The Gardener and the Carpenter

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1. 01

   The word «parenting», used as a verb, assumes a product manufactured to plan — but variability is the species' very strategy, and an unforeseen child is not an execution failure but exactly what was supposed to come out.

   The Gardener and the Carpenter · 2016

   The variability of outcomes is not noise around a target, it is the product itself.

   Gopnik is a developmental psychologist and a researcher of how small children learn. Her argument is evolutionary. Human childhood is abnormally long and costly compared with other species, and the question is why it was worth it. Her answer: the long period of dependence is an investment in exploration. Small children are, functionally, the species' research department — they test hypotheses, vary, produce solutions that adults optimised for exploitation would not find. That is why variability of outcomes is not noise around a target but the product itself. The carpenter metaphor describes what the parenting literature does: pick a model, apply techniques, assess deviations. The gardener metaphor describes what the data shows: you prepare the soil, shelter from the weather, water, and you do not know in advance what comes up, because you do not decide the species of the plant. The second consequence concerns anxiety: if the relationship is an environment rather than a project, then each small decision no longer carries the weight of an entire future, and that is good news for parents exhausted by making everything optimal.

   “Being a parent is not a form of carpentry; it is a form of gardening. You are not building a particular kind of child, you are creating a protected space in which many kinds can flourish.”

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