Alison Gopnik Quotes

People tell you not to work with children and animals, and I chose to work with a 7-year-old and several dinosaurs!

Most parents' goal is to launch their children into the world with all the tools they need to make it on their own.

When we strive to remove all risk from childhood we also remove the foundations of a rational adulthood, and we eliminate the very experiences that will help kids grow up to be the empowered, creative, brave problem-solvers that they can and must be.

The roots of a child's ability to cope and thrive, regardless of circumstance, lie in that child's having had at least a small, safe place (an apartment? a room? a lap?) in which, in the companionship of a loving person, that child could discover that he or she was lovable and capable of loving in return. If a child finds this during the first years of life, he or she can grow up to be a competent, healthy person.

Child development: Most damaging course of action is attempting to keep children from experience or protect them from pain, for it is this time that children learn that life is a magic thing, if "not a rose garden." The parent's role is primarily to stand by with a good supply of band-aids.

...the more risks you allow children to take, the better they learn to take care of themselves. If you never let them take any risks, then I believe they become very prone to injury. Boys should be allowed to climb tall trees and walk along the tops of high walls and dive into the sea from high rocks... The same with girls. I like the type of child who takes risks. Better by far than the one who never does so.

The thing with kids is, if they want to grab for the gold ring, you have to let them do it, and not say anything. If they fall off, they fall off, but it's bad if you say anything.

As all mothers know, children travel faster than kisses. The speed of kisses is, in fact, what Doctor Fallow would call a cosmic constant. The speed of children has no limits.

Both parents' rights must be in balance so children can grow up with a balance between both parents.

All that children need is love, a grown-up to take responsibility for them, and a soft place to land.

Your responsibility as a parent is not as great as you might imagine. You need not supply the world with the next conqueror of disease or major motion picture star. If your child simply grows up to be someone who does not use the word "collectible" as a noun, you can consider yourself an unqualified success.

If we don't give kids the opportunity to fail when they're growing up, and to fail productively, to fail creatively, that they're going to get out there into the world and they're going to hit some kind of setback, like everybody does, and they're going to get completely derailed.

Perhaps the single most important point for parents to follow is the importance of giving goals to a child. And the most important goal is that of growing up to be an adult.

The greatest triumph of our educational method should always be this: to bring about the spontaneous progress of the child.

To assist a child we must provide him with an environment which will enable him to develop freely.

Children learn to read by being in the presence of books. The love of knowledge comes with reading and grows upon it. and the love of knowledge, in a young mind, is almost a warrant against the inferior excitement of passions and vices.

Parents who expect change in themselves as well as in their children, who accept it and find in it the joy as well as the pains ofgrowth, are likely to be the happiest and most confident parents.

Write hand-written notes daily and commit to supporting the growth and self-esteem of children, because it makes such a big difference in terms of their capacity for learning.

It's not only children who grow. Parents do too.

I tried to allow my children to take risks, to test themselves. Better broken bones than broken spirit.

To barter and lose is better than not to go forth.

We must work to reshape the need for our children to want to live so fast even if it means dying too young.

I don't think that all girls seek the influence of older men, but I think girls whose fathers are absent or recessed from their lives often do. And honestly, when I was growing up, fathers were generally pretty absent from their children's lives. We didn't see a lot of them. That may be something that has genuinely changed for the better in our culture: men are more present for their children now that more women are working.

Natural play strengthens children's self-confidence and arouses their senses-their awareness of the world and all that moves in it, seen and unseen.