Pushkin, being noisy, both literally and metaphorically, doing lots of weird, random stuff right that doesn't seem to make sense, being impulsive and curious, and taking risks. All these features of what children are like that we might have thought were signs that they were irrational or just immature, really are exactly the things that make them so good at learning.
Alison Gopnik is a developmental psychologist. She spent the last few decades studying children's brains and how they learn. She says they're the best learners we know of in the universe, and that if we can just let kids do their thing and not overparent them, actually lead to better results.
And it's not to say that parents aren't important. Parents are extremely important, But the things that make parents important are in the kind of spontaneous things like the fact that they love their children and that they put energy into taking care of those children, not that they have some kind of special expertise that they read in a book or found on a blog that they can use to make those children come out better.
On today's episode, the Creative Genius of Children and what they can teach us, I'm Maya Shunker and this is a slight change of plans, a show about who we are and who we become in the face of a big change. Allison is the author of several acclaimed books, including The Philosophical Baby and The Scientist and the crit Work. She often refers to children as humanity's research and development department, because they interact with the world like it's one big
science experiment. It's pretty different from how we as adults engage with the world, and so I started off by asking Alison more about this distinction. I'd love to start with the basics, Alison. We know that children's brains are different from adult brains. But it's easy to think that children's brains are just immature versions of our brains. But you point out that children are actually just wired differently. They're wired to solve a different set of challenges. Right.
The idea is that there's a difference between exploration and exploitation. So exploitation is what we're doing all the time as grown ups. We're trying to get resources and find our way in the pecking order, and find mates and be focused and have plans, all the things that we do
when we're grown ups. But that's really different from just trying to figure out how the world works, trying to figure out what makes what happen, What are the possibility what are the things that I could do, not necessarily the things that I need to do right now to get some kind of reward, And that's exploration. So the idea is that what children are doing is really their brains are designed to explore. They're designed to find out
as much about the world as they can. Not very well designed to put on their snowsuits in the morning and get to prescull right, but very well designed to find out as much as they possibly can about the world around them. And if you're thinking about it from that perspective, many things that are features from an exploit perspective are bugs from an explored perspective, and vice versa. So, for example, having very focused attention, that's very good if
you're a grown up. You want to have focused attention. You want to be paying attention to your goals. You don't want to be distracted by that little speck of dust on the floor. But if what you're trying to do is just learn as much as you can, then having a much broader focus of attention, paying attention to even things that aren't relevant to what you're doing right now is going to be a better strategy. Being noisy, both literally and metaphorically, doing lots of weird, random stuff
right that doesn't seem to make sense. That's a real bug. If you're trying to be an effective, you know, CEO type battle, it's a feature if what you want to do is find out as much about what's going on around you as possible. Being impulsive and curious and taking risks. Those are all things that aren't really a great idea if you're just trying to get out of the house, but they are really good if you want to learn.
And all these features of what children are like that we might have thought were signs that they were irrational or impulsive or just immature, really are exactly the things that make them so good at learning.
Yeah, I love the reinterpretation of bugs as features in this case. And you know, you're talking about the walk to preschool, and I'm reflecting now, you know what, I've taken walks with my nieces and nephews. It is a totally different experience than when I for a walk, right, and in the moment, I actually can get quite impatient with them. Hey, guys, we just have to go to the supermarket because your mom needed us to pick up milk. And this is taking twenty five minutes because you're intrigued
by every little thing that you see. But I actually think you're helping make me more patient with a curious set of behaviors that the kids engage in because it is engineered towards a more exploratory frame of mind, which is very very helpful for our species.
Yeah, and you know, going for a walk to the seven eleven with a four year old, you suddenly realize that these four blocks that you've done, And I've had this experience recently with my three year old grandson. The four blocks that I have walked many many, many many times,
I hadn't didn't see anything. There were all sorts of things to see on those few blocks that I just wouldn't notice if I were by myself, but that thelo who's my grandson immediately notices and sees and thinks are fascinating.
Let's talk a bit more about there being a trade off between exploration and exploitation.
