Children are designed to be #messy and #unpredictable, #playful and #imaginative—and to be very different both from their parents and from each other.
I most definitely teach like a gardener (or, as I sometimes like to say, a farmer). I often liken my students to seeds, with all their natural and amazing gifts hidden inside, just waiting to bloom... And I see my job as ensuring that the soil is as rich and fertile as possible, filled with all they need to naturally grow as best they can… and that I protect them from harshness and danger that might threaten their growth. Mine is not to try and mold a daisy into a rose, or a lilac into a tulip.
Being a parent is simply about loving children
My work is to ensure that a rose becomes the most stunning and amazing rose possible, beautiful and bold, rich and colorful, shining upon this world with all its beauty. Let us be the best gardeners and farmers we possibly can, so our children can flourish and thrive, and shine their best most beautiful light upon this world.
Alison Gopnik is very well known and has written extensively on infant brain development. Below you will find her thoughts on this particular question of the gardener versus the carpenter.
Developmental psychologist and philosophy professor at the University of California, Berkeley, Alison Gopnik, argues that the familiar twenty-first-century picture of #parents and #children is profoundly wrong—it’s not just based on bad #science, it’s bad for kids and parents, too.
Love is never simple
Drawing on the study of human #evolution and her own cutting-edge scientific research into how children learn, Gopnik shows that although caring for children is profoundly important, it is not a matter of shaping them to turn out a particular way. In her book, ‘The Gardener and the Carpenter’ she explains that children are designed to be #messy and #unpredictable, #playful and #imaginative—and to be very different both from their parents and from each other.
There are two kinds of parents in modern America, says Gopnik
🔨 The "carpenter" thinks that his or her child can be molded. "The idea is that if you just do the right things, get the right skills, read the right books, you're going to be able to shape your child into a particular kind of adult," she says.
🌱 The "gardener," on the other hand, is less concerned about controlling who the child will become and instead provides a protected space to explore. The style is all about "creating a rich, nurturant but also variable, diverse, dynamic ecosystem."
Gopnik says that many parents are carpenters but they should really be cultivating that garden. She spent decades researching children's development and found that parents often focus too much on who their children will be as adults. The harm in that approach, she says, is that parents and their offspring may become anxious, tense or unhappy. Ironically, the less that mothers and fathers worry about ‘outcomes’, she says, the better their children may fare in life.
Children flourish the most when they are left free to explore. They also learn as much from our mistakes as they do from our instructions. She says, “Our job is not to shape our children’s minds; it’s to let those minds explore all the possibilities that the world allows.”
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