Interpret the trailer
You think children always like to mess around? In fact, children are learning to interact socially;
You think your child is quietly playing with toys? In fact, the child is exploring the mysteries of the world;
Why do you think your child asks why because he's bored? In fact, the child is looking for answers;
……
What exactly is the child learning when he is playing?
And how did they learn it?
What can children learn from their parents?
In "The Gardener and the Carpenter", Alison Gopnik, an international children's learning research giant, takes you to understand the learning rules behind children's behavior.
With a large number of classic and creative experiments, it describes to you how children learn when they watch, listen, play, and do, as well as the learning characteristics of different stages of early childhood, school age, and adolescence.
Gopnik with his lifelong research profoundly revealed that every child is a natural master of learning, if you want to be a visionary parent, then do not let the child enter the adult learning mode too early, let alone use the adult thinking mode to set limits for the child.
This book takes you out of the traditional "let the child become a talent" parenting misunderstanding, telling you that raising children is not a formula, and the specific parenting method is not important at all.
What matters is what kind of person you are and how your relationship with your children is.
The fundamental difference between a master parent and an ordinary parent is whether you are a gardener or a carpenter.
True master parents know how to build a growth ecology for their children.
The Gardener and the Carpenter strikes at the heart of contemporary parental anxiety and gives you a new upgrade to your parenting mindset.
Are you a gardener or a carpenter
In educating children, the focus is not to regulate children's behavior at a glance, but to create a suitable environment for children to grow. The former is called carpenter-style baby-raising, and the latter is called gardener-style doll-raising.
These two parables are very graphic. When carpenters make furniture, they first have pictures in their minds, have design drawings in their hands, and then make wood into furniture according to their own imagination.
No matter what difference each tree is, the way to become a talent is to be sawn and planed to become a standard craft.
The gardener is different, his job is the whole garden, he needs to water and fertilize according to the growth of each plant, even if the branches are pruned, the value of each plant is still to present its original appearance.
Isn't it particularly obvious that we usually manage children, don't we often build him according to the template of our imagination, and hope that his words and deeds can meet the corresponding norms.
American scholar Simon Snek has a picture with 3 circles on it, from the inside to the outside, why, how, what, the most important is "why", followed by "how", and finally "what to do".
The most central reason is the core problem, first clarify the core problem, and then look at the peripheral problem, just like building a high house, natural water comes to fruition.
The first thing parents need to do to educate their children is to understand the logic behind their children's behavior.
For example, if the child is reluctant to go to school in the morning, if we only pay attention to the child's external performance, we have formulated a lot of rules to deal with the child's late arrival at school, without analysis.
Children are reluctant to go to school, may be snubbed or even bullied at school, then they will be blinded by the improvement of appearance and behavior, ignoring the place where the child really needs help.
Childhood, a key strategy for human evolution
The author places the importance of childhood at the height of human evolutionary strategies.
In reality, many parents just regard childhood as an adult preparation period that they have to go through, and they look forward to the child's quick understanding, excellent grades, and no need to worry about themselves.
The author analyzes the meaning of human childhood from the perspective of evolution, and I think it is to grasp the key to the problem, this kind of justification for childhood, not only humanistic care, but the crushing of cognitive heights.
Starting with "can't lose at the starting line", either a lifetime of competition without the ability to be happy in life, or at some point in time to start falling, retaliatory pursuit of happiness.
Love, the guarantee of continuous evolution
The author discusses three levels of love for children: parents, grandparents, and alien parents, and from the perspective of evolution, he explains that human beings break through the prisoner's dilemma in the form of love, and the code of caring for children is deeply rooted in the genetic and cultural levels.
Not to take care of it because of love, but to love because of care.
The existing education system is only a few hundred years old, but modern middle-class parents have adapted to school education and want to use this set on their children as soon as possible, while paying less attention to more ancient and natural imitation learning.
A common explanation is mirror neurons, but that's just a lazy oversimplification. Children's imitations are very complex and subtle, beyond the perception of adults (not knowing when they learned).
Children will listen to adults, but not accept them all, and they will judge whether adults are trustworthy.
Children love to ask why, most of the time they really want to explore the principles of the world, and in many cases, asking directly is a more efficient way to learn than to observe.
This kind of question and answer constitutes real life, not deliberate, because of the child's sensitivity, parents can not always pretend to be knowledgeable, pretend to be fair and objective, everything can only be true feelings.
Not only humans, but all intelligent animals like to play. A common way of playing is slapstick play, puppies biting each other, and physical collisions between children, which can improve children's social skills.