So the picture that comes from cognitive science is that there are many different kinds of cognitive abilities that we have, and not only are they different, but they actually trade off against each other. So the things that make you very good at learning, for example, might really be intention with the things that make you really good at acting
and doing things effectively. So any kind of intelligent system, rather than just sort of, you know, dialing up the general intelligence knob, is going to have to figure out ways of having a kind of division of labor, of having trade offs, of figuring out when do you do one and when do you do the other, and how can you get a system that's capable of doing things that are very different and actually intension with each other.
Mm hmm. You do say that childhood is evolution's way of solving for the explore exploit trade off. Tell me a bit more about that.
One of the things that we know about biological intelligent beings is that there's this really driking relationship between how long a period of childhood a species has and how large a brain it has, how intelligent it is, how
much it relies on learning. It's a very very general principle, but sort of a mysterious one, right, because having a long childhood sort of by definition means you're going to have a period when you're not going to be effective and you're going to need resources from other animals.
Yeah, greater dependency, exactly right.
And humans are way out on the end of the distribution, as it were, on all of these measures. So we have the longest childhood by far. Chimpanzee children are producing as much food as they're consuming by the time they're seven. Oh wow, and humans, even in forger cultures, aren't doing that until they're at least fifteen. So that's very puzzling
from an evolutionary perspective. Why would you have this very long period where you not only are you not producing resources, but you're depending on other people to produce resources for you. And the argument is that when you're trying to resolve this explore exploit trade off, a very good way to do it is have an early protected period where all
you have to do is explore. You don't have to worry about exploiting because you have caregivers who take care of you, and then you can take all those things that you learned when you were three or when you were four and put them to use as an adult in a new environment.
You said a really critical word there, which is you said protected childhood, and it is really important to emphasize that kids are only really getting the gains of this period of exploration when they do feel that they are in these safe spaces where it's okay to take risks, where it's okay to experiment with different solutions.
Right, that's exactly right. If you feel as if you're in a protected context, then that actually enables you to go out and explore. And there's quite a bit of work recently. We've just written a paper about this that suggests that what is sometimes called adverse experiences like not be in that situation of caregiving, right, which is unfortunately true for many, many, many children, especially in the United States.
That one of the effects that has is that it tamps down that kind of exploration in that sense of possibility.
Right. And that's so sad because exploration seems critical for these kids. And actually, you said that kids are Humanity's research and development department. Can you say a bit more about that.
My basic hypothesis has been the children are like little scientists. They're going out in the world, they're doing experiments, they're analyzing statistics, and they're doing that in order to figure out how the world works. So things that you again might think of as bugs of the children, like they're just trying things out even when they get a bad outcome,
actually turn out to be features from this exploration perspective. So, especially if the world works in an unexpected way, not the obvious way, not the way that you would think right away, then being willing to experiment, being curious, trying things even if it's going to cost you the short run, actually lets you learn about the world. And that seems to be what children are really designed to do.
Yeah, And actually that reminds me of one of your research studies that I think is such a good example of this. In the study, you gave kids and adults the task of solving a complex logic fuzzle, and the kids in the study actually tried out a much wider range of possible solutions before committing to a final answer, even when trying out more things came at some sort
of cost or penalty. But adults, on the other hand, they stopped trying new solutions as soon as they thought they had the right answer, even if they didn't actually have it. And you call what adults are doing here a learning trap. Can you explain what that is?
Yeah, Essentially, what happens in a learning trap is that you decide that you've figured out how something works, and as a result, you don't actually go out and get more data. You don't actually go out and get more evidence that could prove that you're wrong. And the result is that you think that you're doing great. You think you've figured out how this thing works, but you've actually committed to a much more narrow view of how the
world works. But often actually finding something new involves a measure of risk, right, And what happens is that because adults are often sort of overconfident about the fact that they've actually understood how something works, they won't take the risks that would actually let them learn that something's new. Yeah, and let me give you an example of a learning trap in real life that we think actually is responsible for certain kinds of mental health issues. So, for example,
suppose I'm getting on an airplane. This is actually autobiographical, and I have a terrible experience on the airplane. It's, you know, there's awful turbulence site, I get a terrible headache, and as a result of that, I just refuse to get on an airplane ever. Again, that's what happens in phobias or anxiety disorders. Now, the problem is if I do that, I'm never going to learn that most of the time airplane rides are perfectly fine. And my brain isn't going to figure out that most of the time
airplane rides are perfectly fine. And that's one of the reasons why when people have anxiety disorders, the solution, which seems sort of paradoxical, is actually go out and do the thing that you're afraid of and then find out that, oh no, actually, you know, the snake is not going to the snake is not going to bite you, the airplane ride is not going to be terrible.
