Unlearning parenting
The Gardener and the Carpenter by Alison Gopnik, Part I
Read for: A challenge to the idea of “parenting,” a case for being a parent in a mutual relationship, a look at other species with long childhoods, a case for embracing childhood mess and getting all the support you can as a parent
In a previous post, I wrote about how we have few models to observe and celebrate difference without immediately creating an underlying ranking. Parent/child, CEO/frontline, black/white. It’s why I immediately liked Alison Gopnik’s terms to describe different modes of attention: ”spotlight consciousness” and “lantern consciousness.” Neither seems obviously better on first read. Spotlight consciousness refers to our ability to focus on specific tasks, leaving everything else in the dark. Lantern consciousness refers to a diffuse and wide-ranging attention that can absorb lots of stimuli at once — the way young kids (or brains on psychedelics) operate.
Gopnik is a psychology and philosophy professor at UC Berkeley. The Gardener and the Carpenter combines research from evolutionary psychology, children’s learning and development, biology, anthropology — with her own view as a grandmother, scientist, and philosopher — to argue against “parenting” and make the case for being a caregiver in a mutually respectful relationship.
Her core argument is that the dominant “parenting” model, in which parents are carpenters who work hard to shape their children into pre-determined products, is ineffective and at odds with who we are as a species. She points to the proliferation of parenting books and “experts,” along with parental burnout, as signs of a flawed model. (She didn’t even mention the rise of parenting social media influencers!) She acknowledges that “working to achieve a particular outcome is a good model for many crucial human enterprises. It’s the right model for carpenters or writers or businessmen.” But the pressure to precisely build a particular kind of person makes a hard journey even harder.
A better analogy, she argues, is parent as gardener — someone who creates a protected, nurturing space for many types of plants to grow; someone who does consistent, long-term grunt work without exactly knowing how it will contribute to the end result; someone who is attentive to the constant change and occasional surprise in her resilient, adaptable ecosystem.
She builds her case through explorations into interesting philosophical questions and scientific research, occasionally stuffing in grandkid anecdotes with the overindulgence of a doting grandmother. It’s a long book that’s hard to summarize, so I’ll cover it in two parts. In Part I, I’ll cover the evolution of childhood and parenting. In Part II, I’ll cover how we learn and grow.
Gopnik dives deep into our evolutionary history to explain why childhood is messy and long, as well as how we possibly survived as a species carting around chaotic kids who don’t contribute their fair share to the household.
Our long, messy childhood and humans’ creativity evolved together to help us adapt to nearly every environment on earth.
Gopnik reframes toddler chaos from a bug (something parents need to fix through sticker charts, discipline, or emotional jiujitsu) to a feature of the human species’ success. She notes that “scientists have other words for mess: variability, stochasticity, noise, entropy, randomness,” pointing to evolution by natural selection as one of the best examples of how messiness helps with survival. We have a long, protected period of immaturity to create space for mess, variability, and exploration, which we then “exploit” as adults to succeed in new and unfamiliar environments.
We know that human childhood is substantially longer than other primates and mammals, which have longer childhoods than invertebrates and fish. We also know that across species, long childhoods are associated with larger size, longer lifespan, more parental care and investment, fewer births at the same time, higher survival rates, larger brains, increased intelligence and flexibility. Australian quokkas, for example, stay in their mother’s pouch longer and have larger brains than American opossums. Precocial birds, like chickens and turkeys, mature quickly but don’t learn new skills well compared to altricial birds, like crows and parrots, that learn to use and make tools during their longer childhoods.
Childhood became longer as humans evolved. Homo erectus walked upright but didn’t have a long childhood, based on what we know from analyzing teeth and bones. Given that our large brains, long childhood, and increased parental investment seem to have evolved around the same time, she concludes:
Childhood is for learning — that’s what children are designed to do, and that’s why adults and children have such a special relationship…The mind of a human child working in concert with the minds of the people caring for him is the most flexible and powerful learning device in the known universe.
This flexibility means that the human mind is less like a Swiss Army knife, with specialized parts to solve specific problems, and more like a human hand, which isn’t designed for anything specific but is a flexible and effective tool for doing many different things. Our chaotic, messy childhood allows us to “explore” different possibilities so that we can “exploit” them efficiently as adults.
Parenting in a nuclear family is unusual; our species thrived with a mosaic of ways to care for children.
Gopnik adds to the piles of criticism of the nuclear family ideal, which she suggests was common for only a brief blip in human history. More common was the evolution of a human caregiving “triple threat” as our childhoods grew longer and required more investment.
