Small parenting techniques matter less than parents think

Alison Gopnik, a child psychologist and professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and a grandmother of three grandchildren under age five, stood before a lunchtime audience to talk about her book on childhood. She started not with science but with language, and with the picture that comes with the modern word parenting.

Being a parent, she said, has come to seem "a bit like being a carpenter." Learn the right techniques, she said, apply enough control, and you can shape your raw material "into a child of a particular kind," happy or successful or smart, who will then become an adult with those same traits. She noted that a literally billion-dollar industry has grown up to serve parents who want to do that shaping.

The carpenter view fails, Gopnik argued, because the evidence does not support it. She said studies show the everyday choices that preoccupy secure parents, such as whether to co-sleep or sleep train, how much homework to require, or which way a stroller faces, show no link to how children turn out years later. What does make an enormous difference, she said, is having a committed and loving caregiver, and children who lack that network, including many of the 20 percent of American children growing up in poverty, face risks in many ways. Policies that support caregiving, like maternal leave and universal preschool, are among the best attested interventions in social science.

Then she offered her line: "What you do when you garden is not create the biggest potato or create the grandest orchid."

What a gardener does, Gopnik argued, is put in messy and strenuous work, which she joked means you "sweat" and are "up to your ears in manure a lot of the time," and still get many surprises. The planned successes fall apart, and unexpected and marvelous things appear. The job is to build fertile ground and safe room where many different plants can thrive, and thrive in new ways when conditions change. That kind of varied system, she said, withstands change better than a single prized crop.

That, for Gopnik, is what childhood is for. From an evolutionary perspective, she argued, childhood is a protected space for novelty and diversity, the thing that lets each generation do things the previous generation never anticipated. If parents could actually specify the blueprint and produce exactly the child they wanted, she said, they "would have defeated the whole purpose of childhood."