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

The brain is highly structured, but it is also extremely flexible. It's not a blank slate, but it isn't written in stone, either.

Scientists learn about the world in three ways: They analyze statistical patterns in the data, they do experiments, and they learn from the data and ideas of other scientists. The recent studies show that children also learn in these ways.

Because we imagine, we can have invention and technology. It's actually play, not necessity, that is the mother of invention.

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.

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.

Childhood is a fundamental part of all human lives, parents or not, since that's how we all start out. And yet babies and young children are so mysterious and puzzling and even paradoxical.