Leave the kids alone! A cognitive case for un-parenting

I want to pass on some clips from the text of a recent review by Glausiusz of Alison Gopnik's book on child-rearing "The Gardener and the Carpenter," and also from the NYTimes pieces by Gopnik summarizing its main arguments. (Her bottom line: "We don’t have to make children learn, we just have to let them learn." Clips from the book review:

An Amazon trawl for “parenting books” last month offered up 186,262 results. ..This is less genre than tsunami...Yet, as Alison Gopnik notes...the word parenting became common only in the 1970s, rising in popularity as traditional sources of wisdom about child-rearing — large extended families, for example — fell away...Gopnik...argues that the message of this massive modern industry is misguided.

It assumes that the 'right' parenting techniques or expertise will sculpt your child into a successful adult. But using a scheme to shape material into a product is the modus operandi of a carpenter, whose job it is to make the chair steady or the door true. There is very little empirical evidence, Gopnik says, that “small variations” in what parents do (such as whether they sleep-train) “have reliable and predictable long-term effects on who those children become”. Raising and caring for children is more like tending a garden: it involves “a lot of exhausted digging and wallowing in manure” to create a safe, nurturing space in which innovation, adaptability and resilience can thrive. Her approach focuses on helping children to find their own way, even if it isn't one you'd choose for them. The lengthy childhood of our species gives kids ample opportunity to explore, exploit and experiment before they are turned out into an unpredictable world.

Clips from Gopnik:

It’s not just that young children don’t need to be taught in order to learn. In fact, studies show that explicit instruction, the sort of teaching that goes with school and “parenting,” can be limiting. When children think they are being taught, they are much more likely to simply reproduce what the adult does, instead of creating something new.

My lab tried a different version of the experiment with the complicated toy. This time, though, the experimenter acted like a teacher. She said, “I’m going to show you how my toy works,” instead of “I wonder how this toy works.” The children imitated exactly what she did, and didn’t come up with their own solutions.

The children seem to work out, quite rationally, that if a teacher shows them one particular way to do something, that must be the right technique, and there’s no point in trying something new. But as a result, the kind of teaching that comes with schools and “parenting” pushes children toward imitation and away from innovation.

There is a deep irony here. Parents and policy makers care about teaching because they recognize that learning is increasingly important in an information age. But the new information economy, as opposed to the older industrial one, demands more innovation and less imitation, more creativity and less conformity.

In fact, children’s naturally evolved learning techniques are better suited to that sort of challenge than the teaching methods of the past two centuries.