Notebook per
A Manifesto Against ‘Parenting’
Citation (APA): Gopnik, A. (2016). A Manifesto Against ‘Parenting’ [Kindle Android version]. Retrieved from Amazon.com
Parte introduttiva
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 2
Manifesto Against ‘Parenting’ By Alison Gopnik
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 10
As long as there have been human beings, mothers and fathers and many others have taken special care of children. But the word “parenting” didn’t appear in the U.S. until 1958,
Nota - Posizione 11
LA PAROLA
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 15
The right kind of “parenting” will produce the right kind of child, who in turn will become the right kind of adult.
Nota - Posizione 15
L ASSUNTO
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 27
Biologists have shown that humans evolved a unique network of care. Unlike our nearest primate relatives, extended family and “alloparents” (unrelated helpers) all combine to take care of those needy kids.
Nota - Posizione 28
ALLOPARENTS
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 31
The traditional sources of wisdom and competence weren’t available any more.
Nota - Posizione 32
FINE DELLA RETE
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 40
You can judge whether you are a good carpenter or writer or CEO by the quality of your chairs, your books or your bottom line. In the “parenting” picture, a parent is a kind of carpenter; the goal, however, is not to produce a particular kind of product, like a chair, but a particular kind of person.
Nota - Posizione 42
FIGLI E STATUS
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 42
In work, expertise leads to success. The promise of “parenting” is that there is some set of techniques, some particular expertise, that parents could acquire that would help them accomplish the goal of shaping their children’s lives.
Nota - Posizione 43
UN LAVORO
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 46
The scientific study of development provides very little support for this picture.
Nota - Posizione 46
NO EVIDENCE
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 48
middle-class parents obsess about small variations in parenting techniques. Should you co-sleep with your babies or let them cry it out? Should strollers face front or back? How much homework should children have? How much time should they spend on the computer? There is almost no evidence that any of this has much predictable effect on what children will be like when they grow up.
Nota - Posizione 49
VARIAZONI MINIME
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 52
Does this mean that parents don’t matter? To the contrary: From a scientific perspective, being a parent, as opposed to “parenting,” is crucially important, but it’s important in a very different way.
Nota - Posizione 53
EPPURE I GENITORI CONTANO
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 56
More than any other animal, we human beings depend on our ability to learn. And the current thinking is that our large brain and powerful learning abilities evolved, most of all, to deal with change.
Nota - Posizione 57
LUNGA INFANZIA X IMPARARE
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 60
On top of that, human beings were nomadic, moving from environment to environment, and, thanks to culture, each new generation could create and modify its own environment. All this meant that humans had to adapt to an exceptionally wide range of exceptionally variable environments.
Nota - Posizione 61
PLEISTOCENE E ADATTAMENTO TRAMITE CULTURA
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 64
One way that the human species may have evolved to deal with this variability was by nurturing a wide range of children with very different temperaments and abilities. This helped to ensure that someone or other in a new generation would have the skills to cope with the unpredictable
Nota - Posizione 66
FIGLI E PORTAFOGLIO
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 69
Many animals have minds that are exquisitely adapted to just one particular environment. Our minds can change in unpredictable ways to match unpredictable environments.
Nota - Posizione 70
FLESSIBILI
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 70
But this strategy has a drawback:
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 71
You don’t want to be stuck figuring out how to deal with a mammoth while it’s charging at you.
Nota - Posizione 71
INCONVENIENTE
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 72
The evolutionary solution to that trade-off is to give each new human being protectors— people who make sure that children have a chance to thrive, learn and imagine before they have to fend for themselves. Those protectors also pass on the knowledge that previous generations have accumulated.
Nota - Posizione 73
PROTETTORE
Nota - Posizione 73
TRASMETTITORE
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 74
If “parenting” is the wrong model, then, what’s the right one? Let’s recall that “parent” is not actually a verb, nor is it a form of work. What we need to talk about instead is “being a parent”— that is, caring for a child. To be a parent is to be part of a profound and unique human relationship,
Nota - Posizione 75
ESSERE
Nota - Posizione 76
RELAZIONE
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 77
After all, to be a wife is not to engage in “wifing,” to be a friend is not to “friend,” even on Facebook, and we don’t “child” our mothers and fathers. Yet these relationships are central to who we are.
Nota - Posizione 78
AMICARE MOGLIEGGIARE
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 79
Talking about love, especially the love of parents for their children, may sound sentimental and mushy and simple and obvious. But like all human relationships, our love for our children is at once a part of the everyday texture of our lives
Nota - Posizione 80
AMORE
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 81
We can work to love better without thinking of love as a kind of work.
Nota - Posizione 81
IMPARARE AD AMARE
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 85
Love doesn’t have goals or benchmarks or blueprints, but it does have a purpose.
Nota - Posizione 85
OBIETTIVO
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 85
But I wouldn’t evaluate the success of my marriage by measuring whether my husband’s character had improved in the years since we wed.
Nota - Posizione 86
UNA BUONA MOGLIE
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 87
This, however, is the implicit standard of “parenting”— that
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 88
The most important rewards of being a parent aren’t your children’s grades and trophies— or even their graduations and weddings. They come from the moment-by-moment physical and psychological joy of being with this particular child, and in that child’s moment-by-moment joy in being with you.
Nota - Posizione 90
STARE INSIEME
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 91
Instead of valuing “parenting,” we should value “being a parent.”
Nota - Posizione 91
ESSERE E NN FARE
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 93
Love’s purpose is not to shape our beloved’s destiny but to help them shape their own.
Nota - Posizione 93
FINE DELL AMORE
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 96
We try to give our children a strong sense of safety and stability. We do this even though the whole point of that safe base is to encourage children to take risks and have adventures.
Nota - Posizione 97
LA SICUREZZA X VOLARE
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 97
And we try to pass on our knowledge, wisdom and values to our children,
Nota - Posizione 97
TRASMETTERE
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 98
In fact, the very point of commitment, nurture and culture is to allow variation, risk and innovation.
Nota - Posizione 99
INNOVAZIONE
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 102
Caring for children is like tending a garden, and being a parent is like being a gardener.
Nota - Posizione 102
GIARDINIERI. LA MIGLIORE METAFORA
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 103
We do it to create a protected and nurturing space for plants to flourish.
Nota - Posizione 103
IL TERRENO X FIORIRE
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 107
The good gardener works to create fertile soil that can sustain a whole ecosystem of different plants with different strengths and beauties— and with different weaknesses and difficulties, too.
Nota - Posizione 109
BIODIVERSITÀ
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 110
And in the long run, that kind of varied, flexible, complex, dynamic system will be more robust and adaptable than the most carefully tended hothouse bloom.
Nota - Posizione 111
SFRUTTARE LE OCCASIONI
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 112
Our job is not to make a particular kind of child but to provide a protected space of love, safety and stability in which children of many unpredictable kinds can flourish.
Nota - Posizione 113
AMBIENTE
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 119
“The Gardener and the Carpenter:
