Alison Gopnik

I've had three of my own children and spent my professional life thinking about children. And yet I still find my relation to my children deeply puzzling.

What's it like to be a baby? It's like being in love in Paris for the first time after you've had three double espressos.

Ours is an age of pedagogy. Anxious parents instruct their children more and more, at younger and younger ages, until they're reading books to babies in the womb.

Adults often assume that most learning is the result of teaching and that exploratory, spontaneous learning is unusual. But actually, spontaneous learning is more fundamental.