Gardening

Alison Gopnik, in The Gardener and the Carpenter, offers a useful frame for parenting: think of it more like gardening, less like carpentry.

A carpenter builds toward a blueprint. A gardener tends the soil so things grow.

Childhood is a search phase. It's where subconscious baselines are set. What is normal? How should normal feel? What is expected of me?

Children are remarkably capable learners, often better than adults at discovering unlikely possibilities. In a famous experiment using "Blicket Detectors"(machines that light up when "blickets" are placed on them) 4-yo consistently outperformed adults in figuring out complex, unlikely rules (e.g "you need a square AND a circle"). Adults, weighed down by their prior expectations that "usually one thing causes an effect," struggled to change their minds and update their priors.

The novel piece that Alison mentions is of a related study: in a similar experiment, children's exploratory performance dropped when an authority figure was present. When an instructor taught a toy in a narrow way — "look, this is how it works" — and demonstrated just one function, children stopped exploring and never found the toy's other hidden features. The teaching itself killed the discovery.

As a gardener, you tend the soil. Consider the difference between children raised by present, curious parents versus those surviving in low-curiosity households.

The influence that matters is indirect. It's the things you don't do on purpose. The love felt during conversation. The presence. The background music. The mood of mornings. The routines that simply exist.

Longer caregiving periods may even explain our larger brains. Different species within the same mammal group can have twice the brain size due to extended care in early life.

The quality of caregiving matters - but it should come with as little expectation of specific outcomes as possible. Or perhaps, little expectation of the form of the outcome. After all, normal ape parents do expect that their offspring survive.