Yeah, you're talking about how we're encouraged to expose ourself to the scary stimulus rather than avoid it.
Right, And the thought is that childhood is kind of lets you get that for free, right. The children are the children are trying out new things that could potentially be scary all the time, and that helps them to escape from these learning traps where you are frightened of the outcomes, so you don't try to find out something new, which means that you never actually really learn about how the world works.
Yeah. So in terms of everyday life as adults, Obviously it makes sense for us to carry more of the exploit burden. Right. We have responsibilities in everyday life. We have to make money for our families, we have to feed children, lots lots of tasks, and so I think none of us want to go back fully into exploration mode. However, there are moments, there are times in our lives where
we really would benefit from a more exploratory mindset. So, for example, during creative processes, it's really helpful for us to try to embody a childlike state. Do you have some tips for how we might cultivate a mindset that more closely approximates that of a child's.
Well, I think we have some ideas, and one is this sense of being safe, of not having anything immediately riding on your decisions seems to be something that enables
you to explore more widely. The idea would be, and this is something that people frequently do when their brainstorming, is to say, look, you can say something that is going to be really dumb, or that isn't going to work, or that everyone else is going to think is a silly idea, But for now, what we're going to do is let everyone say those weird things, think those weird, strange things. I think another context that makes you more
childlike is something like travel. We're simply placing yourself in a new environment that you haven't already mastered. Is a way of getting that kind of broader focus as a way of giving you an incentive to explore and to learn. I'm talking to you actually from New Orleans. I'm here for the Big AI Conference, and just this morning I was thinking, one of the great pleasures in life is
being what the French call of flaneur. So if flaneur is someone who just goes to a strange city and wanders around the strange city, and I was thinking this morning, why is that so satisfying?
Right?
Why is there such pleasure in just being in a new place and wandering around the streets and seeing everything that's a little different. I think that's something that really puts you in this kind of explore mode. You're not trying to get to the high points, You're not trying to get to the conference center. You're just wandering and physically wandering, and wandering in your head.
Yeah, I mean you mentioned going to new cities and thinking also about learning new skills. I think all of these uncomfortable environments are humbling in a way that's potentially very helpful to the adult brain. When we've been placed outside of our comfort zone, we have no mastery of the skill a hit, or no mastery of how to get around the city. It allows us to rely less on our priors, less on existing knowledge, and to try.
And I'm just trying to think about what it's doing to the mind, but it just seems like it's forcing upon us a kind of creativity that day to day life might not.
That's exactly right. I think that's exactly right. There's a lot of really nice examples of late life artistic creativity. What the artists did is take all the things that they were really good at and then set up a situation where they can't do that anymore.
Oh wow, that's awesome.
Yeah. There's a famous example of the well, the painter Bryce Martin actually, who was a wonderful painter, actually strapped his paint brushes to his hands so that it was much harder to actually put the paint on the canvas. And that seemed to enable him to do things and try things that he hadn't been able to try before.
Yeah, it helps us challenge the routine ways in which we're used to accomplishing tasks. What a wonderful exercise to intentionally put yourself in situations that require innovation from your own mind. That's awesome.
And of course, in some ways it's making you more like a child, because of course, part of what's happening with children is that they're not as good at doing things in this kind of accomplished expert way.
Up next, Alison's share is why gardening is a great metaphor for how we should raise children. And good news, this approach actually requires less effort from parents. So if you're a stressed out caregiver looking for some relief, I promise we've got you covered. We'll be back in a
moment with a slight change of plans. So so far, Elison, we've talked about the marvelous ways in which children's brains are wired and how they learn things, and you say that this has implications for how we parent, and you've come up with this very helpful analogy that helps reflect two distinct models of parenting, the carpenter and the gardener. Do you mind talking about the carpenter and the gardener.
