lightreads (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
lightreads) wrote2022-05-30 01:37 pm
lightreads) wrote2022-05-30 01:37 pm
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The Gardener and the Carpenter: What the New Science of Child Development Tells Us...
The Gardener and the Carpenter by Alison Gopnik
2/5. I liked her other book a lot better. The thesis of this one is, at its simplest, that parents should not try to mold their children into any particular kind of people, but instead should nurture the sort of people those children intrinsically are. Which, uh, no shit? I guess there are people who need to be told that, but I’m not one of them. And she has very little research evidence to draw on here, unlike in her other book, and while she writes well about abstract philosophical concepts, that’s not what I wanted (the “science” in the subtitle is misleading, honestly).
Also, not for nothing, WTAF, Alison Gopnik. Explaining that parental love for children must be real and profound because parents still love their disabled children is, hoo boy. No one would love disabled children if there wasn’t an imperative to, being the implication. It was one of those moments where your opinion of someone falls precipitously in the course of like ten seconds. And let’s be real here – she’s propounding ideas that I have strong experiential evidence to believe the majority of people also hold, though many of those people who believe these things would strenuously deny it. But she wrote it down, and presumably reread it many times, and her editors read it, and they were all collectively like yup, that’s a winning argument right there and just. Fuck all that.
2/5. I liked her other book a lot better. The thesis of this one is, at its simplest, that parents should not try to mold their children into any particular kind of people, but instead should nurture the sort of people those children intrinsically are. Which, uh, no shit? I guess there are people who need to be told that, but I’m not one of them. And she has very little research evidence to draw on here, unlike in her other book, and while she writes well about abstract philosophical concepts, that’s not what I wanted (the “science” in the subtitle is misleading, honestly).
Also, not for nothing, WTAF, Alison Gopnik. Explaining that parental love for children must be real and profound because parents still love their disabled children is, hoo boy. No one would love disabled children if there wasn’t an imperative to, being the implication. It was one of those moments where your opinion of someone falls precipitously in the course of like ten seconds. And let’s be real here – she’s propounding ideas that I have strong experiential evidence to believe the majority of people also hold, though many of those people who believe these things would strenuously deny it. But she wrote it down, and presumably reread it many times, and her editors read it, and they were all collectively like yup, that’s a winning argument right there and just. Fuck all that.
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