Photo: Raincoast Books
 
Alison Gopnik?s forthcoming book, The Gardener and the Carpenter, sheds new light on the relationship between parents and children, but it is not a parenting book. Rather, Gopnik, a psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley, proposes that parents need not and should not seek skills to raise perfect children, as though they were tradespeople and their children, their products. Author of The Philosophical Baby and co-author of The Scientist in the Crib, Gopnik warns that children?s wisdom and spontaneity get lost when parents pressure their kids to be something specific.
Q: Children seem to do the opposite of what parents want. Is moulding children even possible"

A: I don?t think it?s possible. Even if it were, it would defeat the whole purpose of having children. From an evolutionary perspective, childhood is about mess. It?s about shaking things up?adding, as my computer scientist friends would say, a ?boost of noise? to the system, making things a little random in a way that allows new possibilities to emerge. Q: You write about ?the gardener? and ?the carpenter? in your latest book. What do they represent"

A: There are two different ways you could think about being a parent, and one that?s become very common since the end of the 20th century is a kind of carpentry model. The idea is that if you just got enough expertise and enough special techniques and read up enough, then you could shape a child into the kind ...