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.
Ours is an age of pedagogy. Anxious parents instruct their children more and more, at younger and younger ages, until they’re reading books to babies in the womb.
Many philosophers say it’s impossible to explain our conscious experience in scientific, biological terms at all. But that’s not exactly true. Scientists have explained why we have certain experiences and not others. It’s just that they haven’t explained the special features of consciousness that philosophers care about.
One of the best ways of understanding human nature is to study children. After all, if we want understand who we are, we should find out how we got to be that way.
I’ve had three of my own children and spent my professional life thinking about children. And yet I still find my relation to my children deeply puzzling.
If you just, pretty much, take a random 15-month-old, just sit and watch them for 10 minutes and count out how many experiments, how much thinking you see going on, and it will put the most brilliant scientist to shame.
The real excitement is collaborating with computer scientists and neuroscientists and starting to understand in detail how children learn so much so quickly.
I’m the oldest of six children and I had my own first baby when I was 23. So I’ve always been interested in babies, and I had lots of opportunities to watch them.
The best scientific way to discover if one factor influences another is to do a controlled experiment.
The ancient media of speech and song and theater were radically reshaped by writing, though they were never entirely supplanted, a comfort perhaps to those of us who still thrill to the smell of a library.
Historically, absolute IQ scores have risen substantially as we’ve changed our environment so that more people go to school longer.
One of the most distinctive evolutionary features of human beings is our unusually long, protected childhood.
In most places and times in human history, babies have had not just one person but lots of people around who were really paying attention to them around, dedicated to them, cared to them, were related to them. I think the big shift in our culture is the isolation in which many children are growing up.
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.
Putting together philosophy and children would have been difficult for most of history. But very fortunately for me, when I started graduate school there was a real scientific revolution taking place in developmental psychology.