The Gardener and the Carpenter: What the New Science of Child Development Tells Us About the Relationship Between Parents and Children

Caring deeply about our children is part of what makes us human. Yet the thing we call “parenting” is a surprisingly new invention. In the past thirty years, the concept of parenting and the multibillion-dollar industry surrounding it have transformed child care into obsessive, controlling, and goal-oriented labor. Alison Gopnik argues that the familiar twenty-first-century picture of parents and children is profoundly wrong―it’s not just based on bad science, it’s bad for kids and parents, too.