Alison Gopnik Quotes

We all learned how to walk and talk by interacting with our environment, with real goals and rewards.

It's hard to think of a 16-month child being anything other than a delight to be around.

Babies and young children are like the research and development division of the human species, and we grown-ups are production and marketing.

Play is often talked about as if it were a relief from serious learning. But for children play is serious learning. Play is really the work of childhood.

Early childhood education begins early, even before birth.

Don't forget that compared to a grownup person every baby is a genius. Think of the capacity to learn! The freshness, the temperament, the will of a baby a few months old!

But, if you observe children learning in their first few years of life, you can see that they can and do learn on their own - we leave them alone to crawl, walk, talk, and gain control over their bodies. It happens without much help from parents.

I think much of what you learn as a kid comes before age seven.

I have for many years interested myself in the study of children from three years upwards. Many have urged me to continue my studies on the same lines with older children. But what I have felt to be most vital is the need for more careful and particularized study of the tiny child.

We've got to understand that the ages of zero to three are the most formative years of a person's life, the time they learn the concept of reward and punishment and develop a conscience, and that 50 percent of all learned human response is learned in the first year of life.

It's something that is very comforting. Just the process of them moving throughout their stages of early childhood. Learning to walk, learning to talk. Reaching out for you for the first hug, telling you they love you.

Kids grasp what you teach them, from crawling to walking, for everything they look up to their parents.

Physical development fosters learning.

Watching a child makes it obvious that the development of his mind comes through his movements.

The development of the mind comes through movement

Children need to move to develop their brain; it's a natural urge. That's why boys will run after a ball and play soccer despite how many video games are available to them, and they can't help themselves from building with Lego bricks as well. They want to be creating something that's uniquely their own.

The first six years of a child's life, it is like a tape recorder is on. Everything it sees, smells, touches, experiences in any way, whatever it hears, is being downloaded into the brain before the consciousness of the child is even made apparent.

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.

I am seriously interested in the psychology of childhood. And I've given a lot of my life to trying to see questions of personal development, as well as the great issues of the day, from a child's point of view.

As children, as we learn what things are, we are slowly learning to dismiss them visually. As adults, entirely submerged in words and concepts, we spend almost all of our time thinking and worrying about the past and the future, hardly ever looking at or engaging with the world visually.

Minds ripen at very different ages.

Give me a child for the first 7 years, and you may do what you like with him afterwards.

What use does a newborn infant have?

At three years of age, the child has already laid the foundations of the human personality and needs the special help of education in the school. The acquisitions he has made are such that we can say the child who enters school at three is an old man.

Anyone with a child knows that children learn about the world through binary options: up or down, hot or cold, big or little, inside or outside, wet or dry, good or bad, boy or girl, man or woman.