So a very common way, especially nowadays, that people think about being a parent is that it's kind of like work or school. So I think especially you know, modern middle class parents who have spent a lot of time working or going to school, have this picture that if you just get the rules right, you know, you just get the right kind of skills, then you're going to
get the right outcome. So if you think about being a carpenter, you know, you want to make a chair that's a particular shape, and you know, here's the wood that I need, and here's what I have to do to make that come out a particular way. And people often especially now have that as the sort of internal model of what it is to be a parent. I want a child too is going to Harvard and smart and competent and happy and successful and whatever you're listening to.
All the things, have all the things exactly, And if I just do the right things, if I just have the right techniques and the right tools, I'll be able to create this child who has all these properties that I want. And the trouble is, that's not how being a parent works at all. So if you think back to that, relationship between caregiving and exploration. What the caregiver can do is to give the child space to try lots and less of different things, often things that the
caregiver couldn't have anticipated. And if you think about a garden when you're a gardener, that's really what you're trying to do. So a garden is a really complicated ecosystem. It can come out in lots of different ways. It has to respond to the very particular phenomena of the weather, the climate, and the geography.
That you're in.
And a good gardener knows you just can't control what's going to happen in the garden, But what you want to do is to provide enough richness, enough resources so that many different kinds of plants can thrive. And it's actually a deeper point because what makes say an ecosystem like a garden effective is this kind of variability in diversity. And we know that that's the thing that makes it robust.
That's the thing that can make the garden survive even though you know one year you have a tremendous amount of rain, in the next year you have drought, And it's having that possibility of diversity of variability of doing things that are different, things that are unexpected, things that you know, maybe you don't even want as a parent. That's the thing that makes the system robust.
Yeah, why is it better for parents to be more gardeners than carpenters.
Even if you could be the carpenter, even if you could fulfill this carpenter agenda, you'd be sort of undermining the whole point of childhood by doing it. But the
truth is you can't really do it. And the result is that parents are in this constant state of frustration because they feel as if there should be a guidebook, there should be a specific outcome, and that they're failing, And so they read more books, so they look at more parenting blogs, or they try to make judgments about what they should be doing and what they shouldn't be doing. And that just makes everybody miserable. It makes everybody anxious.
It makes parents anxious, it makes children anxious. Whatever its long term effects on the children are, in the moment, it makes being a parent much more stressful and difficult than it should be. And it's not to say that
parents aren't important. Parents are extremely important, But the things that make parents important are in the kind of spontaneous things like the fact that they love their children and that they put energy into taking care of those children, not that they have some kind of special expertise that they read in a book or found on a blog that they can use to make those children come out better.
Yeah. And I mean you have struck a chord with so many parents right now or anyone who cares for children in capturing the anxiety that people feel around this space. I mean, with hundreds of thousands of self help books around parenting or guides for parenting, it's really overwhelming. And on a personal level, I do see so many of my friends with kids getting completely wound up over whether they're engaging in the right kind of parenting. Was was I mindful? Was I this full? Was I that full?
I mean we're being fed scripts now around how we should be engaging with kids, and I really would love to release the pressure valve for them just a little bit right in this moment. What are the types of things that you see parents stressing about that the empirical research shows just don't make a difference when it comes to the kids development.
So there's a kind of paradox because we know a lot about how important parents are, because we know that, as I say, the large number of children in a place like the United States who don't have good caregiving, who don't have parents who are able to take care of them, because the parents are stressed, because the parents aren't there, because the parents are or under other kinds of pressure, they do really suffer, and we know that
they suffer in the long run. But the things that typical middle class parents are stressing about, like exactly how should you feed your child or exactly what kind of sleep pattern should the child have, there's no evidence that those kinds of decisions have effects in the long run. And in some ways, it's almost like the things that you are sitting there and consciously trying to decide about, should I do it this way? Do it that way? You know, do you have the baby face forward or
face backwards in their stroller? Do you sleep train or do you have the baby sleeping with you? Almost by definition, those are not the things that are going to have the long term effects. And the things that will have long term effects are whether you love the child and have resources to take care of the child, and whether there are other people who love the child and have resources to take care of the child.
