Sublime

Children won’t take in what you tell them until it makes sense to them. Other people don’t simply shape what children do; parents aren’t the programmers. Instead, they seem designed to provide just the right sort of information at just the right time to help the children reprogram themselves.

The new developmental research tells us that Baby 0.0 must have some pretty special features. First, it must already have a great deal of knowledge about the world built into its original program. The experiments we will describe show that even newborns already know a great deal about people and objects and language. But more significant, babies an

What is required of parents is not perfection but attention, a willingness to learn and relearn, repeatedly—what each child individually needs, and needs from us, in order to blossom and thrive.

Our own view is that children’s whole conception of people, objects, and words changes radically in the first three years of life. And it changes because of what children find out about the world. We already said that babies start out with complex, abstract, coherent representations of the world and rules for manipulating them. They use those repre

One benefit of knowing the science is a kind of protective skepticism. It should make us deeply suspicious of any enterprise that offers a formula for making babies smarter or teaching them more, from flash cards to Mozart tapes to Better Baby Institutes. Everything we know about babies suggests that these artificial interventions are at best usele