RESEARCH / BOOK: What Kind Of Parent Are You: Carpenter Or Gardener? (aka on Inquiry)

[Ryan Goble]

The "carpenter" thinks that his or her child can be molded. "The idea is that if you just do the right things, get the right skills, read the right books, you're going to be able to shape your child into a particular kind of adult," she says.


The "gardener," on the other hand, is less concerned about controlling who the child will become and instead provides a protected space to explore. The style is all about "creating a rich, nurturant but also variable, diverse, dynamic ecosystem."


An experiment] was done by [researchers] Elizabeth Bonawitz and Laura Schulz. What they found was that if you gave a complicated toy to a 4-year-old, they find all the things that it could do. It could squeak, had a mirror, it had a light. But when the experimenter said, "This is my toy, I'm going to show you how it works," and did one thing, like squeak the squeaker, children were much less likely to explore. What they did, rationally, was squeak the squeaker — what the adult had demonstrated.

#Parents often focus too much on who their children will be as adults. The harm in that approach, says @AlisonGopnik, is that parents and their offspring may become anxious, tense or unhappy https://t.co/TGXpknwt1E #edchat #parenting

— MindShift (@MindShiftKQED) October 13, 2018