And are you finding that to be true even with pedagogical approaches with kids. So the way that we try to teach kids certain skills, like what I think, what I'm interested in here is when I think about so I used to be a violinist, and when I think about how I learned the violin, it was exclusively through imitation. I do you know how to reachcheat music? I didn't know any of the relevant technique. I just watched my teacher and I imitated. And at the time it was
considered blasphemous. This was the way that I'd got about learning music. It was so unstructured. So undis that in reading your book it allowed me to see my learning of music through a different lens, which is actually maybe that was a terrific way for me to learn as a six year old.
Right, Yeah, I mean this is another one of these ironies, which is that children are learning a tremendous amount just by observing what's going on around them, by watching the people around them, by doing things like helping mom to cook, by watching the things that are most important to the grown ups around them, and figuring out how the grown ups around them were, and we know for many studies, many which I describe in the Gardener and the Carpenter,
just how amazingly subtle children are and how accomplished they are at learning just by looking at other people, listening to what other people say. Again, I think, because so many parents are coming to being parents after they've spent a whole lifetime going to school, very often people think, oh, children are learning a lot. That means that we have to teach them a lot, the way that we teach people in school. And in fact, we don't have to make children learn. All we have to do is let
them learn. They are the best learners that we know of in the universe, you know, much better than any AI system. And it's not like we have to teach them how to do all of these things. They learn just in the course of their everyday interaction with the people and the world around them.
Is there evidence to show that the Carpenter model of parenting is really taking off or has really taken off? I mean, intuitively I feel that's the case, but I'm always mindful that I live in a particular bubble and that might not be representative of US based trends or worldwide trends.
Well, there's a very interesting paper that just came out in the Journal of Pediatrics where they looked at how much independence children have had and how constrained they are by what parents are doing. And I think the evidence was pretty good that historically children had many more opportunities
for exploring than they do now. So even if you just think about, you know, could children walk to school, how much of the neighborhood did they know about, I think there's actually some pretty good evidence that that has really narrowed and become more constrained, both for high income and low income children over the past say, twenty or
thirty years. If you think about when the TV series Stranger Things came out, which is all set even just not that long ago in the eighties, one of the reactions people had is, Gee, those kids are just like getting on their bikes and wandering around and you know, going through the park and going to these strange places in the forest. The kids wouldn't do that now, right, That would be a strange thing for kids to do now. And I think there is some empirical evidence that that's been true.
Yeah, I'm sure there's lots of people listening who are thinking, Allison, you convinced me intellectually I want to do a little bit more of the gardening approach to parenting. But man, it is really hard to or resists the pressures of being a carpenter parent. When our current system as it is designed, tends to reward kids that grow up under that model, What do you say to them? Because it's so hard, and I mean, I feel the temperature rising.
Like we both live in the Bay Area, right, it just feels a little bit suffocating at times.
My basic advice is to chill out. That putting more energy into integrating children into the daily life that's most important to you, and less energy into trying to shape them just leads to a happier existence for everybody. What I do think is that in the moment, for a particular parent and a particular child, you can sort of get a sense of what makes us thrive and what makes us not thrive. What are the times that are
the happy, joyful times? And I think we really underplay just how much every day joy and happiness there is and being with little kids, like you know, rolling around on the floor and playing and you know, getting a chance to use crayons. I never get a chance to use crayons in my everyday life. But I could do it if I'm with my grandchildren, getting a chance to sing old Broadway show tunes, which is also something I don't get a chance to do in my regular.
Life, or just so. My nephew's nine years old and I somebody's just marvel at what he's picking up from his environment that we know that he's never been explicitly taught. So he came to visit my husband and me, and he gets into the car as we're driving, you know, to go to an amusement park or something, and he said, you know, like Auntie Maya, Uncle Jimmy, I just need to tell you that I probably won't get married, okay.
And I was like, okay, I'm so glad that this is a choice for you, Matteo, like it's up to you to decide. And he's like, and there's a really big reason why. And I was like, okay, you know what is it? And he like to have this big dramatic pause and he goes heartbreak. I just don't think heartbreak is something that I ever want to go through. I was like, you're nine, but it was extraordinary to me.
