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Join Millennium and Dr. Gopnik for a parent ed night. All current and prospective families, friends, and community members are invited!
By Millennium SchoolFollow
Date and time
Thursday, November 16 · 6 – 7pm PST
Location
Online
About this event
- 1 hour
- Mobile eTicket
Supporting the Adolescent Mind: What the New Science of Child Development Tells Us About How to Raise Our Kids
Caring deeply about our children is part of what makes us human. Yet the thing we call “parenting” is a surprisingly new invention. In the past thirty years, the concept of parenting and the multibillion dollar industry surrounding it have transformed child care into obsessive, controlling, and goal-oriented labor intended to create a particular kind of child and therefore a particular kind of adult. I’ll argue that the familiar twenty-first-century picture of parents and children is profoundly wrong–it’s not just based on bad science, it’s bad for kids and parents, too.
Drawing on the study of human evolution and my own scientific research into how children learn, I’ll show that although caring for children is profoundly important, it is not a matter of shaping them to turn out a particular way. Children are designed to be messy and unpredictable, playful and imaginative, and to be very different both from their parents and from each other. The variability and flexibility of childhood lets them innovate, create, and survive in an unpredictable world. “Parenting” won’t make children learn—but caring parents let children learn by creating a secure, loving environment.
Date: Thursday, November 16th, 2023
Time: 6-7pm
Where: Zoom
About Dr. Alison Gopnik:
Alison Gopnik is a professor of psychology, affiliate professor of philosophy, and member of the Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research Group at the University of California at Berkeley. She is an internationally recognized leader in the cognitive science of learning and development and the author of the bestselling and critically acclaimed books The Scientist in the Crib, The Philosophical Baby and The Gardener and the Carpenter.
Dr. Gopnik is a Guggenheim, AAAS, and Cognitive Science Society Fellow, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and President of the Association for Psychological Science. She writes the Mind and Matter science column for the Wall Street Journal, and has appeared on “The Charlie Rose Show”, “The Colbert Report” “Radio Lab” and “The Ezra Klein Show”.
You can learn more at www.alisongopnik.com
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