The first unique feature is somewhat aligned with the nuclear family ideal: pair-bonding, which is correlated across species with overall investment in childhood and specifically with paternal investment.
Pair-bonding means that a pair of animals who have sex with each other also share their lives and care for the young together. In birds this can mean everything from sharing a nest to correlating a song. Pair-bonding may not last for life, but it lasts for longer than a mating season or two. And for many animals pair-bonding can sometimes involve same-sex as well as opposite-sex partners.
The author, who describes herself as “a woman who had the great good fortune to grow up in the late sixties [i.e. the free love era], in that glorious five minutes after the pill and before AIDS”, is careful to note that pair-bonding is not the same as lifetime monogamy. But she also states that fathers’s care of kids (paternal investment) and pair-bonding between fathers and mothers are “part of the same evolutionary package.”
Human fathers invest more in their children than chimpanzee or gorilla fathers, but their role is generally more variable (or “facultative”) than mothers. It reminds me of the core argument in The Dawn of Everything, which says that humans’ social arrangements are and always have been incredibly diverse; it’s less interesting to debate about our “natural” state and more interesting to choose among the wide range of options. Gopnik notes that the experience of care is what leads to more paternal investment and bonding.
The second unique feature of human caregiving is the evolution of grandmothers. Females in most species die shortly after becoming infertile. Killer whales are the only other animals to undergo menopause. Human women mysteriously live 20-30 years past their fertile years, which was true even in previous eras of short average lifespan (which is driven largely by infant mortality). The grandmother hypothesis posits that post-menopausal women evolved by giving an edge to their grandchildren’s survival. Mathematical models show that if even a few women happen to become post-menopausal grandmothers and invest resources in grandchildren, their genes are more likely to spread. Anthropological studies of forager cultures calculate that grandmothers contribute more high-calorie food to children than hunters, due to their expertise in foraging for nutritionally dense resources. This picture fits with friends’ anecdotes of whose parents became revitalized with their new role as grandparent and caregiver (though our evolutionary past doesn't mean this is the only valuable role of grandmothers in today’s world).
The third part of the “triple threat” is alloparenting, which refers to non-parents caring for children. Lemurs, langurs, birds, and elephants are among the few other species that alloparent. Alloparenting is counterintuitive because there’s no self-preservation reason to care for and share resources with a small creature who shares only small percentage or none of your genes. Primatologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy suggests that a change in the climate 1.8 million years ago led to a need for early humans to collaborate differently on hunting and foraging for food, which led them to be more open to alloparenting, which led to higher levels of empathy and cooperation which reinforced and lengthened our childhood. The involvement of many caregivers may have contributed to our socially-oriented way of learning (to be covered in Part II), our sensitivity to facial expressions, and our foundational capacity for empathy.
Together, the “triple threat” hypothesis suggests that the distinctive human love for children has shaped — and been shaped by — other kinds of human love, from romantic to familial to friendship.
Embracing mess and all the support you can get
This evolutionary picture does seem quite at odds with the modern American view on childhood and parenting. Childhood mess and variability has been a feature of our species for eons. It’s the very thing that makes us creative, resilient, and adaptable to an uncertain future:
Trying to consciously shape how your children will turn out is both futile and self-defeating…we can’t know beforehand what unprecedented challenges the children of the future will face. Shaping them in our own image, or in the image of our current ideals, might actually keep them from adapting to changes in the future.
The rich evolutionary history of caregiving is a stark contrast to the nuclear family ideal or the 30% of children who now rely on the resources of a single parent, with limited external supports to funnel resources into the intensive period that is childhood. Gopnik hopes that we’ll take the strong and specific commitment we have to our own kin and extend it broadly:
The emotions of commitment are among the most significant and profoundly human feelings. The fact that we care about the people we love for their own sake, and not for our own is one of the foundations of our moral and even spiritual lives. In fact, many religious and spiritual traditions articulate a human ideal that centers on these emotions. The ideal is to extend the same specific committed love that we feel so naturally for our children to everyone else.
Read with:
📄 Parental Ethnotheories of Children’s Learning by Harkness et al: A mirror into our own beliefs about children, how they learn, and what’s most important — and how our deepest beliefs wouldn’t make sense if we happened to be born in a different country
📰 Menopausal killer whales are family leaders: A summary of the research on grandma killer whale wisdom
📕 The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow: A reminder of how truly little we know about ancient humans and ways to break your stereotypes about them
📚 Other parenthood book recommendations from a previous post, Unlearning the stereotypes of pregnancy and parenthood