If you just got enough expertise and enough special techniques and read up enough, then you could shape a child into the kind of adult you wanted. There's almost this kind of competitive enterprise. That picture is the picture I think people often imply when they use the word "parenting".
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 GopnikWhat teenagers want most of all are social rewards, especially the respect of their peers.
Alison GopnikThe youngest children have a great capacity for empathy and altruism. There's a recent study that shows even 14-month-olds will climb across a bunch of cushions and go across a room to give you a pen if you drop one.
Alison GopnikThe best scientific way to discover if one factor influences another is to do a controlled experiment.
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 Gopnik