Children Quotes by Alison Gopnik

“Loving children doesn't give them a destination. It gives them sustenance for the journey.”

— Alison Gopnik

We don't wife our husbands and we don't child our parents.

— Alison Gopnik

“If the child is a budding psychologist, we parents are the laboratory rats.”

— Alison Gopnik

Caring, whether for children or the dying, shouldn't be instrumental. It should be an intrinsic, moral good.

— Alison Gopnik

Being a grandmother is a wonderful thing, so my advice is skip the children. Go straight to the grandchildren.

— Alison Gopnik

“Child abuse isn’t evil because it may produce neurotic adults but because it abuses children.”

— Alison Gopnik

One of the most distinctive evolutionary features of human beings is our unusually long, protected childhood.

— Alison Gopnik

If parents are the fixed stars in the child's universe, the vaguely understood, distant but constant celestial spheres, siblings are the dazzling,…

— Alison Gopnik

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…

— Alison Gopnik

We learn differently as children than as adults. For grown-ups, learning a new skill is painful, attention-demanding, and slow. Children learn unconsciously…

— Alison Gopnik

Siblings are the guarantors that the private childhood world - so unlike the adult world that scientists are only just beginning to…

— Alison Gopnik

Each new generation of children grows up in the new environment its parents have created, and each generation of brains becomes wired…

— Alison Gopnik

“The dominant view was that children were essentially defective adults. They were defined by the things they didn’t know and couldn’t do.”

— Alison Gopnik

Like most parents, I think, my children have been the source of some of my most intense joys and despairs, my deepest…

— Alison Gopnik

Putting together philosophy and children would have been difficult for most of history. But very fortunately for me, when I started graduate…

— Alison Gopnik

Imaginary friends are one of the weirder forms of pretend play in childhood. But the research shows that imaginary friends actually help…

— Alison Gopnik

We provide a secure, stable space for children to grow up in, so children will be able to take risks and have…

— Alison Gopnik

“We decided to become development psychologists and study children because there aren't any Martians. These brilliant beings with the little bodies and…

— Alison Gopnik

I think, at the end of the century we'll have a generation of parents and a generation of children who won't have…

— Alison Gopnik

We have lots of evidence that putting investments in early childhood education, even evidence from very hard-nosed economists, is one of the…

— Alison Gopnik

Young children seem to be learning who to share this toy with and figure out how it works, while adolescents seem to…

— Alison Gopnik

We pass our values, ideas and moral character on to our children, but we do that knowing that our children are going…

— Alison Gopnik

“It’s not that children are little scientists — it’s that scientists are big children. Scientists actually are the few people who as…

— Alison Gopnik

All of us gardeners know that nothing comes out the way you planned. It's a different garden every year, and it's always…

— Alison Gopnik

People talked about being a parent, or being a mother or a father. We don't talk about "wiving" our husbands or "friending"…

— Alison Gopnik

“So our job as parents is not to make a particular kind of child. Instead, our job is to provide a protected…

— Alison Gopnik

Children have a very good idea of how to distinguish between fantasies and realities. It's just they are equally interested in exploring…

— Alison Gopnik

I'm the oldest of six children and I had my own first baby when I was 23. So I've always been interested…

— Alison Gopnik

What happens when children reach puberty earlier and adulthood later? The answer is: a good deal of teenage weirdness.

— Alison Gopnik

Being a developmental psychologist didn't make me any better at dealing with my own children, no. I muddled through, and, believe me,…

— Alison Gopnik

Asking questions is what brains were born to do, at least when we were young children. For young children, quite literally, seeking…

— Alison Gopnik

Successful creative adults seem to combine the wide-ranging exploration and openness we see in children with the focus and discipline we see…

— Alison Gopnik

We know that kids who grow up in an environment of warmth and support will thrive and function in whatever environment they…

— Alison Gopnik

If parents are the fixed stars in the childs universe, the vaguely understood, distant but constant celestial spheres, siblings are the dazzling,…

— Alison Gopnik

Ours is an age of pedagogy. Anxious parents instruct their children more and more, at younger and younger ages, until they're reading…

— Alison Gopnik

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

Childhood is a fundamental part of all human lives, parents or not, since that's how we all start out. And yet babies…

— Alison Gopnik

We say that children are bad at paying attention, but we really mean that they're bad at not paying attention - they…

— Alison Gopnik

I've had three of my own children and spent my professional life thinking about children. And yet I still find my relation…

— Alison Gopnik

Caring for children has always been one of the deepest and most satisfying things that a human being does, and yet it…

— Alison Gopnik