Putting together philosophy and children would have been difficult for most of history. But very fortunately for me, when I started graduate school there was a real scientific revolution taking place in developmental psychology.

I think, at the end of the century we'll have a generation of parents and a generation of children who won't have had the deep satisfactions of being parents and being children in the way that they might have and are going to spend a lot of time fretting and worrying and being hovered over for nothing. The question isn't so much "What will happen in the long run?" but "What's happening to people's lives right now?"

Adults often assume that most learning is the result of teaching and that exploratory, spontaneous learning is unusual. But actually, spontaneous learning is more fundamental.

If parents are the fixed stars in the childs universe, the vaguely understood, distant but constant celestial spheres, siblings are the dazzling, sometimes scorching comets whizzing nearby.

The best scientific way to discover if one factor influences another is to do a controlled experiment.

We don't measure the quality of our other relationships by how well the other person turns out, for instance whether my husband is a better person after 10 years than he was when I first met him.

The largest and most powerful computers are still no match for the smallest and weakest humans.