Alison Gopnik

Our babies are like penguins; penguin babies can't exist unless more than one person is taking care of them. They just can't keep going. ”

Scientists and philosophers tend to treat knowledge, imagination and love as if they were all very separate parts of human nature. But when it comes to children, all three are deeply entwined. Children learn the truth by imagining all the ways the world could be, and testing those possibilities. ”

If you wanted to design a robot that could learn as well as it possibly could, you might end up with something that looked a lot like a 3-year-old. ”

If you just, pretty much, take a random 15-month-old, just sit and watch them for 10 minutes and count out how many experiments, how much thinking you see going on, and it will put the most brilliant scientist to shame. ”

Imagine if baseball were taught the way science is taught in most inner-city schools. Schoolchildren would get lectures about the history of the World Series. High school students would occasionally reproduce famous plays of the past. Nobody would get in the game themselves until graduate school. ”

Like most parents, I think, my children have been the source of some of my most intense joys and despairs, my deepest moral dilemmas and greatest moral achievements. ”

What teenagers want most of all are social rewards, especially the respect of their peers. ”

What happens when children reach puberty earlier and adulthood later? The answer is: a good deal of teenage weirdness. ”

The science can tell you that the thousands of pseudo-scientific parenting books out there - not to mention the 'Baby Einstein' DVDs and the flash cards and the brain-boosting toys - won't do a thing to make your baby smarter. That's largely because babies are already as smart as they can be; smarter than we are in some ways. ”

I'm afraid the parenting advice to come out of developmental psychology is very boring: pay attention to your kids and love them. ”