Asking questions is what brains were born to do, at least when we were young children. For young children, quite literally, seeking explanations is as deeply rooted a drive as seeking food or water.
I’m afraid the parenting advice to come out of developmental psychology is very boring: pay attention to your kids and love them.
Knowing what to expect from a teacher is a really good thing, of course: It lets you get the right answers more quickly than you would otherwise.
We learn differently as children than as adults. For grown-ups, learning a new skill is painful, attention-demanding, and slow. Children learn unconsciously and effortlessly.
Adults often assume that most learning is the result of teaching and that exploratory, spontaneous learning is unusual. But actually, spontaneous learning is more fundamental.
The youngest children have a great capacity for empathy and altruism. There’s a recent study that shows even 14-month-olds will climb across a bunch of cushions and go across a room to give you a pen if you drop one.
Texts and e-mails travel no faster than phone calls and telegrams, and their content isn’t necessarily richer or poorer.
If you wanted to design a robot that could learn as well as it possibly could, you might end up with something that looked a lot like a 3-year-old.
Because we imagine, we can have invention and technology. It’s actually play, not necessity, that is the mother of invention.
Becoming an adult means leaving the world of your parents and starting to make your way toward the future that you will share with your peers.