First published 2016
Developmental psychologist Alison Gopnik takes aim at contemporary parenting culture and its obsession with controlling outcomes. She examines how the past three decades transformed child care into a goal-driven industry worth billions of dollars. Gopnik argues that this twenty-first-century approach rests on flawed science and harms both children and parents. Drawing from human evolution studies and her own research on how children learn, she demonstrates that effective child care differs fundamentally from molding kids into predetermined shapes. Children naturally develop as messy, unpredictable, playful, and imaginative beings who differ from their parents and siblings. The book offers parents a science-based alternative to the anxiety-inducing methods promoted by the modern parenting industry.
Genres: psychology, family-life, non-fiction, 21st-century, parenting, academic
Vibes: informative, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: informed-consent, science-vs-culture
Period: 21st-Century
322 pages · Kindle Edition · Farrar, Straus and Giroux