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.
Alison GopnikRead
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.
Interpretation
Parenting is complex and often confounding, even for those who study it.
In this quote, Alison Gopnik reflects on the intricate and sometimes perplexing relationship that parents have with their children. Despite her personal experience as a mother and her professional focus on child development, she acknowledges that understanding this dynamic remains a challenging and mysterious endeavor, illustrating the complexities of familial bonds and the psychological aspects of parenting.
In practice
This quote can be used in a parenting workshop to illustrate the complexities of raising children.
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.
I remember that the first time I looked at my son, of course I felt love. But I think the first feeling was not love: it was fear. Someone is needing me. If something happens to him, what am I going to do? Maybe I won't survive if something happens to him? The fear was as big as the love.
It's important for a parent to learn to take delight in a child whose behavior might seem mystifying. In the case of an extroverted parent with an introverted child, it can be learning to see the inner riches of your child that may not always be expressed on the surface - but are there.
There's a schizoid streak within the family anyway so I dare say that I'm affected by that. The majority of the people in my family have been in some kind of mental institution, as for my brother he doesn't want to leave. He likes it very much.
Grown don't mean nothing to a mother. A child is a child. They get bigger, older, but grown? What's that supposed to mean? In my heart it don't mean a thing.
I felt like I needed to come to terms with the decision I'd made to let go of my family. What do you do when you want to be loyal to your family but you feel that loyalty to them is in conflict somehow with loyalty to yourself?
All the awards in the world, you can get into all the nightclubs, they'll send you the nicest clothes. Nothing better than walking into your dad's restaurant and seeing a smile on his face and knowing that your mom and dad and your sister are real proud of you.
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