People talked about being a parent, or being a mother or a father. We don't talk about "wiving" our husbands or "friending" our friends, or "childing" our parents. We just talk about being in a relationship with those people. You don't measure whether your marriage was good based on whether or not your husband is better now than he was 10 years ago, or whether your friend is richer than when they first became your friend. The relationships between parents and children is a kind of love, rather than a kind of work.

What happens when children reach puberty earlier and adulthood later? The answer is: a good deal of teenage weirdness.

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".

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.

Animals are certainly more sophisticated than we used to think. And we shouldn't lump together animals as a group. Crows and chimps and dogs are all highly intelligent in very different ways.

We know that kids who grow up in an environment of warmth and support will thrive and function in whatever environment they find themselves. What we need to do is to do more to help poor kids have such an environment.

Ineffective or weak brain connections are pruned in much the same way a gardener would prune a tree or bush, giving the plant a desired shape.