I was filled with awe, wow, this little kid is walking around the world and he somehow absorbed this message right, And that was a nice reminder. I was reading your book during the same period of time where I was interacting with my nephew, and it was a reminder while so much of that learning is happening outside of these formal systems of education, and that's outside these formalized structures, and that's the most powerful, emotionally resonant kind of learning.
And I think one of the things that we can do as caregivers in general, maybe even more as grandparents because we don't have to worry so much about the day to day, is we just get to witness this
incredible phenomenon of human children learning. I mean, it's one of the most striking, amazing things that ever happens in nature, is that in this very short space of time, these little creatures who were in so many other ways not very competent, managed to learn really subtle things like that you might have your heart broken if you ever fall in love, and not only that, but learning having ideas about how the world works, as I said before, that
are really different from anything that a grown up would be thinking.
About there's also a I guess I want to point out that even if you are trying to optimize for your kid's success, you point out that given all of the technological changes happening around us, the gardener approach is cultivating the very skills that might be most useful in the future of our society. So things like flexibility, creativity, imagination, innovation.
These are the sorts of things that are going to be more important than ever given AI and all the jobs that will become redundant in the face of AI, like, it's these skills that we're cultivating in childhood that actually might be the differentiators. Is that right? Or am I talking about this in the right way?
I think that's exactly right. And remember the impetus for humans to develop this long childhood and these big brains in the first place is exactly that we live in a much wider variety of environments and environments that change more than other creatures do. And that's just accelerated, right.
You know, we're going to have to deal with environments that are really different from the environment that we grew up in or that we're living in now, and providing children with the kind of sense of possibility, the possibilities for exploration is a really good way to do that.
Yeah, I'm curious in terms of the practical implications of this gardener versus carpenter approach, And I'm wondering has this research made you reflect on how your parents did things, how you parented your own kids, and what you might have done differently.
Yeah, So my parents are kind of an interesting case. They had six children within eleven years when they were undergraduate students at the University of Pennsylvania, and we never had special classes, we never were in enrichment programs. But we grew up in this world where there was lots of art around, there were lots of books around, there was always lots of conversation available, and for what it's worth, we all became writers and scientists and people who were
doing creative work. But it wasn't because our parents were ever shaping us. It was that we were in this very rich world and we just got to explore that rich world. Now, you know, as a parent myself, I have to say to this day, I'm almost seventy and my children are in their forties. I say to myself, you know, maybe would it have been better if I hadn't done that when they were five or six. It's very,
very hard to avoid thinking that way. But I do think the things that have been most satisfying for me about my children have been the things that they did that were completely unexpected. One of my sons actually became a carpenter. He isn't too happy about the title of my book because he he thinks it's a bit of a slur on carpenters.
Carpenters are great houses, that's right, that the family's then live in. So there, Allison's son, I got.
You another one of my sons. I like this story. My grandfather actually was an immigrant from a little Jewish settle in Russia, and he became a deli man. He opened up a little grocery store, and he had a little deli. And then, of course his son, who was my father, became an academic, became a professor, His daughter me became a professor. And my son is now providing smoke meat and poutine and deli meats to the Berkeley in the Bay areas. So he became a deli man.
I would never have anticipated that he would have become a deli man and a very successful and happy Deli man. And it's those kinds of unexpected trajectories that I actually think, in fact are the most satisfying things that you can imagine happening with your children.
Hey, thanks so much for listening. Join me next week for my conversation with clinical psychologists doctor Becky Kennedy. She's known as the millennial parenting Whisperer, and she offers a new approach to parenting that I find refreshing because it's useful for all kinds of relationships. See you next week. A Slight Change of Plans is created, written, and executive
produced by me Maya Schunker. The Slight Change family includes our showrunner Tyler Green, our senior editor Kate Parkinson Morgan, our producer Trisha Bobita, and our sound engineer Andrew Vastola. Louis Scara wrote our delightful theme song, and Ginger Smith helped arrange the vocals. A Slight Change of Plans is a production of Pushkin Industries, so big thanks to everyone there, and of course a very special thanks to Jimmy Lee. You can follow A Slight Change of Plans on Instagram
at doctor Maya Schunker. See you next week.