Humans are better at pretending than other animals, which is a counterfactual reasoning ability to construct a virtual, logical world, and literature has this power.
Children who are good at pretending are more able to understand the thoughts of others, and even many children will have a hypothetical friend, which often scares adults.
In the child's play, parents should do support rather than guidance, and guidance will often cut off the child's own exploration ideas and become a boring imitation of adults step by step.
The concept of school age is based on school education, but children's psychological development does have such a layer of change, from exploratory learning to master learning, laying the foundation for adult life, mastery learning needs to be practiced, is a kind of reconstruction of the brain nerve, this process is to turn skills into a subconscious state, from another point of view is also a degradation.
From an evolutionary point of view, adolescence is a process of human progression to adulthood, related to human dynamic mechanisms and control mechanisms, adolescent children are more likely to be affected by peer evaluation, more emphasis on those calm adults feel strange rewards.
Contemporary children's puberty has arrived earlier, but they are far less than the children who grew up in the apprenticeship model who have real work experience, can control their behavior and make real intentional achievements, and a child who wants to use scientists as a profession can only really contact scientists to work together in their twenties.
Schooling, like homeschooling, should be the gardener model, but the reality is more of a carpenter model.
Parenthood is the art of finding balance in a series of contradictions
Gopnik said that a good gardener will definitely spend a lot of effort to create a fertile soil to nurture the entire ecosystem, so that flowers and trees can rely on their own advantages to grow.
In addition, a good garden will constantly change to adapt to weather changes and the change of seasons. "In the long run, plants that grow in this changeable, flexible, complex, dynamic system will be stronger and more adaptable than the most carefully cared for greenhouse flowers."
In the same way, a gardener-type parent is a parent who can create a good growth ecology for his children, and a parent who can create a safe, healthy and warm environment for his children.
In this ecosystem, intimate, loving parent-child relationships are like fertile soil that nurtures every aspect of a child's life. Moreover, this ecological environment should be full of elements of change, innovation and novelty, which can be used for children to develop better and make children more able to adapt to future challenges and changes.
Gopnik's use of "gardener" and "carpenter" as a metaphor for these two types of parents can be said to be a stroke of genius.
Can quickly recognize their own typical parenting characteristics. This simple classification is indeed in line with the cognitive mechanism of the human brain. However, it seems to me that most parents, including Professor Gopnik himself, do not adopt an absolutely either-or parenting style, but a combination of two types, just the difference between more and less.
At first, Mr. Hurdy argues, the need may be simpler, just to transport larger babies on long journeys, but once this strategy begins, other possibilities follow, such as longer immaturity, larger brains, and better learning abilities.
Of course, this commitment to love is not without cost, "we vs others" is the emotional death pit of human beings, and the trust, love and commitment of our nature to the same kind often implies hostility to the "other" and "outsider".
To summarize this section, in human society, children's long immaturity is generously supported by mothers, fathers, grandparents, and even strangers who are not related by blood.
Children are the purest examples of a particular long-term commitment.
The key to this relationship is the act of caring and caring itself. It is this commitment that guarantees a long period of protected immaturity.
Because of the love for children, human beings extend to other children, between other members of society, including friends, teachers, and even schools and cities.
So, again, we return to the theme of "The Gardener and the Carpenter":
If our purpose is to raise a particular adult, then it is enough to choose the one from all the children who has the most potential to cultivate him, but in fact, human love for children always transcends practical uses.
We don't take care of a child because we love him, on the contrary, we love a child because we take care of him all the time.
Write at the end
As Alison Gopnik put it:
"Good parents don't necessarily turn their children into smart, happy, or successful adults, but they can create a strong, highly adaptable and resilient new generation to better cope with the inevitable and unpredictable changes they will face in the future."
Taking care of children is like taking care of a garden, and being a parent is like being a gardener.
Perhaps, just like taking care of flowers and plants, it is necessary to give the right moisture, pots and shelves, suitable sunshine, ventilation and air humidity.
Raising children should meet the physical needs of children, prepare and constantly replace suitable spaces and toys for children, choose suitable kindergartens and schools, and then enjoy the happy time of living with children.
Most importantly, you have to know how to love and love your children.
Over the course of its long evolution, humans have developed strategies for coping with complex and changing environments — exploring and learning during childhood in order to cope with uncertainties.
Your unconditional love is the most powerful guarantee for children on the way to learning and exploration.
Click "Watching" and encourage the parents.
END