flash cards and the brain-boosting toys - won't do a thing to make your baby smarter. That's largely because babies are already as smart as they can be; smarter than we are in some ways.
Alison Gopnik
ScienceParentingSmartBabyYou
What happens when children reach puberty earlier and adulthood later? The answer is: a good deal of teenage weirdness.
GoodChildrenReachAnswerAdulthood
We have lots of evidence that putting investments in early childhood education, even evidence from very hard-nosed economists, is one of the very best investments that the society can possibly make. And yet we still don't have public support for things like preschools.
EducationBestChildhoodSupport
Successful creative adults seem to combine the wide-ranging exploration and openness we see in children with the focus and discipline we see in adults.
ChildrenDisciplineFocusCreative
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.
LearningResultMoreSpontaneous
One of the things I say is, 'You want to know what it's like to be a baby? It's like being in love for the first time in Paris after four double espressos.' And boy, you are alive and conscious.
LoveTimeBabyYouAliveKnow
Because we imagine, we can have invention and technology. It's actually play, not necessity, that is the mother of invention.
MotherTechnologyPlayInvention
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.
ChildrenGreatEmpathyClimbPenGo
The thing that is most important is having people who are involved and engaged with the kids and also are not stressed and can be involved with them. And that's actually not boring and banal. That actually takes a lot of work to make that happen, and it's not something that our society does very well at all.
WorkPeopleSocietyImportantBoring
Our babies are like penguins; penguin babies can't exist unless more than one person is taking care of them. They just can't keep going.
Keep GoingCarePersonMorePenguin
We do nothing for children between the ages of zero and five. And we seem to be quite happy to have children growing up in not just poverty, which wouldn't be so bad, but isolation, lack of people around them, lack of support, lack of ability to go out and play in the dirt.
ChildrenSupportHappyPeopleBad
We learn differently as children than as adults. For grown-ups, learning a new skill is painful, attention-demanding, and slow. Children learn unconsciously and effortlessly.
LearningChildrenSlowLearnSkill
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