Hey there, I'm Jason Gots and you're listening to Think Again a Big Think podcast.

Since 2008, Big Think has been gathering big ideas from some of the most interesting and creative thinkers around.

On the Think Again podcast, we take ourselves out of our comfort zone by discussing surprise

interview clips that are unexpected by both me and my guest.

I am very, very happy to be joined today by Alison Gopnik.

She is an internationally recognized expert in children's learning and development, professor

of psychology and an affiliate professor of philosophy at the University of California Berkeley.

She's the author of many, many books, including The Philosophical Baby.

And her new book, The Gardener and the Carpenter, is a response to the fact that parenting has become a verb,

a powerful middle-class trend, a lucrative self-help industry, and sometimes a kind of blood sport,

while developmental science paints a very different picture of how children actually grow and learn

and what it means to be a good parent. Welcome to think again, Alice. Glad to be here.

I guess we can start with sort of the big broad picture. Like what has gone wrong, and I guess

we should also be clear that

this is like a very specific this parenting that we're talking about this

is happening within a very specific cultural context it's probably not everywhere

right right but what's what's gone wrong for many middle-class parents in

terms of how they're approaching, raising their children,

how we think about...

Well, a very strange thing happened at the end of the 20th century.

It was called parenting.

So the very word parenting only first appears in the dictionary in 1958, and it only became common

...