We're in a culture where everything is either consumption or production, so child care is either a very, very bad-paying form of work or a very expensive luxury that you purchase. There isn't a good place in our picture of the world for what caregiving is about. Even teenage babysitters have sort of disappeared from the scene.
Alison GopnikIt's turns out to be much easier to simulate a grandmaster chess player than it is to simulate a 2-year-old.
Alison GopnikI'm culturally Jewish but, like most scientists, an atheist: I don't believe there's a God or supernatural world. Buddhism offers guidance on what to do in a world without God: It opines that truly being present in the worldโ experiencing and hanging out with your loved ones, provides all the significance you could want.
Alison GopnikAll of us gardeners know that nothing comes out the way you planned. It's a different garden every year, and it's always sort of different from what you were thinking when you began. What it really means to be a good gardener is to work hard to produce an ecosystem that will have enough diversity, enough possibilities, so it's robust, and it's resilient, and it can change when the seasons change. And that kind of robust, unexpected, variable, messy system - that's what you want to create when you're having children, too.
Alison GopnikWhat's it like to be a baby? It's like being in love in Paris for the first time after you've had three double espressos.
Alison Gopnik